Fallohides

Fallohides is one of three names by which the hobbits of the later Shire distinguished the old branches of their people. The other two were the Harfoots and the Stoors. The book gives these names in English form, following the convention of rendering the Common Speech into English equivalents. Read that way, the word is an old-fashioned compound of a pale, fallow colour and a hide or skin. It points to the feature that most plainly set this kindred apart: a lighter complexion and lighter hair than their kin. No separate name that the Fallohides used for themselves is recorded, and how other peoples may have called them is not told.1

Like all hobbits, the Fallohides trace their earliest remembered home to the upper vales of the Anduin, between the Misty Mountains and the eaves of Greenwood the Great. Within that shared homeland they were the most northerly of the three branches. They held to wooded country and preferred hunting to tilling the ground. They were more at ease with Elves than the other kindreds were, and their gifts ran more to language and song than to handicraft. The Prologue makes clear that these differences were already old by the time of the westward wanderings. How the three branches first came to diverge is not explained.2

When the hobbits began to move west, the Fallohides took their own road. They crossed the mountains to the north of Rivendell and came down along the course of the Hoarwell into Eriador. There they did not stay a separate folk for long. Being bolder and more given to adventure than their neighbours, they mixed with the Harfoots and Stoors who had arrived before them. They often rose to lead the groups they joined. The crossing of the Baranduin that founded the Shire was itself led by two Fallohide brothers, Marcho and Blanco. Even in Bilbo's day the Fallohide inheritance could still be recognised in certain leading houses, the Tooks and the Masters of Buckland among them.3

Almost nothing of the Fallohides' time in Wilderland was set down by the hobbits themselves. Their written records begin only after the settlement of the Shire, and what they remembered of earlier ages survived as family legend and in the names of the three kindreds. The Prologue presents the Fallohides as the smallest of these branches in numbers. It does not say how long they had lived beside the Anduin, what their communities were like, or whether they had chieftains of their own before the migrations. The account of this kindred properly begins with the Wandering Days, when all three branches left the vales and moved west.1

The hobbits did not leave the vales together. The Tale of Years places the Harfoots in Eriador around the middle of the eleventh century of the Third Age. This was about the time a shadow fell on Greenwood the Great and Men began to call it Mirkwood. The Fallohides followed roughly a century later, around 1150. In the same period the Stoors crossed the Redhorn Pass and went on to the Angle or to Dunland. The Prologue does not claim a firm cause for the movement. It points cautiously to two pressures: Men were growing more numerous in the lands near the hobbits, and the darkness was spreading in the forest to the east.2

Eriador was then under the rule of the Dúnedain of the North, whose realm had split into three rival kingdoms. The newcomers spread west through lands that Men and Elves already knew. By about 1300 many hobbits had settled at Bree, which became the oldest lasting hobbit dwelling-place in the region. The Tale of Years records that the Stoors left the Angle around 1356, when the wars with Rhudaur made the country unsafe, and that some of them went back to Wilderland. No comparable retreat is recorded for the Fallohides. Their history in these generations is instead one of absorption into the mixed hobbit population of Eriador.3

In 1601 King Argeleb II of Arthedain granted the hobbits the land beyond the Baranduin. The crossing from Bree under the leadership already described became the first year of the Shire's own calendar. The settlers held their land as subjects of the king at Fornost. They kept his roads and bridges and acknowledged his lordship, though in practice they governed themselves. When the northern kingdom fell in 1974, the hobbits later claimed that they had sent archers to its last battle, though the Prologue treats the claim with some reserve. Without a king, they chose a Thain of their own. The first to hold the office was Bucca of the Marish, in 1979.4

The office passed to the Took family in 2340, when Isumbras I became the first Thain of that line. In the same year the Oldbucks moved east across the river into Buckland. From then on, the leadership of the Shire's two most prominent families lay with houses in which, by the Prologue's own account, the Fallohide inheritance remained visible. By this time the Fallohides no longer existed as a distinct community with its own settlements or customs. Their descent survived within family lines and was recognised in temperament and appearance rather than in any separate identity.5

This inheritance still counted at the end of the Third Age. Bilbo Baggins was the son of Belladonna Took. Frodo's mother was a Brandybuck, and two of the four hobbits who set out from the Shire in 3018 were Peregrin Took and Meriadoc Brandybuck. The narrative does not trace any of their actions to Fallohide blood, and it would be an overreading to do so. Still, the families through which this kindred's line had passed were the ones from which the Shire's part in the War of the Ring was drawn.6

