Henneth Annûn Story Archive

I was talking to a friend of mine and we were talking about the effect the Black Breath might have had on Merry in latter years and she said it must have been especially hard for him, because he had no wife like Pippin had, to support him. I am pretty sure Merry did in fact marry, but there was no reference in the family trees in LOTR and I could not think of any other place where I might have seen it... So, my question to the Hobbit experts, Ang, Cel and the others : Did Merry have a canon wife? Where is she mentioned, if he had one?
Thanks a lot, but the Little People are just not my field of expertise
Makamu

 

Merry married Estella Bolger, daughter of Odovacar Bolger and the former Rosamunda Took. According to my genealogy, it's in the Family Trees at the end of Return of the King.

I don't have the books available at the moment, so can't check, but it is likely that the marriage between Merry and Estella is there in the RoTK Family Trees, but I probably got her parents' names from the Family Trees in the Peoples of Middle-Earth (HoME vol 12).

- Barbara

 

Part of the confusion is that Estella being married to Merry was accidentally missed off the family trees in Appendix C in earlier editions of RotK but is now there in the latest edition. (She's not there in my Unwin editions, dated 1979, but she is in my recently acquired Harper Collins editions, which are dated 1991 inside - bought because there was only so much sellotape I could use before the Unwin ones became unreadable )

Anyway, she's Fredegar (Fatty) Bolger's sister and Barbara is right about her parents' names - you can find them all on the Took family tree.

Cheers, Liz

 

Thank you for the information. It seems we just checked the wrong tree, because we only had a look at the Brandybuck one But I forgot that Hobbits don't always follow Big Folk logic when composing their genealogies

~Maka

 

Part of the confusion is that Estella being married to Merry was accidentally missed off the family trees in Appendix C in earlier editions of RotK but is now there in the latest edition.

Ah, thank you Liz, I'll have to remember that. Sort of brings to mind the question, "What is canon and what is not?". Everyone considers LoTR to be canon, but there are differences between the editions.

she is in my recently acquired Harper Collins editions, which are dated 1991 inside - bought because there was only so much sellotape I could use before the Unwin ones became unreadable

LOL! I am quite new at being a Tolkien fan, having been hooked on the first movie, then reading the books (several times). But my three movie-cover paperbacks published by Houghton Mifflin are already showing the strain of all the research I've been doing into Tolkien's genealogies, and my cheap Del Rey paperback of the Silmarillion is almost falling apart (and I didn't even *like* it the first time I read it).

Obsessed? Moi?

- Barbara

 

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