Concerning Hobbits Part II

In the western lands of Eriador, between the Misty Mountains and the Mountains of Lune, Hobbits found Men and Elves. In fact, there were still Dúnedains, the kings of Men who had come, through sea, from the West; but they were rapidly disappearing and the lands in the Kingdom of the North were becoming fallow and deserted.

It was, undoubtedly, in the first times that Hobbits learnt their letters and began to write in the Dúnedain way. In that time they also forgot the languages they had once used and moved on speaking only the Common Speech, Westron. However, they kept some of their old words, like the names of the months and days and a great amount of proper names from the past.

In 1601 of the Third Age, the fallohide brothers Marcho and Blanco set foot from Bree and crossed the Baranduin river with a large company of Hobbits and occupied all the lands who followed them, between the river and the Far Downs.

And so began the Shire Reckoning, given that the year of the crossing of the Brandywine river (name given by the Hobbits to the former Baranduin) became the first year of the Shire (The years of the Third Age of the Elven calendars and the Dúnedain’s are calculated by adding 1600 years to the Shire Reckoning).

The Hobbits fell in love with their new land and so they stayed. While there was a king they were his subjects; but in reality they had leaders of their own and didn’t lay hand in anything outside their borders. Even during the battle of Fornost with the Witchking of Angmar , Hobbits supposedly sent a number of archers to help their suzerain, even though no story of Men has ever registered that fact. But the Kingdom of the North was ended in that war, and so the Hobbits occupied that land as officially their own and chose, between their leaders, a baron to assume the authority of the former king.  

The Hobbits called it the Shire. And so, in that peaceful corner of the world, they dedicated themselves to the well-organized job of living and worrying every little less with the outside world, where dark things were put to work. They even convinced themselves that peace and abundance were normal daily things to Middle Earth and also the right to every reasonable person.  They even forgot (or ignored) the little they had ever known about the Guardians and their efforts to bring peace to the Shire. They were, in fact, protected, but they had forgotten that a long time ago.

Never did the Hobbits from any species fight against each other. The last battle (and in fact the only one ever fought inside the borders of the Shire) was the Battle of the Greenfields, in 1147 (S.R), in which Bandobras Took put an invasion of orcs out of the Shire.

Even though there were still some weapons in the Shire, they were used as trophies, hanging in their chimneys, walls or in the Michel Delving museum. The museum was called “Mathom-House”, since the Hobbits gave the name “mathom” to everything without an immediate utility or purpose, but that they wanted to keep.

However, the peace and quiet had allowed that people to keep their strength. If things were to come to a point, it would be known that Hobbits were difficult to scare or kill. Maybe they were so unbendingly friends with good things because they could, when necessary, go on without them and survive to the foulest treats of despair, to enemies or time in a way that would surprise those who didn’t knew them well and couldn’t see past their big bellies and well fed faces.

They were agile with the bow due to their sharp vision and good aiming skills. But these talents weren’t only dedicated to bows and arrows: if a Hobbit were to go down and pick up a rock, the best thing for his enemy to do was to hide quickly enough.

Every hobbit had lived in holes in the ground in the past, and it was on those shelters where they still felt more comfortable nowadays, but with the running of time they were forced to move to other ways of residence.  In fact, in Bilbo’s time only the richest or the poorest respected the old ways of living under the ground.  The poorest kept living in simple holes with only one window or even none. While the richest ones build a more luxurious version of those simple excavations.  But it wasn’t easy to find adequate spaces for those large, ramified, tunnels (smials, as they called them). So, in plains and low areas, Hobbits started to build above the ground.

It is probable that the craft of building has been taught to the hobbits by the Dúnedains. But it is also possible that hobbits might have learned it directly from the Elves, professors of Men in their primes: the Elves of the High Kindred hadn’t yet forsake Middle Earth and, in that time, were still living in the Grey Havens, to the west and in other places next to the Shire.

Three Elf Towers were still to be seen on the Tower Hills. They shone far off in the moonlight and the tallest was furthest away, standing alone on a green mound.  The hobbits of the West farthing used to say that it was possible to see the sea from that tower, even though no hobbit has ever climbed it. In fact, very few hobbits had ever seen the sea or sailed on it and even lesser had returned to tell the tale. Hobbits usually didn’t know how to swim and were very apprehensive when it came to rivers or boats. As the time passed, they talked less and less with the Elves, began to fear them and became distrustful of those who maintained contact with them – and so the sea turned into a word of fear among them, a symbol of death and so they learned to turn their eyes away from the hills of the west.

The craft of construction may have been learned from the Elves or Men, but Hobbits did it their own way. They didn’t like towers; their houses were usually long, short and confortable. The main characteristic of their homes was round windows and doors. Hobbits often shared their homes with their large families (Bilbo and Frodo, being single were a very rare case, as in many other aspects such as their friendship with the elves).  They were very clannish and reckoned up their relationships. Hobbits drew long and elaborate family-trees with innumerable branches. The genealogical trees at the end of the Red Book were themselves another small book that only Hobbits would find appealing or interesting: “they liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions.”