Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Middle-earth Psychology, Case Study #4
In previous case studies, I have combined information from the text of The Lord of the Rings with historical documentation to explore character behavior through a modern medical lens. These descriptions cannot be considered true diagnoses, as I am not a licensed psychiatrist, the characters are fictional, and the terminology that I use did not exist when the books were written. However, I hope that explaining these conditions will provoke empathy for people in the Real World who live with similar circumstances. While I will briefly cover the plausibility of two conditions that I have seen mentioned by other Tolkien enthusiasts on social media, I will spend most of the essay explaining my own interpretation.
Today’s subject is Merry Brandybuck. Like his older cousins Bilbo and Frodo, Merry does show some neurodivergent traits, although not severe enough to receive a diagnosis. He is quiet unless speaking about a topic where he is the expert, such as ponies and pipe-weed, which may be considered “persistent preoccupation with one or more special interests”. For example, when Théoden King of Rohan expressed surprise that Hobbits “spouted smoke from their mouths”, Merry began a detailed account about the discovery of pipe-weed until Gandalf quickly interrupted him (“Chapter 8: The Road to Isengard”, Book III). Merry later got his chance to tell “about his home and the doings of the Shire-folk” while riding with Théoden (“Chapter 3: The Muster of Rohan, Book V).
Another apparent neurodivergent trait was mild prosopagnosia, or difficulty recognizing faces despite no visual impairment. Merry briefly mistook a Gondorian soldier named Hirgon for his deceased friend Boromir and did not recognize that Eowyn and Dernhelm were the same person despite this being his new adoptive sibling (“Chapter 3: The Muster of Rohan”, Book V). Other characters were not shown to have this difficulty. Merry did seem to recognize most of his closest friends and family, suggesting that he could retain facial memories with practice.
If these were the only two traits, my essay would be unusually short. However, the focus of this essay is much different and potentially controversial. Since my first reading of the novel about twenty years ago, I thought Merry was written like a female character despite using male pronouns and receiving male privileges throughout the book. I genuinely believed Merry would have a gender reveal at some point in the series only for this to happen instead to Eowyn/Dernhelm, the only other person predestined to slay the witch-king. For the rest of this essay, I will analyze Real World historical and cultural factors related to my initial belief, which will influence how I portray Merry during my adaption.
The Crucial Primogeniture
During past installments to this essay series, notably last week’s post on the Took Cousins and its predecessor about family trees, I have discussed the importance of having a son to continue the family line in ancient and medieval cultures. The concept was so ingrained in many patriarchal societies that the eldest male child of the father was called the firstborn, regardless of his number of elder sisters or half-siblings. In the New International Version of the Bible, the word “firstborn” appears 109 times and refers to a male for both people and animals. The Plague of the Firstborn in Exodus 11 specified that Egyptian firstborn sons would die, not daughters, while laws in Numbers required offerings to be sacrificed soon after the birth of firstborn sons.
For our linguistics moment, the technical name for this practice is “inheritance by the agnatic primogeniture”. The word “agnatic” is from Latin and means a relative born on the father’s side, especially through a line of men. The word “primogenitor” is from Medieval Latin and appeared in English during the 1650s. The term literally means “first of the father”, as a legal firstborn son might have older half-brothers on his mother’s side. The phrase is fairly recent, as it is used by modern historians to describe older practices. Based on a relatively brief literature review I conducted using Internet Archive, Google Books, Google Scholar, and JSTOR, the phrase seems to have been published for the first time in November 1960 in The Armorial: An International Quarterly Journal of Heraldry, Genealogy, and Related Subjects. The inheritance system was highly popular during the European Medieval Period. A 2014 study of European monarchies from the 11th to 18th centuries showed that countries with inheritance based on primogeniture had more peaceful successions, the notable exception being what went on with Henry VIII and his immediate descendants.
As mentioned during my discussion on family trees, the branch of the Brandybuck family, who held the title of Master of Buckland, was lacking an agnatic primogeniture before the birth of Merry in Shire Reckoning (S.R.) 1382. The two young males close to his age were likely considered illegitimate: his older cousin, Berilac, had been born out of turn two years early, while his older first cousin once removed, Frodo, had joined the household the same year after the death of his parents. The next child born in the household needed to be male to secure the line of succession and strengthen the appearance of the family to their subjects. If the newborn baby of Saradoc Brandybuck and Esmeralda Took was announced as a hobbit-lad, regardless of biological sex, this would have dispelled fears of instability. A correction could have been made after the subsequent birth of a male baby, except the couple only had one child. While this does not offer proof that Merry’s sex assigned at birth did not align to his gender presentation, it does offer historical groundwork for the rest of my argument.