Only a few traits of the Fallohides as a kindred are recorded, and nearly all of them come from the brief comparison of the three branches in the Prologue. Beside their lighter colouring, they were noticeably taller and more slender than Harfoots or Stoors. Their preference for woodland set them apart from the Harfoots, who favoured hills and uplands, and from the Stoors, who kept to flat country and riverbanks. Nothing is said of Fallohide dwellings, dress or tools. Given their small interest in handicraft, it is unlikely they had a craft tradition of their own. The one skill the Prologue credits to them is with words and song, and even that survives only as a description, not as any recorded work.1

No Fallohide language survives. In Eriador all hobbits took up the Common Speech and the letters of the Dúnedain, and whatever tongues they had spoken earlier fell out of use. A faint trace of the kindred's older habits may lie in naming. The notes on translation observe that old families of Fallohide descent, the Tooks and the Bolgers among them, liked to give their children grand first names taken from legend. This set them apart from the plain names that were usual elsewhere in the Shire. The custom accords with the Prologue's remark about their gift for language, though Tolkien never connects the two himself.2

It points cautiously to two pressures: Men were growing more numerous in the lands near the hobbits, and the darkness was spreading in the forest to the east.

Their temperament is best seen in how later hobbits spoke of the Tooks. The Hobbit describes that family as wealthy but not quite respectable, because some of its members now and then went off on adventures. Shire gossip explained this with a tale of an ancestor who had married a fairy, a tale the narrator dismisses as absurd. The rumour nonetheless shows that the Shire regarded something in these families as not entirely hobbit-like. The sources say nothing of any Fallohide attitude to death, lifespan or the passing of time that would distinguish them from other hobbits.3

The Prologue treats the Fallohides as a single branch. It names no clans, houses or chieftains among them for the time before the westward migrations, and it does not divide them into lesser groups the way it separates the three kindreds from one another. The only individuals it explicitly calls Fallohides are Marcho and Blanco, the brothers who led the crossing into the Shire. Even for them, no family name is given. No later Shire family is said to descend from either of them, so the one recorded pair of Fallohide leaders does not stand at the head of any known house.1

The houses in which the Fallohide strain was later recognised were Shire families of mixed descent, not Fallohide houses in any strict sense. The Tooks held the Thainship and had their family seat at Great Smials in Tuckborough. The Brandybucks show the mixture more clearly. Their forebears, the Oldbucks, came from the Marish, a district the Prologue associates with Stoorish traits. Gorhendad Oldbuck led them over the river, began the building of Brandy Hall and changed the family name to Brandybuck. His successors headed the family as Masters of the Hall and of Buckland. The Prologue still counts these Masters among the houses where the Fallohide inheritance could be seen, so one lineage could carry more than one strand of descent.2

The family trees in the Appendices trace the Took and Brandybuck lines over many generations, but they never mark anyone as a Fallohide. The notes on translation add the Bolgers to the families of this descent without giving them any special rank or office. By the time the records were kept, the old kindred names described inherited traits within families rather than separate communities with their own leaders.3

The Fallohides belong to the frame of The Lord of the Rings, not to the tale itself. They appear in the Prologue's survey of hobbit origins, which reads like an editor's summary of what the hobbits remembered, and they never act as a people in any narrated scene. The Hobbit does not use the name at all. Of the three kindreds, only the Stoors return in the plot proper, when Gandalf traces Sméagol's family to a hobbit-like folk related to the forebears of the Stoors. The Fallohides reach the main narrative only indirectly, as an inheritance carried within certain families and never as a group that appears on the page.1

What this device does becomes clearer beside the earlier book. The Hobbit builds Bilbo around a divide between his respectable Baggins side and the restless side he owes to his mother's family, and the plot sets off when the second briefly wins out over the first. There that divide is a matter of family character. The Prologue, written later, gives it a longer history by linking such families to an old kindred with habits of its own. As a result, the hobbits who leave home in both books are not exceptions without explanation. They draw on a strain that has always existed within a people otherwise known for comfort and routine.2

Read in this way, the Fallohides stand for the part of hobbit nature that turns outward. Among the qualities the Prologue divides between the three branches, theirs are the ones that connect hobbits to the wider world: familiarity with Elves, a feeling for words, and a readiness to go first. That they merged into their neighbours instead of remaining apart matters for this reading. The book does not present openness to the wider world as the mark of a separate race. It presents it as a strain that runs through ordinary hobbit families, dormant in most of them and liable to wake in a few.3