Harfoots

Character

Of the three breeds into which the Hobbits were once divided, the Harfoots were the commonest and set the pattern that outsiders came to think of as simply hobbitish. They were the smallest and shortest of their people, browner of skin than the others, and without beards. They went barefoot as a matter of course, kept their hands and feet neat, and were on the whole a tidy, practical, unadventurous folk. The country they liked best was hilly: highlands and hillsides where they could dig, for the Harfoots kept up the ancient habit of living in holes longer and more faithfully than either the Stoors or the Fallohides. Their long acquaintance with the roots of the Misty Mountains brought them into contact with Dwarves, with whom they had more dealings than any other Hobbits.

The westward crossing

The Harfoots were the first to leave the vales of the Anduin. Around T.A. 1050, as the darkness spread through Greenwood, they crossed the mountains into Eriador and worked their way west as far as the country around Weathertop while the other two breeds were still in Wilderland. Their arrival is the earliest notice of any Hobbits in the records of other peoples. When the Fallohides came down out of the north about a century later they mingled with the Harfoot settlements and, being bolder and more articulate, often ended up leading them; the great Harfoot majority supplied the numbers, and the Fallohide minority the chieftains.

In the Shire

When Marcho and Blanco led the migration from Bree over the Brandywine in T.A. 1601, the bulk of the settlers were surely Harfoots, and they became the plain hobbit stock of the Shire: the farmers, gardeners, millers and innkeepers of the four Farthings. The typical Shire-hobbit described in the Prologue, three feet or so in height with curly brown hair and furry feet, is a Harfoot in all but name. Families such as the Gamgees, with no pretensions to Fallohide ancestry or Stoor riverside habits, represent the strain at its purest, and the whole culture of hobbit-holes, gardens and quiet good sense owes most to them.

Fate

By the end of the Third Age the word Harfoot had ceased to mean anything in ordinary Shire speech, for the three kinds had long since intermarried. What survived was the temperament: the reluctance to travel, the love of the familiar and the deep, unremarkable toughness that carried Samwise Gamgee to Mount Doom and back again.

Smaller and shorter than other Hobbits, browner of skin, beardless and bootless, with neat hands and feet.

Hill-dwellers and hole-diggers, the least changed in habits since the ancient days; friendly with Dwarves; farmers and craftsmen of the plain Shire sort.

One of the three ancient strains of the Hobbit people, already distinct before the wanderings from the Anduin began.

Absorbed into the mixed population of the Shire, where their type remained the majority.