One of the five ponies owned by Meriadoc Brandybuck, and used by Frodo and his companions on the first stage of their journey out of the Shire. After passing through the Old Forest, the ponies became lost on the Barrow-downs, and when Tom Bombadil set out to collect them together again, he called each of them by a name that their Hobbit owners had not heard before. One of those names was 'Wise-nose'.
With the other ponies, Wise-nose travelled as far as Bree, but before their masters could mount them again, the ponies were driven out of the stables to wander in the wilds of the Bree-land. Eventually the ponies found their way back to Tom Bombadil, who in turn sent them to back to Barliman Butterbur of the Prancing Pony inn, from whose stables in Bree they had fled.
Notes
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Most of the names chosen by Tom Bombadil for the Hobbits' ponies, like 'Swish-tail' or 'White-socks', come from distinctive characteristics of the ponies in question, but 'Wise-nose' is a little more difficult to parse. It seems to be connected to Tom's comments about the ponies, saying that (compared to the Hobbits) they had '...more sense in their noses. For they sniff danger ahead...' (The Fellowship of the Ring, I 8 Fog on the Barrow-downs) Here Tom is talking about the ponies in general, but we might assume from this that Wise-nose had even more of this 'nose-sense' than the others.
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- Updated 1 November 2021
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