Lotho Sackville-Baggins

The son of the Sackville-Bagginses

Lotho was the only child of Otho Sackville-Baggins and Lobelia, and grew up nursing his parents' conviction that Bag End should have come to them. He was a pasty, spotty young hobbit, called Pimple behind his back and never much liked. He inherited from his father, who died in 3012, a good deal of property in the Southfarthing, the pipe-weed country, and he had something his parents lacked: a taste for business.

Buying the Shire

In the years before the War of the Ring Lotho began quietly buying up plantations, mills, inns and farms, with more money than anyone thought the Sackville-Bagginses had. The money came from Saruman, who had been buying Shire pipe-weed through agents in Bree and the south for years, and whose barrels of Longbottom Leaf turned up in the ruins of Isengard. In 3018 Lotho was exporting leaf by the wagon-load down the Greenway, and in September of that year he and his mother at last took possession of Bag End when Frodo sold it to them.

The Chief

With Frodo gone Lotho moved fast. By the start of 3019 he had brought in Big Men, first as workers and then as an armed force, and had begun to gather the Shire's produce into storehouses for shipment away. When old Will Whitfoot, the Mayor, set out to protest, the ruffians locked him up in the old storage tunnels at Michel Delving, which became the Lockholes. Lotho named himself Chief Shirriff and then simply the Chief, swelled the Shirriffs into a police force, posted rules at every inn and then closed the inns, and set his Men to felling trees, pulling down holes and building sheds and brick houses. The old mill at Hobbiton was demolished and a bigger one built, and the Water ran foul with its waste. Farmer Cotton judged that Lotho had only wanted to own things and had not seen where it would end.

Prisoner and victim

Where it ended was with Saruman's arrival at Bag End in September 3019 under the name of Sharkey. From then on the Men obeyed Saruman and Lotho was a prisoner in his own hole; his mother had been dragged off to the Lockholes, and he had no friends. When the four travellers took the Shire back at the Battle of Bywater and came to Bag End for Sharkey, Frodo demanded Lotho's release, and Saruman answered with malice that Lotho had been dead for some time, and hinted that Wormtongue had done more than kill him. Gríma, goaded, admitted the killing in his bed and then cut his master's throat. Lotho's body was never spoken of again. His death broke his mother, and his money went with hers to relieve the hobbits his rule had left homeless.

Murdered at Bag End in the autumn of T.A. 3019 by Gríma Wormtongue while a prisoner of Saruman.