The Shire was covertly protected by Rangers of the North, who watched the borders and kept out intruders. When the Oldbucks settled Buckland, the position of Thain was peacefully transferred to the Took clan. The first Thains were the heads of the Oldbuck clan. Īfter the fall of Arnor, the Shire remained a self-governing realm the Shire-folk chose a Thain to hold the king's powers.
The hobbits from the vale of Anduin had migrated west over the perilous Misty Mountains, living in the wilds of Eriador before moving to the Shire. The Shire was first settled by hobbits in the year 1601 of the Third Age (Year 1 in Shire Reckoning) they were led by the brothers Marcho and Blanco. įurther information: The Scouring of the Shire Within the Farthings there are unofficial clan homelands: the Tooks nearly all live in or near Tuckborough in Tookland's Green Hill Country. Pippin was born in Whitwell in the Tookland. There are several Three Shire Stones in England, such as in the Lake District, and formerly some Three Shires Oaks, such as at Whitwell in Derbyshire, each marking the place where three counties once met. It was inspired by the Four Shire Stone near Moreton-in-Marsh, where once four counties met, but since 1931 only three do. The Three-Farthing Stone marked the approximate centre of the Shire. The Shire was subdivided into four Farthings ("fourth-ings", "quarterings"), as Iceland once was similarly, Yorkshire was historically divided into three " ridings". It expanded to the east into Buckland between the Brandywine and the Old Forest, and (much later) to the west into the Westmarch between the Far Downs and the Tower Hills. The main and oldest part of the Shire was bordered to the east by the Brandywine River, on the north by uplands rising to the Hills of Evendim, on the west by the Far Downs, and on the south by marshland. The Shire measured 40 leagues (193 km, 120 miles) east to west and 50 leagues (241 km, 150 miles) from north to south, with an area of some 18,000 square miles (47,000 km 2): roughly that of the English Midlands. The Shire was fully inland most hobbits feared the Sea. The landscape included downland and woods like the English countryside. They had agriculture but were not industrialized. In Tolkien's fiction, the Shire is described as a small but beautiful, idyllic and fruitful land, beloved by its hobbit inhabitants. In Peter Jackson's films of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the Shire was represented by countryside and constructed hobbit-holes on a farm near Matamata, New Zealand, which became a tourist destination.įurther information: Tolkien's maps and Geography of Middle-earth Tolkien based the Shire's landscapes, climate, flora, fauna, and placenames on rural England where he lived, first in Worcestershire as a boy, then in Oxfordshire. The main action in The Lord of the Rings returns to the Shire near the end of the book, in " The Scouring of the Shire", when the homebound hobbits find the area under the control of Saruman's ruffians, and set things to rights. Five of the protagonists in these stories have their homeland in the Shire: Bilbo Baggins (the title character of The Hobbit), and four members of the Fellowship of the Ring: Frodo Baggins, Sam Gamgee, Merry Brandybuck and Pippin Took. The Shire is the scene of action at the beginning and end of Tolkien's The Hobbit, and of the sequel, The Lord of the Rings. It is in the northwest of the continent, in the region of Eriador and the Kingdom of Arnor.
The Shire is an inland area settled exclusively by hobbits, the Shire-folk, largely sheltered from the goings-on in the rest of Middle-earth. Tolkien's fictional Middle-earth, described in The Lord of the Rings and other works. The Shire (red) within the northwest of Middle-earth at the end of the Third Ageīilbo Baggins, Frodo Baggins, Merry Brandybuck, Pippin Took, Sam Gamgee