Meriadoc Brandybuck - Names and Titles

Names and Titles

In the prefaces and appendices to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien employed the conceit that he was the modern translator of a unique manuscript, the Red Book of Westmarch, and that his stories of Middle-earth derived from that. In this guise of translator, he maintained that the character's real name was not Meriadoc Brandybuck but rather Kalimac Brandagamba. This was said to be an actual phonetic transcription of the name in Tolkien's invented language of Westron, which Tolkien said he transliterated to English as follows: The nickname "Merry" represents his actual nickname Kali which meant "handsome, happy", and "Meriadoc" serves as a plausible name from which a nickname meaning "happy" could be derived.

Théoden called Merry Holdwine, and the Hobbit was thus known as such in the records of Rohan. It most probably derives from the Old English words hold and wine, respectively meaning "faithful" and "friend". Tolkien used Old English to represent Rohirric, another of his fictional languages, so Holdwine, like Meriadoc Brandybuck, is not what the character was actually called. Tolkien does not give Merry's real Rohirric name.

It has been asserted that the name Meriadoc could be in itself an allusion to the British nobleman Conan Meriadoc, legendary founder of the House of Rohan in Brittany, since the character Meriadoc is closely associated with Tolkien's kingdom of Rohan.