The Shire

The name of the land is an ordinary word rather than an invention: a shire is a settled district held in common order, and the Hobbits used it of their whole country without ornament or ceremony. Nothing in it commemorates a founder, a battle, or a god; it announces only that the ground is divided, farmed, and administered. This plainness is deliberate, and it belongs to the translation conceit set out in Appendix F, where the Red Book is said to have been written in Westron and every name of the Shire rendered into a modern English equivalent so that its homeliness would be audible; names of older or foreign root are given correspondingly older or stranger forms. The same word stands behind the title of the land's officers, the Shirriffs, whose archaic spelling preserves the local flavour of a word the Hobbits felt to be their own.

The internal names follow the same habit of description. The country is parted into Four Farthings, the term meaning no more than a fourth part, and their designations are simply the points of the compass. Settlements are named for what is there or who lives there: Hobbiton for its inhabitants, Bywater for its pool, Michel Delving on the White Downs for the great digging that made it, Tuckborough for the Tooks, and the Marish for the wet ground of the Eastfarthing. Buckland, east of the river, takes its name from the family that settled it and lies outside the reckoning of the Farthings altogether. Taken together the nomenclature is one made from below, by farmers and diggers, not conferred by kings or preserved by loremasters.

The eastern boundary shows how older names were worn down into Hobbit speech. The river was called Baranduin by the Elves, a name meaning the golden-brown water, and the Hobbits reshaped its sound into Brandywine. In their own tongue they had a form meaning border-water, which they twisted in jest into a word suggesting heady ale, a pun on the river's colour that Appendix F records without apology. The family that crossed to the far bank altered its own name to match, the Oldbucks becoming Brandybucks in the land they took up. Such changes are characteristic: elder names are not preserved out of reverence but rubbed smooth by daily use until they mean something a Hobbit can taste or point at.

The Shire lies in the northwest of Middle-earth, in the wide country of Eriador, well inland from the Sea and far from the great roads of war. Its bounds are given plainly in the Prologue: from the Far Downs in the west to the Brandywine Bridge in the east, and from the moors at the northern edge to the marshes in the south. The land runs to low green hills, tilled fields, coppice and hedgerow, with rivers small enough to be forded and no mountain within its borders. Its two chief upland features are the White Downs in the west, where Michel Delving stands, and the Green Hills country in the middle, and the Water threads the land eastward past Hobbiton and Bywater to join the Brandywine. Nothing in it is grand; it is a country made for growing things, and the Hobbits' chief pride was the tilling of it.

Beyond the four quarters the Hobbits later reckoned two additions. Buckland lies across the Brandywine on its eastern bank, a narrow strip of settled ground pressed against the Old Forest, from which it is shut off by the High Hay, a great hedge grown and tended for that purpose; behind the hedge the Bucklanders kept the habit of locking their doors at night, which the rest of the Shire thought strange. The Westmarch, between the Far Downs and the Tower Hills, was granted later and reckoned a further division. Out along the westernmost hills stand three tall Elven-towers of great age, older by far than any Hobbit dwelling and no work of theirs; the Shire-folk knew of them but seldom went so far, and the Sea beyond was to them a word of ill omen rather than a place.

What distinguishes the region is less its shape than its position and its quiet. The East Road crosses it from the Brandywine Bridge westward toward the Far Downs, carrying such traffic as there is — Dwarves passing to and from the Blue Mountains, an occasional Elf-company going west — but the Shire-folk took little notice of who used the road or where it went. The land had been part of the realm of Arnor, and when that kingdom failed the Hobbits went on with their own ordering, keeping the roads and bridges by custom rather than by command, and remaining unaware that the Rangers of the North watched its borders. So a small, unwalled, unremarkable country in a wide and emptying land kept its peace for centuries, and its inhabitants took that peace for the natural order of the world.

