How Pippin Bore the One Ring for a Very Short Time, or a Tale of Missed Steps

My tale is of an alternate reality, a reality that never could have been foreseen nor believed, even if it had been absolutely true, which it wasn’t, thank Eru! This is a tale of indigestion, of herbs unknown to all but the heir of Isildur and now to be known to my gentle readers.

It so happened that our hero Frodo Baggins, here incognito as one Mr. Underhill, was coming to the last verse of a rousing rendition of Bilbo Baggins’ “Man in the Moon” verse in the gloom of the Prancing Pony when his fellow traveler Pippin, of whom our tale tells, happened to decide he needed another pint from the bar. As he returned, a most spectacular thing happened, but really, it wasn’t so spectacular for this time of night at the Prancing Pony. But the confluence of events played out in a way that changed the fates of many, albeit for a short time, and Frodo Baggins unwittingly traded one major unpleasantness for a mere inconvenience, if a rather distasteful one.

For said hobbit Pippin stepped before the impromptu stage of Frodo Baggins, which was really an old table, just as a drop of beer sloshed from his overflowing pint. This drop fell portentiously underneath the incognito Mr. Baggins’ left foot just so that when he came down upon it, he slipped forward off the table and tumbled over Pippin, who lost his balance but not his pint (thanks to a particular talent honed to a fine art through much practice and passed down through generations of well-pickled Tooks).  Frodo tumbled over the back of Pippin, who, at that instant, raised his glass to catch any stray overflow caused by the impact of Frodo’s grand somersault. In a daring save, Pippin managed to catch a rising wave of beer from over the lip of his mug full in his mouth, ensuring no loss of drink, save what dribbled down his chin after the fact.

In the meantime, Frodo had a different problem. The beer spot, as previously mentioned,  had caused his left foot to slip forward, while his right leg had been supporting his weight from behind. The result was an overbalance, throwing Frodo headlong over Pippin’s left shoulder. By a freak occurrence, this caused the Ring in his front pocket to peek out and catch upon a portion of Pippin’s forehead. Thus the Ring was dislodged from Frodo’s keeping and stuck momentarily just above Pippin’s left eyebrow, until his magnificent beer save, which caused the Ring to slide down over his nose and plop into his pint mug, unnoticed by all. He balanced the mostly full mug deftly, while bending over to help the unfortunate Frodo back to his feet. Pippin was so pleased with his prowess in keeping all his beer within the mug or inside himself that he stood up and called a toast to all things alcoholic and to his friend Frodo for allowing him to show off his Tookish talents to a full house.

So it came to pass that Pippin took the mug in his hands and downed the beer in one long gulp, never noticing the golden glint at the bottom, thinking it but a reflection of candlelight in his misty, unfocused eyes. For a moment, it seemed that Pippin had simply fallen to the ground in a faint so quickly that no one had noted it. But he did not appear on the floor, nor anywhere near Frodo, who began to panic and paw his pockets in a terrified frenzy. This alerted Sam, who rose to help Frodo and promptly tripped over the invisible Pippin. Merry, returning from outside, saw the uproar in the bar, and immediately knew Pippin to be the cause of it. But he could find no sign of him! Merry simply shook his head slowly, knowing this to be a typical Pippin disaster area.

Suddenly, a dark stranger appeared between Frodo and Sam, causing both of them to stop scrabbling on the floor for the missing Ring. The tall stranger bent down and scooped the floor in front of Frodo and Sam, apparently lifting an armful of thin air. He then fell back into the shadows, followed now by Frodo and Sam, both frantic and hurrying to keep up with the stranger’s long strides. They brushed past Merry, who immediately turned to follow. The stranger walked to one side of the darkened street and veered off into tall weeds, one kind of which was a vine of beautiful blue flowers just beginning to open. The seeds of this plant he found and chewed; his hands groped for something invisible; the seed mash disappeared; momently a sound as a deer in the grass ensued, along with the untying and tying of a leather thong. The next sound was unmistakeable, not the least to Merry, who heard it regularly after long nights at the Green Dragon. A small “Ah…” in a particular timbre marked the sound as originating from Pippin, who was still nowhere to be seen! For he had indeed swallowed the One Ring and could only be seen by the Nine Black Riders who had pursued the hobbits out of the Shire.

This situation was so out of Frodo’s experience and knowledge that he redoubled his wish that Gandalf had met them as he had promised, although his first instinct was to break into uncontrollable laughter. For Pippin’s sake, he restrained himself. Ridiculously enough, Frodo realized now their only hope was in finding a really good laxative quickly. So they traveled stealthily with the tall stranger, Strider to the hobbits, and every now and then they would stop while he repeated his ritual with the chewing of the strange seeds. By the time they approached Weathertop, he had performed this ritual 12 times. But they were pursued in the glades under Weathertop and fled to the top, arraying themselves in a circle, holding their swords ready for the horror that approached.

Then the familiar sound reached Merry’s ears again. That particular and characteristic “Ah…” he knew to be Pippin, but this time it was longer, drawn out, strained even. Frodo and Sam cowered in horror before the five Ringwraiths that approached, but then they saw them veering slowly over to a hidden stone structure near the Seat of Wind itself, the peak of Amon Sul. Suddenly before the wraiths materialized a very wobbly Pippin, rising from a squatting position with an air of contentment. He spoke to the nearest Wraith, not realizing what it was in his drunken state. “Ach, I wouldn’t go in there if I were you!” Amazingly, the wraiths fell back and retreated down the hill, pursued for good measure by Strider with a torch. The hobbits breathed a sigh of relief, Pippin not the least—all except Frodo, who stared at the dark patch behind the rock and knew what he, as Ringbearer, would be called upon to do. He wrinkled his nose and resolved to do his duty, never knowing the greater doom he had just escaped by the good graces of Pippin’s fondness for beer, and his serendipitous dropping of a tiny bit of draught on just the right spot on a table in the Prancing Pony…


And so, the One Ring passed back to Frodo by a rather long and winding road, through the innards of Peregrin Took, and all due to a single drop of beer and a missed step!

The End of this Ridiculous Tale