Hobbits

Origins and kinship with Men

Hobbits are not a separate creation like Elves or Dwarves. Everything the chroniclers of the Shire could piece together points to their being an offshoot of the race of Men: far nearer to Big People than to any other speaking folk, though the exact point at which the two lines parted has been lost beyond recovery. No tale of the Elder Days mentions them at all. They appear in the records of other peoples only in the Third Age, and even then obliquely, for they were a people who took great pains not to be noticed.

Their earliest remembered home was the upper valley of the Anduin, between the eaves of Greenwood the Great and the eastern feet of the Misty Mountains. There they lived long enough to acquire a language of their own, related to the speech later spoken by the Men of the Vales and by the ancestors of the Rohirrim. The very word hobbit is a worn-down form of a name in that older tongue meaning 'hole-builder', which the Riders of Rohan still remembered as holbytla. In the Common Speech of the West they were called Halflings, and the Elves and the Men of Gondor called them Periannath.

What sets them apart

Hobbits stand between two and four feet tall, and by the end of the Third Age seldom reached three. Their feet are their most famous feature: broad, with tough leathery soles and a thick pelt of curling hair, so that shoes are unnecessary and generally unworn. Their hair is curly and usually brown, their faces good-humoured rather than beautiful, and their fingers long and deft. They are quick of hearing and sharp of eye, and can move so quietly that Big People take it for magic; it is nothing of the sort, only long practice at avoiding trouble.

They live somewhat longer than ordinary Men. A hobbit comes of age at thirty-three and may reasonably hope to see a hundred. The twenties are counted as an irresponsible interval known as the tweens. Their greatest weakness, if it can be called one, is a settled aversion to anything unfamiliar; their greatest strength, discovered only in the last years of the Age, is a tough, unshowy endurance that neither hunger, fear nor the corruption of the One Ring could easily break.

The three breeds

Before the crossing of the mountains the Hobbits were already divided into three somewhat distinct kinds. The Harfoots were the most numerous and the most typical: smaller, browner, beardless, fond of hillsides and of digging holes, and on friendly terms with Dwarves. The Stoors were heavier and broader, with larger hands and feet, lovers of flat riverside country who alone of the three took readily to boats and fishing; some of them could grow beards. The Fallohides were fairer, taller and slimmer, woodland-loving, gifted in song and speech rather than in handicraft, and friendly with Elves. Fewest in number, they were nevertheless the boldest, and families of Fallohide descent such as the Tooks and the Brandybucks supplied most of the leaders of the later Shire. By the time of the War of the Ring the three strains had mingled thoroughly, though regional differences remained: the Bucklanders and the folk of the Marish kept a Stoorish look, and the Tooks a Fallohide streak.

The wandering days

Around T.A. 1050, when a shadow fell on Greenwood and it began to be called Mirkwood, the Hobbits started to leave the Anduin. The Harfoots went first, crossing the Misty Mountains and coming down into Eriador, where they reached the country around Weathertop while their cousins still lingered in Wilderland. The Fallohides came about a century later by a northern route, and the Stoors last of all, over the Redhorn Pass. Some Stoors settled in the Angle between the Hoarwell and the Loudwater, others went south into Dunland. When the Witch-king raised Angmar around T.A. 1300 the Hobbits of the Angle scattered: many drifted west to Bree, while a party of Stoors turned back east over the mountains to the Gladden Fields.

The Bree-land became the first firm home of the Hobbits in the West, and its little villages of Staddle, Combe and Archet, together with Bree itself, claimed with justice to be the oldest surviving hobbit settlement in the world. There, mixing with the Men of Bree, the Hobbits forgot their own tongue and adopted the Common Speech, and there they first became known to the Dúnedain of the North-kingdom.

The founding of the Shire

In T.A. 1601 two Fallohide brothers of Bree, Marcho and Blanco, obtained leave from Argeleb II, king at Fornost, to settle the empty and well-tilled land beyond the Baranduin. They led a great company across the Bridge of Stonebows and took possession of the country between the river and the Far Downs. The king asked only that they keep the bridge and roads in repair, speed his messengers and acknowledge his lordship. From this crossing the Shire-folk counted their years: the year of the crossing became Year 1 of Shire Reckoning, so that T.A. 2941, the year of Bilbo's adventure, was S.R. 1341.

