Stoors

Stoors is the name the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings gives to one of three branches into which the hobbits had already divided before they crossed the Misty Mountains; the other two are the Harfoots and the Fallohides. The name marks a breed within one people, not a separate folk. As hobbits, the Stoors shared the common name their kind used for itself, and the English forms of that name and of the breed-names are presented as renderings of the hobbits' own words. Tolkien's texts record no other name for this branch, neither a Stoorish self-designation nor one used by Men or Elves. What sets them apart in the Prologue is their bodily build, their liking for low, wet country, and their ease in the company of Men. The Prologue also describes the other two breeds, so the Stoors are defined partly by contrast.1

Like all hobbits, the Stoors trace their origin to the upper vales of the Anduin, the land between the Greenwood and the Misty Mountains, where the Prologue places the earliest known dwellings of the hobbit-kind. Of the three breeds, they held on longest to the country along the Great River. When the westward movement began, the Harfoots went ahead of them. The Tale of Years dates the Stoors' own crossing to around the middle of the twelfth century of the Third Age: they came over the Redhorn Pass and then turned towards the Angle or towards Dunland. In Eriador they followed the Loudwater southwards before some of them eventually moved north again.2

The Stoorish line stayed traceable in later hobbit society. The Prologue notes that it remained strong among the hobbits of the Eastfarthing, especially in the Marish and in Buckland, where river-craft and the other habits of the old riverside folk lasted longer than elsewhere in the Shire. Gandalf also links the people from whom Sméagol came to this branch. In the second chapter of the first book he describes them as akin to the forefathers of the Stoors, so the Stoors reach back into the hobbits' Wilderland past through him as well.3

In the earliest period the hobbits remember, the Stoors lived along the banks of the Great River in the vales of Wilderland. The Prologue treats them as the branch least troubled by the nearness of Men, and this habit shaped the rest of their history. The other breeds pushed westward earlier and moved further from the old lands. The Stoors lingered by the Anduin, and when they did leave, they settled in places where Men were close at hand. No event of their life in the vales is recorded. Their later story is told almost entirely through their movements in Eriador and through the few who stayed behind on the river.1

Once over the mountains, the Stoors divided their settlement between two regions. One group lived in the Angle, the land enclosed by the Hoarwell and the Loudwater. In those centuries this land belonged to the troubled northern realm of Rhudaur. The Tale of Years records that the Stoors abandoned the Angle about the time King Argeleb I of Arthedain fell in battle against Rhudaur, in the middle of the fourteenth century of the Third Age. Some of them went back east over the mountains to Wilderland. The text notes only that the two events coincide and gives no reason for the departure. Others of the breed spent a long time further south, in the country running from Tharbad to the edges of Dunland, and they stayed there until they finally moved north.2

That northward move ended in the Shire. The Shire was founded in 1601 of the Third Age, when the brothers Marcho and Blanco led hobbits from Bree across the Baranduin into land granted by the king at Fornost. According to the Tale of Years, Stoors coming up out of Dunland joined these settlers about a generation later. From then on the history of the breed merges with that of the Shire. The newcomers settled mainly in its eastern parts. Some centuries later, hobbits from the Marish crossed the Brandywine and settled the country beyond it. The Tale of Years places this about 2340, when the Oldbucks took possession of what became Buckland. The Prologue counts both of these districts as places where Stoorish descent was especially strong.3

Not every riverside hobbit had gone west. Gandalf's account of Gollum describes a small, clever family of this kind that lived by the Anduin near the Gladden Fields long after the main migrations. They were ruled by a stern grandmother and knew a great deal about boats, swimming and the roots of the river-bank. In about 2463 of the Third Age, one of them, Déagol, found the One Ring in the river while out fishing with his kinsman Sméagol. Sméagol killed him to take it. He was later driven out by his own family and eventually disappeared under the Misty Mountains. The narrative does not follow what happened to the rest of that river-folk.4

The last trace of the Stoors in Wilderland comes from the War of the Ring. In 3018, Sauron's Ringwraiths hunted for the land Gollum had named under torment, and they searched the vales of the Anduin, including the region around the Gladden Fields. The account of that search in Unfinished Tales says the Stoorish settlements they came upon there had been empty for a long time. The Wraiths found no one to question, and the hunt turned elsewhere. By the end of the Third Age, then, the branch lived on only as a strain within the Shire-folk, most visibly in the east of the Shire and beyond the Brandywine. There, descendants of the old river-dwellers took part in the events that closed the age.5

The Prologue describes the three breeds largely through their preferred country, and in the Stoors' case place and habit go together. The Harfoots favoured hillsides and highlands, and the Fallohides favoured woods. The Stoors looked for level ground and the banks of rivers, and the heavier frame the Prologue gives them seems suited to that low, damp land. Their tolerance of Men was also a practical matter. A people that settled beside the easy routes of river valleys and in lands where Men already lived had to share the country with them. That openness distinguished them from the other breeds, who kept more to themselves.1

