The Shire
small folk who unmade the world's ring
The Story
The Shire is a small green country where for a thousand peaceful years almost nothing happened, and then everything did. The hobbits had it as a gift from Argeleb II, the King at Fornost, in the year 1601 of the Third Age, one of the last gifts of a kingdom about to fall. There they lived their quiet lives of pipeweed and parties and fences, paying no attention to the wide world unless the wide world insisted.
Then a wizard came to a hobbit's birthday, and the wide world insisted. Frodo took a Ring out of the Shire that no king or wizard could carry. Sam carried Frodo when Frodo could not carry himself. The largest deed of the Third Age was done by the smallest folk in it, and the world they came home to was not the world they had left, and they were not the same hobbits either.
The Land
A small green land in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, walled on the east by the Brandywine River and on the west by the Far Downs. Four farthings, North, South, East, West, meet at the Three-Farthing Stone near the centre.
- Hobbiton, in the West Farthing, in the lee of the Hill; Bag End on its side.
- Bywater, just south of Hobbiton on the Bywater Pool.
- Tuckborough, the Tooks' seat in the South Farthing.
- Michel Delving, chief town of the West Farthing, on the White Downs.
- Buckland, the strip of country east of the Brandywine, between the river and the Old Forest; Brandy Hall on the river bank.
- The Great East Road, runs through Hobbiton, crossing the Brandywine at the Bridge of Stonebows on its way to Bree.