Gerontius Took

Thain and patriarch

Gerontius was born in T.A. 2790 (S.R. 1190), the son of Fortinbras I, and became the twenty-sixth Thain of the Shire in 2848, holding the office until his death in 2890. He is remembered less for anything he did as Thain than for the size of his family and the length of his life. By his wife Adamanta Chubb he had twelve children, nine sons and three daughters, and the Fallohide house of the Great Smials at Tuckborough swarmed with his descendants. His three daughters married into the other great families of the Shire and, between them, produced most of the hobbits who mattered in the War of the Ring.

Belladonna, the eldest daughter, married Bungo Baggins of Hobbiton and was the mother of Bilbo. Mirabella married Gorbadoc Brandybuck, Master of Buckland, and was the grandmother of Frodo through her daughter Primula. Through his son Hildigrim he was the great-grandfather of both Pippin and Merry, whose parents Paladin and Esmeralda were Hildigrim's grandchildren. Two of his sons became Thain in turn, Isengrim III and Isumbras IV, and the office passed down Isumbras's line to Paladin. Two others went adventuring: Hildifons left on a journey and never came back, and Isengar, the youngest, went to sea in his youth, which the family regarded as very odd.

Gandalf's friend

The Old Took was one of the few hobbits of his age on friendly terms with Gandalf. The wizard was a regular guest at the Great Smials and set off his fireworks there on Midsummer's Eve, displays of lilies, snapdragons and laburnums of fire that the young Bilbo remembered for a lifetime, and Bilbo also recalled the tale that Gandalf had given the Old Took a pair of magic diamond studs that fastened themselves and never came undone until ordered. This friendship, and the reputation for oddness that went with it, was the Tookish inheritance that Gandalf counted on when he came to Bag End for a burglar.

A hundred and thirty

Gerontius lived to a hundred and thirty, the greatest age any hobbit had reached, and died in 2890, the year Bilbo was born. For a century his record stood as the mark by which hobbit longevity was measured; Bilbo passed it by a day on his hundred-and-thirty-first birthday, the morning he rode away from Rivendell for the Havens, and was said to have taken quiet satisfaction in it.

Died in T.A. 2890 at the age of a hundred and thirty, the oldest hobbit then known.