The Stoors' closeness to Men also shaped their speech. According to Tolkien's notes on the languages of the Third Age, the hobbits never kept a tongue of their own for long and took up the speech of the Men they lived among. The Stoors who stayed in the south, near Dunland, picked up a language related to that of the Dunlendings before they moved north. Traces of that period remained in the Shire, where some names and words in the eastern districts sounded unusual to other hobbits. Appendix F presents this as a leftover of Stoorish history, not as a separate language still spoken in the Shire.2

The clearest sign of the river-dwelling past is familiarity with water. Most hobbits of the Shire avoided it. In the first chapter the Gaffer's gossip treats boating as a strange and risky habit of the Brandybucks, and he speaks of it with open distrust. Beyond the Brandywine the Bucklanders kept a ferry, handled boats as a matter of course, and seemed half foreign to their western neighbours because of it. The Wilderland family described in the earlier sections showed the same skill with boats and swimming, so the trait belongs to the breed as a whole and is not a Shire development. The texts say nothing about any Stoorish custom concerning death, burial or the reckoning of time. The Stoors appear here only as a strain within hobbit-kind.3

Tolkien's texts divide the Stoors into no named clans or houses, and they record no chieftain who led the breed as a whole. The only internal division they mark is one of settlement: the part that lived in the Angle and the part that stayed longer in the south, told in the history above. Neither group is given a name of its own, and neither is said to have had its own rulers. The Prologue treats the breeds as bodily and cultural strains, not as political communities. It also notes that by Bilbo's day the three kinds had long since mixed in the Shire, so that Stoorish descent could be seen only in some districts and families.1

The nearest thing to a Stoorish house is the family of the Marish that the Prologue calls the Oldbucks. They claimed descent from Bucca of the Marish, the first to hold the office of Thain. The Thainship stayed with them until the family moved across the Brandywine, when it passed to the Tooks. Beyond the river the head of the family, Gorhendad Oldbuck, began the great dwelling of Brandy Hall. His line took the name Brandybuck, and its heads were afterwards styled Masters of Buckland. The texts never call this family Stoors outright. Its homes, however, lay in the two districts the Prologue names as most Stoorish. The Prologue also credits the Masters of Buckland with a strong Fallohide strain, so the family itself reflects the mingling of the breeds.2

The only internal division they mark is one of settlement: the part that lived in the Angle and the part that stayed longer in the south, told in the history above.

The river-family of Sméagol is the one Wilderland kin-group the narrative describes from within, and its standing is carefully qualified. Gandalf does not call them Stoors. He only says they were related to the ancestors of that breed, so the texts state kinship and not identity. Their household under its matriarch is the only picture of hobbit family order outside the Shire.3

In the narrative the Stoors appear less as actors than as background. They are the part of hobbit history that explains why the Shire is not uniform. The Prologue's division into breeds gives the hobbits the depth of a real people, with a remembered past of wandering and mixing, and the Stoorish strand accounts for the Shire's odd eastern fringe. Through that fringe the story first leaves home. Frodo's journey begins by crossing into the most Stoorish corner of the Shire, and the Shire-gossip of the opening chapter already ties him to it. He was raised at Brandy Hall after his parents drowned in a boating accident.1

Water is how the book stages this inheritance. At the ferry Merry handles the crossing with ease, while Sam meets every boat with dread. His fear pays off later when he cannot swim and nearly drowns at Parth Galen, trying to follow Frodo across the river. The contrast between the western Shire-hobbit and the Bucklander is small in scale, but it shows the old difference between breeds as a difference in temperament and ability within one company.2

The weightiest use of the Stoorish past lies in Gollum. By tracing Sméagol's people to kin of the Stoors' forebears, Gandalf makes the Ring's chief victim a distant relative of the hobbits, not a monster from outside. Frodo rejects the idea with disgust, and his resistance is the point of the scene. The kinship turns Gollum into a warning of what a hobbit might become. It also prepares the pity that later governs Frodo's dealings with him. In this sense the river-folk stand for the hobbits' own capacity for ruin, set at the far, forgotten edge of their history.3

The only part of Stoorish history that the screen adaptations dramatise is the river-family episode, and it appears in Peter Jackson's trilogy. The third film, The Return of the King, opens with the finding of the Ring in the Anduin. Andy Serkis plays Sméagol, the part he also plays as Gollum across the trilogy, and Thomas Robins plays Déagol. The change is mainly one of structure. In the book the killing is part of Gandalf's account at Bag End early in the first volume, reported afterwards and pieced together from what he had learned. The film instead gives it as a self-contained prologue at the start of the last instalment, placing it directly before Gollum's part in the climax.1

What the films leave out is the wider setting that ties the episode to the Stoors. Jackson's trilogy does not make use of the Prologue's division of the hobbits into breeds, so the name of the Stoors is not a point the story rests on. The link between Sméagol's people and the forebears of that branch is therefore not presented as ethnography. It is carried only by the general impression that Gollum was once close to hobbit-kind. The household under its stern grandmother and the family's skill with boats and river-bank lore are not developed either. The eastern fringe of the Shire keeps only its function in the plot, as the hobbits' route out of the Shire, and not its role as the part of the Shire where Stoorish descent survived. Which of the older adaptations kept Gandalf's statement of kinship in their dialogue is not recorded here.2