The Shire proved a fortunate choice. Forty miles from the Far Downs to the Brandywine and fifty from the northern moors to the marshes in the south, it was fertile, sheltered and, thanks to the vigilance of the Rangers whom the Hobbits never knew about, remarkably safe. More Stoors came up from Dunland in 1630 and settled the Marish in the Eastfarthing. When Arthedain fell in T.A. 1974 the Hobbits maintained that they sent archers to the king's aid; the tales of Men do not mention it. With no king left to answer to, the Shire-folk chose a Thain from among themselves in 1979, Bucca of the Marish, and went on living as though the kingdom still stood, calling their old customs the rules of the king. In T.A. 2340 Gorhendad Oldbuck crossed the river and founded Buckland, a strip of country between the Brandywine and the Old Forest that was never quite part of the Shire and never quite outside it.

Shire-reckoning and the calendar

The Hobbits kept a calendar of twelve months of thirty days each, filling out the year with five or six extra days that belonged to no month: two Yuledays at midwinter, the Lithedays at midsummer with Mid-year's Day between them, and an Overlithe in leap years. By a reform in the days of Isengrim II they fixed matters so that every year began on the same weekday, a convenience that spared them the trouble of printing new almanacs. The Free Fair on the White Downs was held at the Lithe, and it was at this fair every seven years that the Mayor was elected.

Government

The Shire had almost no government at all. Families managed their own affairs, and the great families of each district, the Tooks in the Tookland, the Brandybucks in Buckland, exercised a loose seniority that nobody thought to question. Three offices survived from the days of the kings. The Thain was master of the Shire-moot and captain of the Hobbitry-in-arms, powers that were exercised only in emergencies and so hardly at all; the title passed from the Oldbucks to the Tooks in 2340 and remained with them. The Mayor of Michel Delving, elected every seven years, presided at banquets and, more practically, ran the Messenger Service and the Watch as Postmaster and First Shirriff. The Shirriffs, twelve in all, three to a Farthing, spent more time rounding up strayed livestock than on anything resembling police work, while a larger and variable body of Bounders patrolled the borders to keep out undesirable strangers. The Shire itself was divided into four Farthings, North, South, East and West, with Michel Delving on the White Downs as its chief town.

Society, food and pleasures

The society of the Shire was rural, unhurried and extraordinarily stable. Hobbits farmed, gardened, brewed, milled and kept inns; they did not engage in trade with the wider world beyond selling pipe-weed to Bree and buying a little from the Dwarves who passed along the East Road. They loved parties, birthdays above all, and on a birthday it was the hobbit whose day it was who gave presents to others. Food was a preoccupation rather than a pleasure: six meals a day were thought reasonable when they could be had, and the second breakfast was a settled institution. Their skill with growing things, with cookery and with the humbler crafts was real, though they had no use for machinery more complicated than a water-mill or a hand-loom.

A peculiar Shire institution was the mathom: any object for which a hobbit had no use but which he could not bring himself to throw away. Mathoms circulated as presents and accumulated in the Mathom-house at Michel Delving, where Bilbo's mithril coat spent some years on display. The pastime most closely identified with the race is the smoking of pipe-weed, a variety of nicotiana which Tobold Hornblower of Longbottom in the Southfarthing first cultivated in his garden in S.R. 1070. The Bree-folk claimed to have smoked it first, and the plant itself seems to have travelled north from Gondor along the Greenway. Longbottom Leaf, Old Toby and Southern Star were the famous sorts, and Meriadoc Brandybuck eventually wrote the standard work on the subject.

Hobbit-holes and houses

The oldest hobbit habit was the digging of holes, and the word smial for a large tunnelled dwelling survived from their forgotten language. By the end of the Third Age most Hobbits lived in houses of wood, brick or stone, low and long, but the richest and the poorest still kept up the old fashion. The Great Smials at Tuckborough and Brandy Hall in Buckland were vast warrens housing dozens of relations, while Bag End under the Hill at Hobbiton was the most comfortable hole in the district. Round doors and round windows were considered the proper style, and the preference carried over into house-building.

Sméagol's people

The Stoors who returned eastward to the Gladden Fields lived on into the twenty-fifth century of the Third Age as a small, clannish folk of the riverbanks, ruled by matriarchs and fond of boats and burrowing. From this people came Déagol, who drew the One Ring from the bed of the Anduin in T.A. 2463, and Sméagol, who murdered him for it and was driven out. By the time of the War of the Ring the Gladden Hobbits had disappeared entirely, and the Shire never knew that it had cousins there.

Hard years

The Shire had its disasters. The Long Winter of T.A. 2758 to 2759 brought famine and heavy loss of life, and it was at this time that Gandalf first came to the aid of the Shire-folk and began his long acquaintance with them. The Fell Winter of 2911 froze the Brandywine and let White Wolves in from the North across the ice, and the floods of the following spring drowned much of Eriador. The Hobbits fought only one true battle before the War of the Ring: the Battle of Greenfields in the Northfarthing in 2747, when Bandobras Took broke a raiding party of Orcs and killed their chief Golfimbul.

