Where do Pippins come from? Also: herbs

[teasel]

A minor canon question

Comments

[danachan]

How am I suppose to attempt serious comments when you say things like...

Ooooh, Banewort! Sounds Orcish to me. On the other hand "Kiss-her-in-the-Buttery" does NOT sound Orcish: "Seizing him roughly Ugluk pulled him into a sitting position, and tore the bandage off his head. Then he smeared the wound with some Kiss-her-in-the-buttery out of a small wooden box. Merry cried out and struggled wildly."

No. Not Orcish. Banewort would definitely work better there.

... that? *attempts stern looks, dissolves into giggles* You know, not that I mind. I'll just have to think about the Pippin question while at work; again, not that I mind.

[teasel]

Ooooh, Dana's on the case! Sorry to have made you giggle when we're in pursuit of such a Serious Issue. I look forward to your thoughts on the subject!

[danachan]

Heh. Thanks! I'm probably thinking that it's just a general border, less than the actual part of the Shire that he's been living in. Just the Shire as a whole. (And he isn't allowed to be Saradoc's unaknowledged love child, because that would make all that sex with Merry kind of more wrong be just not right.) Still, I'll give it further thought and I might just get back to you after work, if said further thought spawns anything good.

Fostering, though. That makes me think.

And since I'm lazy and I'm here: would you be free for a small beta? It's that incredibly short Dernhelm/Merry that I mentioned once upon a time.

[singeaddams]

What Dana said. Shire, not Buckland. And thank you both for cracking my shit up at work. I'm trying to pretend a coworker's email set me off. Bweeheehee!

[chazzbanner]

He sat down on the bank at the side of the road and looked away east into the haze, beyond which lay the River, and the end of the Shire in which he had spent all his life.

I see this as meaning that this is the border/boundary/limit (that meaning of 'end') of the Shire in which he has spent all his life, as opposed to the district or region of the Shire that he had lived in.

[teasel]

Hmmmm, interesting theory, and that would resolve the problem nicely. But I don't know. There is other evidence that Pippin is at the least very familiar with the Eastfarthing; he knows where the Golden Perch is and he knows Farmer Maggot (well enough for Maggot's dogs to know him). So Pippin is definitely NOT moving on into completely unfamiliar territory, which would be the implication of the sentence if T. meant "end" in the sense you mention.

Also in the next sentence, it sounds to me like Tolkien is contrasting Pippin's reaction to Sam's:

Sam stood by him. His round eyes were wide open - for he was looking across lands he had never seen to a new horizon.

Sounds like the Eastfarthing is familiar to Pip and unfamiliar to Sam -- or that's how I read the passage.

[danachan]

*just browsing on through the rest of the thread*

Sounds like the Eastfarthing is familiar to Pip and unfamiliar to Sam -- or that's how I read the passage.

You know, I can dig that. Er, that is, now that you mention it, that is the sort of feeling that it has.

... I'm still going to think about Pippin at work. It'll keep me sane.

[teasel]

Well, that would make a hell of a lot more sense than Pip as the unacknowledged love child of Saradoc (though it's a little less interesting). End can mean quarter or locality (Bag End, Woody End) OR boundary OR physical terminus point (end of the road) OR temporal terminus point) (end of all things, though now I come to think of it in RotK T. must have been playing with several meanings of the word in that line). I suspect that if there's a solution you've got it. On the other hand, I dunno, Cara, two things: first of all, the grammar of the sentence is weird as you say (the Shire in which he had spent all his life, as opposed to which other Shire?) Also, in the next sentence it sounds to me like T. is contrasting Pippin's reaction to Sam's:

Sam stood by him. His round eyes were wide open - for he was looking across lands he had never seen to a new horizon.

It's totally unfamiliar country to Sam, and it sounds like T. is contrasting Sam's reaction to Pippin's more knowledgeable one in the previous sentence.

[suspect_terrain]

I think I've always mentally inserted a comma into the sentence to deal with the confusing grammar:

the end of the Shire, in which he had spent all his life.

Maybe it's a typo that wasn't caught in all the wrangling over dwarfs vs. dwarves.

And I'd always read it as Pippin's never been out of the Shire, but Sam's never been very far away from Hobbiton: a big deal to hobbits, but a distinction that might be lost on, say, Boromir. So yes, there is a contrast between Pippin and Sam, but we aren't going to have to get much further into the book before we'll see how small a difference that really is.

[teasel]

I think you're probably right, despite what Paceus's translator said; and it is indeed interesting how our sense of space shifts as the story goes on. The book starts slowly with a relatively short journey through the Shire, but the narrative clock starts ticking faster once the hobbits are in the wild. I wonder if that change in narrative pacing reflects the way the hobbits experience space: they know the Shire reasonably well and so notice every bit of it, but once they're in the Wild everything collapses into Not Home.

Or possibly Tolkien just felt it was time to get them moving along already. :D

[anonymous]

Perhaps Tolkien did not mean it literally... As in, I might say, 'I have spent all my life in New York City', meaning that I was born and bred there, but did leave it for trips and holidays and other things...

[teasel]

Hmmm, interesting idea! So that means the sentence could cover either situation: Pip in fosterage at Buckland for some reason, with occasional trips back home to the country around Tuckborough, or Pip living mostly near Tuckborough with the occasional summer in Buckland making trouble for his Brandybuck cousins and slowly licking honey off of Merry's chest. Hmm, very sensible; perhaps I have been too literal-minded here.

[renoir_girl]

Thanks so much for that link. I write slowly and poorly, but every bit of help... uhm... helps!

[teasel]

You're welcome! I love sources like that herb book -- I've lived in cities all my life and it's hard for me to picture how a place like the Shire might look without some outside help.

[renoir_girl]

Yes, I do know what you mean. I started writing Sam/Frodo because the emotional content I wanted to work with was there, but the rest of it is like pulling teeth to get any detail...