Marcho and Blanco

The brothers of Bree

Marcho and Blanco were Fallohide hobbits of the Bree-land, where their people had lived for some three centuries among the Men of Bree after fleeing the rise of Angmar. By the beginning of the seventeenth century of the Third Age the Bree-hobbits were numerous and the hobbits of Eriador generally were drifting westward, and the fair, tall, adventurous Fallohides, who supplied the leaders of every hobbit community they touched, were looking further afield. The land between the Baranduin and the Far Downs, once well-tilled by the Men of Arthedain, had emptied as the North-kingdom dwindled, and the brothers set their sights on it.

The crossing of the Brandywine

In T.A. 1601 Marcho and Blanco went to Fornost and obtained from Argeleb II, the king of Arthedain, a formal grant of the land west of the river. The terms were light: the settlers were to keep the Great Bridge and the other bridges and roads in repair, to speed the king's messengers on their way, and to acknowledge his lordship. That done, the brothers led a great company of hobbits from Bree westward along the East Road and over the Bridge of Stonebows, the stone bridge that the Dúnedain had built over the Baranduin, and took possession of the country beyond. The hobbits named the river the Brandywine, the bridge the Brandywine Bridge, and the land the Shire.

Legacy

From that crossing the Shire-folk counted their years. Shire Reckoning began with the year of Marcho and Blanco's migration as Year 1, so that the Shire was already fourteen centuries old, on its own calendar, when Bilbo went to the Lonely Mountain. Nothing else is recorded of the brothers: not their parentage, their later lives, nor where they settled within the Shire. Their achievement was the Shire itself, the most peaceful and fortunate homeland any hobbits ever had, and the peculiar fact that the Shire-folk, though they forgot the king within a few centuries and reduced his lordship to a saying about old rules, kept the roads and bridges in good order as they had promised.

Unrecorded beyond the founding; presumably lived out their lives in the Shire they had made.