The War of the Ring and the Scouring of the Shire

The Shire's part in the great events of the Age began when Bilbo Baggins was drawn into the quest of Thorin Oakenshield in T.A. 2941 and returned with a golden ring from the roots of the Misty Mountains. Two generations later Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, Meriadoc Brandybuck and Peregrin Took carried that Ring out of the Shire, and Frodo and Sam bore it to Mount Doom. Meanwhile at home Lotho Sackville-Baggins had used his wealth to seize control of the Shire with hired Men, and after his own fall Saruman arrived to complete the ruin. The four travellers returned in November 3019, roused the countryside, and at the Battle of Bywater on 3 November broke the ruffians for good, at a cost of nineteen hobbits killed. Saruman died at the door of Bag End the same day. Sam then spent the following year restoring the trees and gardens with the gift of Galadriel, and S.R. 1420 was remembered as the finest year the Shire had known.

The Fourth Age

Under King Elessar the Hobbits prospered as they never had before. In S.R. 1427 (Fo.A. 6) the King declared the Shire a Free Land under the protection of the northern sceptre and forbade Men to enter it, a decree he honoured himself by halting at the Brandywine Bridge when he came north. In 1434 the Thain, the Master of Buckland and the Mayor were made Counsellors of the North-kingdom, and in 1452 the King added the Westmarch, from the Far Downs to the Tower Hills, to the Shire. There, at the Undertowers, the descendants of Sam's daughter Elanor kept the Red Book of Westmarch, the great chronicle of the Ring-bearers from which the tales of the Age were later drawn.

Hobbits are small even by the standards of Dwarves, generally between two and four feet in height and averaging around three feet at the end of the Third Age. The record among them belonged to Bandobras Took at four feet five inches, until Merry and Pippin outgrew him after drinking the waters of Fangorn. They are inclined to stoutness, dress in bright colours, chiefly green and yellow, and go barefoot on feet whose soles are hard as leather and whose tops are thickly furred. Their hair is curly and most often brown; fair hair was rare enough that Elanor Gamgee was thought remarkable for it. Beards were unknown except among some Stoors. They are long-fingered, keen-sighted and keen-eared, hardy against cold and hunger, and possessed of a natural stealth that lets them vanish from the notice of larger folk. In age they wrinkle and grey like Men, and a hundred years is a good span; only the Old Took and Bilbo passed a hundred and thirty.

The culture of the Shire was that of a settled farming people who had learned most of what they knew from the Dúnedain of Arnor and then improved upon it in their own way. They spoke the Common Speech, with a rustic accent and a few old words of their own; they wrote in the same letters as the Men of the West; and they were literate enough that a message could be sent by the Messenger Service and read at the other end. Their crafts were the domestic ones: farming, brewing, milling, weaving, building, cookery and above all gardening. They had no smiths of note, bought their metalwork from Dwarves, and regarded elaborate machinery with suspicion. Social life turned on the family, the inn and the party. Genealogy was a passion, and the great families kept enormous family trees. Presents were given on one's own birthday rather than received. Government was minimal and largely ceremonial, resting on the Thain, the elected Mayor, the twelve Shirriffs and the Bounders. Music was simple and songs plentiful, many of them comic; the Tooks had a taste for stranger tales and dealings with Elves and Wizards that their neighbours found faintly disreputable. The Hobbits kept a lore of herbs, brewing and weather, and after the War of the Ring a lore of history and letters grew up around the Red Book at Undertowers, the Great Smials and Brandy Hall.

Nothing in the surviving records explains how the Hobbits came to be. They regarded themselves as an ancient people, older than their own memory, and their own account began in the upper vales of the Anduin. The scholars of the Shire concluded from the structure of their old names and words that they were kin to the Men who lived along the river and later became the Rohirrim, and the Elves counted them among the Children of Ilúvatar, a mortal branch of the Secondborn. What is certain is that they had lived quietly for many centuries in the shadow of Greenwood before any Elf, Dwarf or Man troubled to write them down, and that they entered recorded history only around T.A. 1050, when the darkening of the forest set them on their westward wandering.

By the end of the Third Age the Hobbits had come through the greatest crisis of their history not merely intact but honoured. The Shire recovered from the Scouring within a year, and the Fourth Age brought peace, the King's protection, an enlarged country and a new interest in books and learning. Their names passed into the songs of Gondor and Rohan, and the Ring-bearers were remembered in Minas Tirith long after the last of them had died or sailed. Yet the Hobbits themselves, once the excitement was over, went back to the life they had always preferred, and the later chroniclers observed that they were becoming, if anything, still smaller and shyer of Big People than before.