Girls Living as Boys
This argument will be uncomfortable for some readers, especially those who have a purist or conservative-leaning interpretation of the books. My theory of Merry being assigned female at birth (AFAB) but living as a hobbit-lad may seem similar to the experience of modern transgender people, especially by the literal definition of the term, which was coined around 1974 to mean someone who has a “sense of personal identity [that] does not correspond with their anatomical sex”. However, the currently understood concept of being transgender comes from the West during the 20th century. Other cultures throughout time and across the world had and continue to have genders outside of the current Western binary system. Likewise, some Middle-earth cultures seemed to have different gender systems than found in the Real World. As discussed in “Appendix A, III Durin’s Folk”, Dwarves presented as masculine and appeared to use gendered pronouns to indicate interest in travel. They contrasted feminine Elves who had gender-neutral pronouns in their own language.
Returning to the Real World, I have found three major examples of how girls and women have lived as boys and men within conservative societies: bacha posh in Afghanistan, burrnesha in the Balkans, and woman-husbands in West Sub-Saharan Africa. In each of these cases, the reasoning behind these gender identities was different than the modern Western concept of being transgender. Some modern members of these groups may consider themselves a part of the LGBTQ+ community, while others do not.
In Afghanistan, rigid gender norms have historically been enforced with strict patriarchal attitudes. Boys are permitted to attend school, have a job, and travel around their hometown, while girls must stay at home. The practice of bacha posh means treating a daughter as a son, allowing her to achieve the same education, early career, and travel opportunities as her brothers. The practice is most common in families with a single daughter or oldest daughter; this allows the family to alleviate the stigma of having no sons. Girls take boy names, cut their hair, and wear clothing typically worn by boys. Community members “play along” until girls reach puberty and are forced to act as women, losing most of their rights. One rare exception was Bibi Hakmeena, a retired politician who was permitted to wear men’s clothing and carry weapons, although she used feminine pronouns in her native language of Pashtun. While some bacha posh have expressed feelings that align to the modern Western concept of identifying as transgender, the majority do not.
In the Balkans, burrnesha or sworn virgins vowed never to marry and in return were permitted to live as men. While some young women were forced to take these vows, as their parents had no son, others gladly accepted the position because of its privileges: the right to bear arms and fight, act as head of household, use coarse language, smoke, drink alcohol, and hang out with other men. Unlike Afghanistan, gender expectations in the Balkans have become increasingly relaxed; the practice of burrnesha arose during the 15th century but has nearly died out. Oral histories collected from the last of the burrnesha revealed a range of experiences, from those thrilled to live as men to those deeply unhappy. Some lived as women until a legal matter arose, while others lived as a man at all times, to the point where community members did not know their biological sex. Much like bacha posh, while some burrnesha expressed feelings that aligned to the modern Western concept of identifying as transgender, most did not.
When examining these two practices from the Real World, one can construct a potential scenario for Merry to live comfortably as a hobbit-lad even if he had been assigned female at birth. His parents needed a male child to “save face”, raising Merry similar to a bacha posh. When no male heir was born, his lifestyle aligned with the burrnesha as he was designated the male head of the family. Merry’s implied ancestry also supported this theory. The location of Buckland to the east of The Shire proper aligned with the location of the Balkans relative to Western Europe. Meanwhile, the migration patterns of his Stoors ancestors mimicked that of the disproved Aryan theory, last discussed in the overview of Chapter 2, where people of the Middle East moved to the British Isles and became Celtic.
What about the Marriage Problem?
Of course, this does not explain the appearance of a marriage between Merry and his second cousin, Estella “Ella” Bolger, in the tenth anniversary edition of the books. If Tolkien had intended for Merry to be female and living as a hobbit-lad, it seems unlikely that a devout Catholic in the mid-20th century would feature a consummated marriage between two female characters, especially when one member of the couple was so prominent.
I could argue that this was a practice similar to woman-to-woman marriage or female husbandry found in Sub-Saharan West Africa, which is just beginning to be studied seriously. Dr. Bright Alozie, a Nigerian-born researcher at Portland State University, describes the practice as “different from homoerotic same-sex practices”, meaning that these women would not describe themselves as lesbians within the Western LGBTQ+ framework. Instead, these marriages are social contracts, where a wealthy or high status woman selects a younger woman to give birth to their children, along with a man to father the children. Kristen Alsaker Kjerlad, a historian formerly at the University of Bergen, described an extension of this practice: should the younger wife in the partnership be unable to bear children, she can take her own subordinate wife to bear children for the woman-husband. While this sounds foreign to the Western experience, it is little different than surrogacy. However, in the West African method, the surrogate mother remains in her baby’s life and is treated as a partner by a wealthy woman, while surrogate mothers in the West generally relinquish custody.
