The Shire

The Shire is a region of J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional Middle-earth, described in The Lord of the Rings and other works. 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. It is in the northwest of the continent, in the region of Eriador and the Kingdom of Arnor.
The Shire is the scene of action at the beginning and end of Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Five of the protagonists in these stories have their homeland in the Shire: Bilbo Baggins, and four members of the Fellowship of the Ring: Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, Merry Brandybuck, and Pippin Took. At the end of The Hobbit, Bilbo returns to the Shire, only to find out that he has been declared "missing and presumed dead" and that his hobbit-hole and all its contents are up for auction. 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.
Tolkien based the Shire's landscapes, climate, flora, fauna, and placenames on Worcestershire and Warwickshire, the rural counties in England where he lived. In Peter Jackson's film adaptations 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 in New Zealand, which became a tourist destination.

Fictional description

Tolkien took considerable trouble over the exact details of the Shire. Little of his carefully crafted fictional geography, history, calendar, and constitution appeared in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, though additional details were given in the Appendices of later editions. The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey comments that all the same, they provided the "depth", the feeling in the reader's mind that this was a real and complex place, a quality that Tolkien believed essential to a successful fantasy.

Geography

Four farthings

In Tolkien's fiction, the Shire is described as a small but beautiful, idyllic and fruitful land, beloved by its hobbit inhabitants. They had agriculture but were not industrialized. The landscape included downland and woods like the English countryside. The Shire was fully inland; most hobbits feared the Sea. The Shire measured 40 leagues east to west and 50 leagues from north to south, with an area of some : roughly that of the English Midlands.
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. It expanded to the east into Buckland between the Brandywine and the Old Forest, and to the west into the Westmarch between the Far Downs and the Tower Hills.
The Shire was subdivided into four Farthings, as Iceland once was; similarly, Yorkshire was historically divided into three "ridings". The Three-Farthing Stone marked the approximate centre of the Shire. It was inspired by the Four Shire Stone near Moreton-in-Marsh, where once four counties met, but since 1931 only three do. 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. Pippin was born in Whitwell in the Tookland.
Within the Farthings there are unofficial clan homelands: the Tooks nearly all live in or near Tuckborough in Tookland's Green Hill Country.

Buckland

Buckland, also known as the "East Marches", was just to the east of the Shire across the Brandywine River. Named for the Brandybuck family, it was settled "long ago" as "a sort of colony of the Shire." It was bounded to the east by the Old Forest, separated by a tall thick hedge called the High Hay. It included Crickhollow, which serves as one of Frodo's five Homely Houses.
The Westmarch or West Marches was given to the Shire by King Elessar after the War of the Ring.

Bree

To the east of the Shire was the isolated village of Bree, unique in having hobbits and men living side-by-side. It was served by an inn named The Prancing Pony, noted for its fine beer which was sampled by hobbits, men, and the wizard Gandalf. Many inhabitants of Bree, including the inn's landlord Barliman Butterbur, had surnames taken from plants. Tolkien described the butterbur as "a fat thick plant", evidently chosen as appropriate for a fat man. Tolkien suggested two different origins for the people of Bree: either it had been founded and populated by men of the Edain who did not reach Beleriand in the First Age, remaining east of the mountains in Eriador; or they came from the same stock as the Dunlendings.
The name Bree means "hill"; Tolkien justified the name by arranging the village and the surrounding Bree-land around a large hill, named Bree-hill. The name of the village Brill, in Buckinghamshire, a place that Tolkien often visited, and which inspired him to create Bree, has the same meaning: Brill is a modern contraction of Breʒ-hyll. Both syllables are words for "hill" – the first is Celtic and the second Old English.

History

The Shire was first settled by hobbits in the year 1601 of the Third Age ; they were led by the brothers Marcho and Blanco. 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.
After the fall of Arnor, the Shire remained a self-governing realm; the Shire-folk chose a Thain to hold the king's powers. The first Thains were the heads of the Oldbuck clan. When the Oldbucks settled Buckland, the position of Thain was peacefully transferred to the Took clan. The Shire was covertly protected by Rangers of the North, who watched the borders and kept out intruders. Generally the only strangers entering the Shire were Dwarves travelling on the Great Road from their mines in the Blue Mountains, and occasional Elves on their way to the Grey Havens. In the hobbits defeated an invasion of Orcs at the Battle of Greenfields. In –60, thousands of hobbits perished in the Long Winter and the famine that followed. In the Fell Winter of –12, white wolves from Forodwaith invaded the Shire across the frozen Brandywine river.
File:Hobbiton, New Zealand.jpg|thumb|upright=1.35|The house of Bilbo and later Frodo Baggins at Bag End, Hobbiton as filmed in New Zealand
The protagonists of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, lived at Bag End, a luxurious smial or hobbit-burrow, dug into The Hill on the north side of the town of Hobbiton in the Westfarthing. It was the most comfortable hobbit-dwelling in the town; there were smaller burrows further down The Hill. In Bilbo Baggins left the Shire on the quest recounted in The Hobbit. He returned the following year, secretly bearing a magic ring. This turned out to be the One Ring. The Shire was invaded by four Ringwraiths in search of the Ring. While Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin were away on the quest to destroy the Ring, the Shire was taken over by Saruman through his underling Lotho Sackville-Baggins. They ran the Shire in a parody of a modern state, complete with armed ruffians, destruction of trees and handsome old buildings, and ugly industrialisation.
The Shire was liberated with the help of Frodo and his companions on their return at the Battle of Bywater. The trees of the Shire were restored with soil from Galadriel's garden in Lothlórien. The year was considered by the inhabitants of the Shire to be the most productive and prosperous year in their history.

