Stoors

Character

The Stoors were the second of the three breeds of Hobbits and in build the most solid: broader and heavier than the Harfoots, with bigger hands and feet, and a few of the menfolk able to grow a beard, which no other Hobbit could do. They preferred flat lands and riversides to hills, and were the only Hobbits who felt easy on water: they fished, they used boats, and in muddy weather they even wore boots, a habit their cousins found faintly foreign. They were also less shy of Men than the other breeds, and readier to settle alongside them. The name itself, which in the old tongue meant something like 'strong' or 'stout', described them well.

Wanderings

The Stoors were the last to leave the Anduin, lingering on the riverbanks after the Harfoots and Fallohides had gone west. When they finally crossed, around T.A. 1150, they took the Redhorn Pass and came down the Loudwater into Eriador. Many settled in the Angle between the Hoarwell and the Loudwater, south of Rivendell, and others went further south to the country between Tharbad and the borders of Dunland. When the Witch-king established Angmar around T.A. 1300 the Angle became dangerous, and its Stoors divided: some went west towards Bree, and about 1356 a smaller party went back over the mountains to the vales of Anduin and settled by the Gladden Fields.

The Marish and Buckland

The Stoors of Dunland came north into the newly settled Shire in T.A. 1630 and took the wet country of the Eastfarthing along the Brandywine, which became the Marish. Their descendants remained recognisable for their heavier build, their skill on the river and their liking for boots; Farmer Maggot of Bamfurlong is a typical Marish hobbit. From the Marish came Bucca, the first Thain of the Shire, whose family the Oldbucks held the office for twelve generations. In T.A. 2340 the head of that family, Gorhendad Oldbuck, crossed the river to settle its eastern bank, changed his name to Brandybuck, and founded Buckland, a district whose folk kept boats, locked their doors at night, and were regarded by the rest of the Shire as peculiar. Meriadoc Brandybuck and Frodo's mother Primula belonged to this Stoorish house.

The Gladden folk and the Ring

The Stoors who returned to the Gladden Fields survived there for more than a thousand years as a small, inward-looking people living in holes along the riverbanks, fishing, burrowing and ruled by their grandmothers. Around T.A. 2463 two young hobbits of one prosperous family, Déagol and Sméagol, went boating on the river. Déagol pulled the One Ring from the mud, and Sméagol strangled him for it. The Ring made Sméagol a spy and a thief among his own people, and at last his grandmother drove him out; he crept up the Gladden into the Misty Mountains and became Gollum. Whether the Gladden Stoors had died out, drifted away or been destroyed by the Orcs and the shadow spreading from Dol Guldur, by the time of the War of the Ring no trace of them remained. Gandalf recognised Gollum's kinship with the Hobbits from his memories and speech, and it was this ancient kinship that let Gollum understand Bilbo's riddles and, later, gave Frodo the pity that spared him.

Fate

The Stoorish strain lived on in Buckland and the Marish into the Fourth Age, its river-craft and boots as distinctive as ever, and the Master of Buckland sat as a Counsellor of the North-kingdom. The eastern branch was gone, its only memorial the ruin it had unknowingly wrought and undone.

Broader and heavier than other Hobbits, with larger hands and feet; some of the men bearded. Fond of boots in wet weather.

River-dwellers who fished and used boats; friendlier with Men than other Hobbits; the Gladden colony was matriarchal and lived in riverbank holes.

One of the three ancient breeds of the Hobbit people, distinguished before the crossing of the Misty Mountains.

Survived as the folk of Buckland and the Marish; the Gladden Stoors vanished before the end of the Third Age.