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
Samwise Gamgee and packing... Tolkien maps the gradual breakdown of restraint [through prolonged peril] until Sam can take Frodo in his arms and call him "Mr Frodo, my dear." " Tolkien wrote in a private letter: "My Sam Gamgee is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognised as so far superior to myself". and elsewhere: "Sam was cocksure, and deep down a little conceited; but his conceit had been transformed by his devotion to Frodo. He did not think of himself as heroic or even brave, or in any