Language

The hobbits of the Shire spoke Middle-earth's Westron or Common Speech. Tolkien however rendered their language as modern English in The Hobbit and in Lord of the Rings, just as he had used Old Norse names for the Dwarves. To resolve this linguistic puzzle, he created the fiction that the languages of parts of Middle-earth were "translated" into different European languages, inventing the language of the Riders of Rohan, Rohirric, to be "translated" again as the Mercian dialect of Old English which he knew well. This set up a relationship something like ancestry between Rohan and the Shire.

Government

The Shire had little in the way of government. The Mayor of the Shire's chief township, Michel Delving, was the chief official and was treated in practice as the Mayor of the Shire. There was a Message Service for post, and the 12 "Shirriffs" of the Watch for police; their chief duties were rounding up stray livestock. These were supplemented by a varying number of "Bounders", an unofficial border force. At the time of The Lord of the Rings, there were many more Bounders than usual, one of the few signs for the hobbits of that troubled time. The heads of major families exerted authority over their own areas.
The Master of Buckland, hereditary head of the Brandybuck clan, ruled Buckland and had some authority over the Marish, just across the Brandywine River.
Similarly, the head of the Took clan, often called "The Took", ruled the ancestral Took dwelling of Great Smials, the village of Tuckborough, and the area of The Tookland. He held the largely ceremonial office of Thain of the Shire.

Calendar

Tolkien devised the "Shire calendar" or "Shire Reckoning" supposedly used by the Shire's hobbits on Bede's medieval calendar. In his fiction, it was created in Rhovanion hundreds of years before the Shire was founded. When hobbits migrated into Eriador, they took up the Kings' Reckoning, but maintained their old names of the months. In the "King's Reckoning", the year began on the winter solstice. After migrating further to the Shire, the hobbits created the "Shire Reckoning", in which Year 1 corresponded to the foundation of the Shire in the year 1601 of the Third Age by Marcho and Blanco. The Shire's calendar year has 12 months, each of 30 days. Five non-month days are added to create a 365-day year. The two Yuledays signify the turn of the year, so each year begins on 2 Yule. The Lithedays are the three non-month days at midsummer, 1 Lithe, Mid-year's Day, and 2 Lithe. In leap years an Overlithe day is added after Mid-year's Day. There are seven days in the Shire week. The first day of the week is Sterday and the last is Highday. The Mid-year's Day and, when present, Overlithe have no weekday assignments. This causes every day to have the same weekday designation from year to year, instead of changing as in the Gregorian calendar.
For the names of the months, Tolkien reconstructed Anglo-Saxon names, his take on what the English would be if it had not adopted Latin names for the months such as January and March. In The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the names of months and week-days are given in modern equivalents, so Afteryule is called "January" and Sterday is called "Saturday".

Month number	Shire Reckoning	Bede's Anglo- Saxon calendar	Meaning	Approximate Gregorian dates
	2 Yule		22 December	-
1	Afteryule	Æfterra Gēola	After Christmas	23 December to 21 January
2	Solmath	Sol-Month	Cakes month	22 January to 20 February
3	Rethe	Hrēþ-mōnaþ	The goddess Hretha's month	21 February to 22 March
4	Astron	Easter-mōnaþ	Easter month	23 March to 21 April
5	Thrimidge	Þrimilce-mōnaþ	Thrice-milking month	22 April to 21 May
6	Forelithe	Ǣrra-Līða	Before the Solstice	22 May to 20 June
	1 Lithe		21 June	-
	Mid-year's Day		22 June	-
	Overlithe		Leap day	-
	2 Lithe		23 June	-
7	Afterlithe	Æftera Līþa	After the Solstice	24 June to 23 July
8	Wedmath	Weod-mōnaþ	Weed Month	24 July to 22 August
9	Halimath	Hālig-mōnaþ	Holy Month	23 August to 21 September
10	Winterfilth	Winterfylleth	Winter Fulfilment	22 September to 21 October
11	Blotmath	Blōt-mōnaþ	Blood Month	22 October to 20 November
12	Foreyule	Ærra Gēola	Before Christmas	21 November to 20 December
	1 Yule		21 December	-