Hobbiton

The village

Hobbiton lies in the Westfarthing of the Shire, roughly in the middle of the country, on the north bank of the little river called the Water. A mile or so downstream, where the Water is crossed by the Bywater Road, stands the neighbouring village of Bywater with its pool and its famous inn, the Green Dragon. Hobbiton itself grew up around a mill and a bridge, with the Old Grange and the Ivy Bush on the road, but its real landmark is the Hill: a broad green rise on the north side of the village whose slopes are honeycombed with hobbit-holes.

The best of these is Bag End, dug into the top of the Hill by Bungo Baggins, with its round green door and its windows looking south over the village and the Water. Below it, along the lane called Bagshot Row, stood the humbler holes of the Gamgees and their neighbours, and at the foot of the Hill lay the Party Field, where Bilbo Baggins pitched his pavilion for the Long-expected Party under the great tree that afterwards bore his name.

The people

Hobbiton was Baggins country. The family had lived on and around the Hill for generations, respectable, well-to-do and, until Bilbo, entirely predictable. Sandymans worked the mill; the Gamgees, first the Gaffer and then Sam, kept the garden at Bag End; Cottons farmed by Bywater. Gossip flowed between the Ivy Bush and the Green Dragon, and the Sackville-Bagginses waited a long time on the far side of the family tree for Bag End to come to them.

The village's character is that of the Shire in miniature: ordered, comfortable, suspicious of anything foreign, and more deeply rooted in its fields and lanes than its inhabitants ever thought to say.

Before the War

Hobbiton has no recorded history before the Bagginses, and its earlier centuries were presumably as quiet as those of every other Shire village. It became notable in T.A. 2941, when Gandalf and thirteen dwarves called at Bag End and carried its master off on an adventure. Bilbo's return a year later, alive when he had been presumed dead and his goods were being auctioned, made him a local curiosity for the rest of his life.

Sixty years later, on his hundred-and-eleventh birthday, Bilbo held the Party in the field below the Hill, gave a speech, and vanished in a flash before the eyes of a hundred and forty-four guests. He left the Hill to his cousin and heir Frodo, and Hobbiton settled back into its routine for another seventeen years.

The War of the Ring

Frodo sold Bag End to the Sackville-Bagginses in the autumn of 3018 and left Hobbiton with Sam and Pippin on the night of September 23, a day ahead of the Black Rider who came asking for him at the Gaffer's door. In his absence Lotho Sackville-Baggins used his new wealth to buy up mills, farms and inns, and when the ruffians he had hired took over the Shire, Hobbiton bore the brunt of it. The Old Mill was pulled down and replaced by a larger brick building that fouled the Water with its waste; Bagshot Row was dug out and its families turned into new ugly houses; the Party Tree was felled; and Saruman, who had come to the Shire under the name of Sharkey, took Bag End for himself.

Sam saw the vision of this ruin in Galadriel's Mirror in Lórien, and found it true when the four travellers came home in November 3019. After the Battle of Bywater the hobbits marched to Bag End, where Saruman was killed by Gríma on the doorstep.

Restoration

The rebuilding of Hobbiton was Sam's great work. The new mill and the ugly houses were pulled down, Bagshot Row was rebuilt as New Row, and Sam went through the Shire planting saplings with a grain of the dust Galadriel had given him beside each. In the Party Field he planted the one silver nut from her box, and from it grew the only mallorn west of the Mountains and east of the Sea. Sam married Rosie Cotton and moved into Bag End in 3020, and Hobbiton became the seat of the Mayor for most of the next half-century.

A village on the north bank of the Water in the Westfarthing, a mile west of Bywater. The Hill rises on its north side with Bag End at the summit and Bagshot Row on its southern slope; the Party Field lies below.