The Hobbits reached the country west of the Misty Mountains long before they had a land of their own. The annals of the North first take notice of them about the year 1050 of the Third Age, when the Harfoots appear in Eriador; the Fallohides followed about a century later, and the Stoors, who had lingered longest in the vales of the Anduin, came over the mountains later still and settled for a time in the Angle between the Hoarwell and the Loudwater. These were the years in which the North-kingdom was already broken into three quarrelling realms and the shadow of Angmar was rising in the far north. The Hobbits had no part in those wars, but they suffered their weather: when Argeleb I fell in battle in 1356 the Stoors began to drift away from the Angle, and the great invasion of 1409 scattered them further, some going back east over the mountains, some south into Dunland, some westward into the emptying lands of Arthedain.

The land itself was founded in 1601, when two brothers of Fallohide stock, Marcho and Blanco, sought and obtained from Argeleb II leave to cross the Brandywine and settle the country beyond it, then largely deserted royal land. A great many Hobbits went with them over the bridge, and from that crossing the Shire-reckoning takes its first year. The terms were light: the settlers acknowledged the king's lordship, and undertook to keep the Great Bridge and the other bridges and roads in repair and to let the king's messengers pass freely. In 1630 they were joined by Stoors coming up out of Dunland, who settled chiefly in the eastern and southern parts. The new country's first great affliction came within a lifetime, when the plague that spread out of the east in 1636 reached Eriador and carried off many of them, so that the early records are thin and the population took long to recover.

The kingdom whose grant had made the Shire lawful did not outlast it. In 1974 the power of Angmar overwhelmed Arthedain and Fornost was taken, and in the year following the host out of Gondor and Lindon destroyed the Witch-king's army in the north; Shire tradition held that a company of their own bowmen went to that war and never came home again, though no record of it was kept. With no king left to appeal to, the Hobbits chose a chieftain of their own, and in 1979 Bucca of the Marish became the first Thain, taking over such of the king's authority as the country still needed. The office remained with his family until 2340, when Isumbras I became the thirteenth Thain and the first of the Took line, in the same year that the Oldbucks left the Shire proper for the eastern bank of the river.

The centuries that followed are, by the standards of the annals, nearly empty, which is the point of them. Only three events broke the quiet enough to be remembered by everyone. In 2747 an orc-band out of the north came down into the Northfarthing and was routed by Bandobras Took at Greenfields, the only battle fought within the borders for the whole span of the Shire's history until the last year of the Third Age. In 2758 the Long Winter shut down over Eriador, and the dearth that came after it killed many; the Shire-folk were helped through it by Gandalf, who was afterwards remembered kindly. In 2911 the Fell Winter froze the Brandywine hard enough for white wolves to cross it, and they came into the land out of the north. Otherwise the record is of harvests, marriages and inheritances, and of a country that had forgotten it was ever defended.

The war that ended the age reached the Shire twice, and the second time from within. After Frodo Baggins left in 3018 the country was gradually taken over by a combination of local ambition and outside force: land and mills bought up, Men brought in as enforcers, a swollen body of Shirriffs, gates on the roads, rules posted on every wall, and the storage tunnels at Michel Delving turned into prisons. Trees were felled, the old mill at Hobbiton pulled down and replaced by a smoking one, and much of Hobbiton itself wrecked and rebuilt in brick. Saruman, dispossessed and gone north on foot, arrived to preside over the ruin under a nickname. The travellers came back in the autumn of 3019, raised the country, and broke the occupation at the Battle of Bywater in November, the second and last battle fought on Shire soil; Saruman was killed at Bag End days later by his own servant.

Repair was quick and the land came out of it better placed than before. The year after the war was remembered for an extraordinary harvest and an unusual number of children, and the replanting was helped by a gift of Galadriel's, from which grew the one mallorn west of the mountains, in the field where Bilbo's farewell party had been held. The restored kingship then formalised what the Hobbits had practised for a thousand years without permission: in 1427 of the Shire-reckoning Elessar declared the Shire a free land under the protection of the Northern Sceptre and forbade Men to enter it, and in 1434 he made the Thain, the Master of Buckland and the Mayor of Michel Delving counsellors of the North-kingdom. When he came north in 1436 he kept his own edict and halted at the Brandywine Bridge, where the Shire-folk came out to him. In 1452 the Westmarch was added to the country by his gift, and the Shire went on into the Fourth Age intact.

