The Shire

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Shire is the homeland of hobbits in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, a small inland territory tucked into the northwest of a vast continent. It measures 40 leagues from east to west and 50 leagues from north to south, an area roughly equivalent to the English Midlands. For most of its history, it was barely noticed by the outside world. Its inhabitants preferred it that way. Yet this sheltered corner of a mythological continent produced five of the central characters in Tolkien's two great works: Bilbo Baggins, Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, Merry Brandybuck, and Pippin Took. What drew Tolkien to build it so carefully? Why does a place that appears barely governed, barely militarized, and entirely unaware of the wider world carry such weight in his stories? And why did a generation of readers feel they already knew it before they arrived?

• 2. A Calque Upon England

  ›

  The scholar Tom Shippey uses a precise linguistic term for what Tolkien built: a calque. A calque is a direct structural translation, element by element, from one thing to another. The Shire's founding brothers were named Marcho and Blanco, hobbit words that mean "horse" in the same way that Hengest and Horsa, the legendary founders of England, mean "horse" in Old English. The three original tribes of hobbits, the Stoors, the Harfoots, and the Fallohides, map onto the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. The period of civil peace in the Shire, measured from the Battle of Greenfields to the Battle of Bywater, runs 272 years. The comparable English span Tolkien had in mind runs 270 years. Tolkien equated the latitude of Hobbiton with that of Oxford, placing his invented county at roughly 52 degrees north. The name of the Northamptonshire village of Farthinghoe is what prompted him to divide the Shire into its four Farthings. Even the pipe-weed grows as it does in the real world: Tolkien noted that it flourishes in warm sheltered places like Longbottom, and the Evesham area of Worcestershire was well known for its tobacco in the seventeenth century.

• 3. Roots in Worcestershire

  ›

  Tolkien grew up in the rural counties of Worcestershire and Warwickshire, and the Shire's landscapes, climate, plants, and place-names are drawn from that countryside directly. In a BBC interview with Denys Gueroult in 1964, Tolkien reflected on what it meant to spend formative years in a quiet Warwickshire village: "To have just at the age when imagination is opening out, suddenly find yourself in a quiet Warwickshire village, I think it engenders a particular love of what you might call central Midlands English countryside." The Shire's homely feel comes from specific touches: the pub called The Green Dragon in Bywater, The Ivy Bush near Hobbiton, and The Golden Perch, renowned for fine beer. The scholar Michael Stanton notes that the Shire draws on Tolkien's own childhood at Sarehole, as well as English village life more broadly, with what Tolkien called "gardens, trees, and unmechanized farmland." The Shire's largest town, Michel Delving, hides a philological joke: it sounds like an English country town but means "Much Digging" in Old English, from micel meaning "great" and delfan meaning "to dig."

• 4. The Industrial Shadow

  ›

  The industrialization of the Shire in The Lord of the Rings was not invented for dramatic effect. It came from lived experience. When the Tolkien family relocated from Sarehole to Moseley and Kings Heath in 1901, and then again to Edgbaston in 1902, each move brought them closer to the industry of central Birmingham. The biographer Humphrey Carpenter notes that the views of Moseley were a sad contrast to the Warwickshire countryside of Tolkien's youth. "The Scouring of the Shire", the chapter in which Frodo and his companions return home to find it under Saruman's control, can be read as wish-fulfilment: a restoration of pre-industrial life, complete with Merry's magic horn rousing the hobbits to fight back. Saruman's takeover was carried out through his underling Lotho Sackville-Baggins. The occupiers ran the Shire as a parody of a modern state, with armed ruffians, destruction of old trees and handsome buildings, and deliberate industrialization. The trees were eventually restored with soil from Galadriel's garden in Lothlórien, a personal gift to Sam.

• 5. Government and Calendar

  ›

  The Shire had almost no formal government, which was part of its appeal. The Mayor of Michel Delving served as chief official for the whole Shire. Twelve Shirriffs, three per Farthing, kept the peace; their main job was rounding up stray livestock. An unofficial border force called the Bounders supplemented them, and by the time of The Lord of the Rings, there were far more Bounders than usual, one of the few outward signs that something was wrong beyond the borders. The Thain of the Shire was the head of the Took clan, holding a largely ceremonial office that had originally been created after the fall of Arnor to stand in for the king's powers. Before the Tooks held it, the office belonged to the Oldbuck clan. Tolkien also built the hobbits their own calendar, based on Bede's medieval Anglo-Saxon calendar. The Shire year has 12 months of 30 days each, with five extra non-month days added to reach 365. The names of the months, such as Afteryule, Solmath, and Blotmath, were Tolkien's reconstruction of what Anglo-Saxon month names would have been if English had never adopted Latin forms like January or March. In the books, these names are quietly replaced with modern equivalents, so Afteryule appears as "January" and Sterday as "Saturday."

• 6. Hobbiton on Film

  ›

  Peter Jackson chose a farm near Matamata in New Zealand to represent the Shire in his film adaptations of both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. After filming The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King, the production was meant to bulldoze the constructed hobbit-holes and return the land to its natural state. Bad weather intervened. Eighteen of the 37 hobbit-holes could not be immediately demolished, and before work could resume, the partially dismantled set was drawing more than 12,000 tourists per year to Ian Alexander's farm, where Hobbiton and Bag End had been built. Jackson returned to the same location for The Hobbit films. The 1977 animated version of The Hobbit and the 1978 animated Lord of the Rings had also featured the Shire, but it was Jackson's live-action version that turned a New Zealand farm into a permanent destination. In the 2007 online game The Lord of the Rings Online, the Shire was rendered almost entirely in digital form, with the only missing portions being parts of the West Farthing and the majority of the South Farthing, based on Christopher Tolkien's original map.