Brandybuck Clan Brandybuck Clan In J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional universe of Middle-earth, the Brandybuck clan was a powerful Hobbit family. Like the other main aristocratic families, the Tooks and the Bolgers, they had a Fallohide strain, though they and the Bucklanders among whom they lived were at least partly of Stoor origin, and "by all accounts" had Bree blood as well. The family began as the Oldbuck clan, who named themselves such apparently after "Bucca of the Marish", the first Thain of the Shire. Eleven Oldbuck Thains followed, until "Gorhendad Oldbuck" crossed the Brandywine river into what would become Buckland. The
Meriadoc Brandybuck Took (as Sam said at the Field of Cormallen, Merry was three inches taller than he ought to have been). In the Brandybuck family tree as it appeared in the First Edition, the name of Merry's wife was not recorded. In a revision made in 1966, the name of Estella Bolger, sister of Fredegar, was added in this role; the revision was initially made in some editions but not in others, as described in the "Note of the Text" by Douglas Anderson which is prefaced to recent editions. At the same time, Tolkien added Estella to the Took family tree,