The Hobbits who held the country were not of one stock. Three kindreds are distinguished in the Prologue: the Harfoots, brownest of skin, smallest and most numerous, hill-dwellers and diggers who had long been on good terms with Dwarves; the Stoors, broader and heavier, with larger hands and feet, who kept to river-banks and level ground, went in boats and were the least shy of Men; and the Fallohides, fairer and taller, fewer than the others, lovers of trees and woodland, more given to speech and song than to handicraft, and more often friendly with Elves. In the Shire these strains mingled until they could no longer be told apart with any confidence, though the Fallohide element was still said to be visible in the Tooks and in the families of Buckland, which may account for the readiness of both to do odd things. Beyond such distinctions the country ordered itself by family: households grouped into clans under their elders, with the Tooks seated at the Great Smials in Tuckborough and the Brandybucks in their hall across the river, and most disputes about land, inheritance and precedence settled within that framework rather than by any officer.

Formal government was slight and mostly ceremonial. The Thainship carried the mastership of the Shire-moot and the captaincy of the muster and the Hobbitry-in-arms, but since neither assembly nor levy was called except in emergency the dignity had become little more than a title of respect. The one office filled by election was that of Mayor of Michel Delving, chosen every seventh year at the Free Fair held on the White Downs at Midsummer; with it went the posts of Postmaster and First Shirriff, and in practice the duties amounted to presiding at feasts, since the messenger service and the twelve Shirriffs, three to each Farthing, made up nearly the whole of the Shire's administration. A larger and less fixed number of Bounders patrolled the borders, their strength varying with the need, and the ordinary Hobbit knew little of them. Laws were obeyed less from compulsion than from habit: the Shire-folk ascribed their essential rules to the king of old and kept them because they were held to be both ancient and just.

Buckland stood a little outside this arrangement, a colony governed by the head of the Brandybuck family as Master of the Hall, with its own habits and its own defences; the rest of the Shire thought its people peculiar and only half its own. Outward relations were thinner still. Dwarves travelling the East Road and occasional companies of Elves passing westward were tolerated as part of the traffic of the highway; Men were seldom seen and less often welcomed, and the Shire-folk showed little curiosity about them. Even the nearest community of their own kind was regarded as foreign: at Bree, four villages under the hill where Big Folk and Little Folk had lived side by side longer than the Shire had existed, the inhabitants claimed the oldest Hobbit settlement in the world and used the word Outsiders freely of anyone who came from elsewhere, the Shire included. The mutual indifference was old and comfortable, and it held until the closing years of the Third Age.

Both of Tolkien's Middle-earth narratives begin in the same room. The Hobbit opens with Bilbo Baggins at breakfast in his hole at Bag End, and the whole adventure is set going by the arrival of visitors he did not invite and cannot get rid of; the joke of the first chapter is that the wider world simply walks up a garden path and lets itself in. The Lord of the Rings uses the same door a second time, opening on a birthday party in a field at Hobbiton and taking more than four chapters to get its hero out of his own country. That slow start is doing work. The reader is given the Shire at leisure — its gossip, its meals, its mistrust of anything east of the river — before anything is explained, so that when the Black Riders come asking after the name Baggins the intrusion is felt as a violation of somewhere already known. The escape runs through ordinary Shire places: a farmer's fields in the Marish, a ferry across the Brandywine at night, a borrowed house at Crickhollow.

Once the story leaves it, the Shire becomes a measure rather than a setting. It is what the errand is for, and it is invoked at the turning points: Gandalf explains at the Council of Elrond why a country that has never asked to be defended has been defended anyway, and Sam, looking into Galadriel's mirror, is shown his home dug up and nearly abandons the journey to go back and put it right. In Mordor the two hobbits keep themselves going on remembered Shire particulars — a garden, a meal, the sound of water — and the smallness of these things against the scale of what is at stake is the argument the book is making. The land the reader was shown at length is never described again from within until the end, which is why its absence carries weight.