It is also possible that this marriage indicated a close platonic friendship, rather than a romantic or sexual relationship. Plenty of scholarly material discusses how the text seemingly blurs the lines between these forms of love, so this type of relationship would not be out of place. Additionally, the tenth anniversary edition arrived after a crisis in Tolkien’s own life: the death of his best friend, C.S. Lewis, in 1963, which came three years after the death of Lewis’ wife, Joy Davidman. As I mentioned during my summary of a webinar on The Mythmakers by John Hendrix, Lewis had secretly married in 1956, not even telling his best friend. Davidman was a divorced American living in England who had a civil marriage with Lewis, although they had a Christian ceremony the next year in 1957 after Davidman was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer. Lewis’ brother, Maj. Warren Lewis lived with the couple and described their relationship as “intellectual”. Reflecting upon Davidman’s death, Lewis wrote A Grief Observed under a pseudonym, although it was released under his own name after his death. Tolkien may have added Ella to the family tree to give Merry a loving, intellectual partner who did not mind her husband taking frequent trips abroad for research while she presumably ran Buckland on his behalf.
Name Linguistics
I previously described Merry’s unusual name during “Appendix F, II On Translation”. His legal name was Meriadoc, meaning “magnificent”, which was the epithet of a Celtic warrior who founded the House of Rohan in the Real World. The spelling changed to Meredith, became a masculine given name, and turned into a completely feminine name in the UK by 1954, the same year The Fellowship of the Ring was published. The name was a translation of Kalimac, supposedly an “unmeaning Buckland name”, while the nickname Kali was considered the equivalent of Merry to mean “jolly” in the Buckland dialect of Hobbitish Westron (The Return of the King, 463).
Since Tolkien was a linguist, the way Merry’s names are described in Chapter 2 seemed significant, especially compared to the description of another name: “but his closest friends were Peregrin Took (usually called Pippin), and Merry Brandybuck (his real name was Meriadoc, but that was seldom remembered)”. For younger cousin Pippin, his birth name was the first name given, with an addendum about his nickname. However, Merry’s birth name or “real name” was a nearly forgotten afterthought. This could indicate that he has deliberately changed his neutral or feminine name for a more masculine name, much like bocha posh taking boys names. This also resembles the modern Western practice of taking a new name during a gender transition. The old name is called a “deadname” or “dead name”, with this concept entering the mainstream on the internet around 2011. Using a deadname is considered extremely rude, and yet legally changing one’s name is difficult, causing the person to repeatedly feel hurt.
Merry is not implied to have this reaction, or perhaps he is so accustomed to the oversight that he has stopped caring. His legal name appears throughout the Prologue and Appendix, perhaps implying that he put it on his books. His name is only used twice in the dialogue of Fellowship: Pippin calls him “O blessed Meriadoc!” after Merry draws him a bath in “A Conspiracy Unmasked”, while Aragorn calls him Meriadoc (along with referring to Frodo as “son of Drogo”) due to his inability to read the room in “The Breaking of the Fellowship”.
My final note on Merry’s unusual name comes from an Adûnaic word list on Eldamo, a language learning site for Tolkien fans, which I last used during my psychological study of Sam. Adûnaic compared to Westron is like Latin and Old Norse compared to English; people of Rohan and Gondor spoke a version of Westron much more similar to Adûnaic than the dialects of Hobbits. At any rate, the word kali does appear in the Legendarium, specifically “Lowdham’s Report on the Adûnaic Language” which was published in The History of Middle-earth Book 9: Sauron Defeated. Rather than meaning “merry”, the word means “woman”; it is highly likely that Westron speakers outside the Shire and Bree-land use this meaning. Perhaps the Adûnaic meanings of names point to a hidden yet integral part of the character. Just as Sam’s original name, Ban, meant “half” and indicated Sam being inseparable from Frodo, then Merry’s original name, Kali, showed how those outside of his community perceived him, and yet respected his choice.
Conclusion
While not a widely discussed potential aspect of the character, historical and textual evidence supports my long-standing theory that Merry could have been assigned female at birth. As the next heir of the Master of Buckland, a head of household in a patriarchal society, he needed to present as male, especially with two seemingly illegitimate male cousins as his closest relatives. The practices of assigning a girl to live as a boy in order to provide the child with better education and career opportunities, along with young women vowing to become young men to assume the head of household, have been documented in two unrelated conservative societies. In both cases, gender transition was not a personal choice but a societal demand. As for the issue of having a wife, this legal designation is not necessarily driven by falling into romantic love but by necessity, whether a wealthy woman is in need of an heir or an intellectual expat wanted to remain in her new country with her closest friends. Finally, Merry’s own chosen name meant “woman” in the oldest version of his language, even if this was not his own intention. I do not expect others to agree with my theory, nor can I truly know if Tolkien meant to weave this secret into the story. However, this idea does have much more evidence than other theories I have seen during my time researching the Legendarium, and I was pleased to support it for myself.