The homecoming refuses the consolation the shape of the story seems to promise. Three of the travellers take up offices and households and settle; the fourth cannot, and Frodo's going down to the Havens is set against Sam riding back up the hill to his family and his supper, an ending that gives the Shire to those who can still live in it. The country is also the book's supposed source. Bilbo's memoir and Frodo's continuation are written at Bag End, the manuscript passes to Sam, and the Prologue traces the copies made and kept in Shire houses, with Merry contributing works on herb-lore, calendars and old names. The land that noticed nothing thus ends as the place where the record was made.

The country was in place before the story was. The drafts printed in The Return of the Shadow show that the opening chapter, with its party at Bag End on the Hill above Hobbiton and the Water below it, was written at once and then recast again and again, while almost everything about its purpose remained unsettled. In the earliest versions the traveller was Bilbo himself setting out a second time, and then a younger heir named Bingo Bolger-Baggins, who held the position the published book gives to Frodo; the name Frodo belonged for a long while to one of the Took companions before it was transferred to the chief character. The device of selling up and removing across the river to a small house at Crickhollow, which gets the hero quietly out of his own country, was reached early and kept, even as the identity of those who travelled with him changed repeatedly. The stability of the setting against the instability of the plot is the plainest lesson of these papers: Tolkien knew the ground before he knew the errand.

Much of the apparatus that now frames the land was late work. The Peoples of Middle-earth preserves successive versions of the Prologue and of the account of Hobbit speech and naming, in which the conceit of a translated record — homely modern forms standing for Westron ones — was argued out, expanded and pruned; some of the fuller philological discussion was cut before publication as too heavy for the front of a novel. The genealogies, the calendar and the dating of the settlement belong to the same late reworking rather than to the writing of the narrative. Sauron Defeated prints a further ending that was written and then abandoned: an epilogue set years afterward at Bag End, with Sam among his children answering their questions about what became of the people in the book. Tolkien drafted it twice and let it go, so the published text closes at the door instead.

Peter Jackson's trilogy built the Shire as a practical location on farmland near Matamata in the North Island of New Zealand, and the set was afterwards rebuilt in permanent materials for the Hobbit films and left standing. The films' handling of the country departs from the book in two ways that are much discussed. The long interval between Bilbo's departure and Frodo's — seventeen years in the novel — is compressed to a matter of weeks, so that Gandalf's identification of the Ring and the flight from Hobbiton follow closely on one another. More substantially, the occupation of the country and its recovery are omitted altogether: Saruman is dealt with at Isengard rather than at Bag End, his death appearing only in the extended version of the third film, and the four travellers return to a Shire that has not been touched, which turns Sam's vision in Galadriel's mirror into an averted possibility rather than a prophecy fulfilled. The Old Forest and the Barrow-downs are cut with Tom Bombadil, so Buckland's hedged eastern boundary plays no part. The Hobbit trilogy frames its narrative with scenes at Bag End on the day of the birthday party, with Ian Holm and Elijah Wood returning in their earlier roles to join the two sets of films together.

The older adaptations treat the land more briefly. The Rankin/Bass television Hobbit opens at Bag End with Orson Bean voicing Bilbo, but its running time leaves little room for the country beyond the hole itself; the same studio's Return of the King frames its story as a birthday feast at Rivendell rather than in the Shire and passes over the homecoming entirely. Bakshi's film moves through Hobbiton quickly in its opening and, breaking off after Helm's Deep, never reaches the end of the journey at all. The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation, running to twenty-six parts, is alone among these in giving the occupation of the country and its undoing their full weight, and it is generally the version cited as closest to the book; Ian Holm played Frodo in it, two decades before taking the older part on screen.