IN THE SHIRE-RECKONING by Diane Finnis-Robb  

Part One; Chapter Four "The Earliest Settlements"

   In those first few days after Gondo had departed a very steady stream of would-be pioneers kept flowing out of the Bree-land and across the Stonebows bridge hoping to lay their own claims in the new land. A kind of makeshift bureaucracy was therefore established; newcomers would be met at the Bridge to be asked a series of questions regarding the size of their family and their former occupations and any useful skills which they might have in a wide variety of areas. No hobbit was turned down, for they all knew that there was much work to be done, but all were expected to work for two weeks within the main encampments before being able to register for a deed to any land or be granted a license for any business. In this way, or so Gondo hoped, strangers might soon become neighbours and all of the hobbits might get a sense of the hard tasks ahead. It seemed to be a good plan in its own way, but Alaura, who was not present for argument at the plan’s making, would later point out that it meant that the male hobbits, who Gondo had called upon first, would be the first holders of deeds and titles. Of course no one other than her had considered that at the time and, as with all political change, to notice such unfairness too late might also be too late for its correction.

  At the end of these two long weeks of learning and labour an initiate would then return to the Bree-land to register whatever deeds or licenses they might need with Twoody and have their names set down by Alaura among “THE FIRST FAMILIES OF THE SHIRE.” In the months we now call June and July (simply called “the Summerdays” in the oldest calendars of the Bree-land) caravans of carts and goods and people were traveling back and forth between the Bridge and Bree-hill daily. To make this more efficient a way-station, or “waymeet”, was set up for the two day journey. Some of the first hobbit pioneers set aside their dreams of building homes or farms in the Shire and chose to become entrepreneurs; they took up jobs in the waymeet as shippers and carters, putting their ponies and carts to good use while the settlements and towns were still being built in the new land. In mid-July Twoody sent Nob the pony by courier into the Shire carrying letters and a few light provisions. They had raised the pony together, Gondo and Twoody, but now he was a gift so that Gondo might ride him from settlements to farms and to wells and other important areas of construction. The two friends shared daily missives on their great undertaking and much of the speedy success in the early development of the Shire could be seen as a result of this very fine arrangement.

   Back in the Bree-land, Alaura and her team of (mostly female) hobbit writers had made a steady practice of sending out their weekly announcement of the work being done. Much like the earlier editions these were entitled THE SHIRE-RECKONING and these documents spread throughout the villages surrounding Bree-hill and as far as anyone was willing to carry them. News, letters and rumour were all traveling back and forth steadily between the Shire and the Bree-land. It is perhaps from these early weekly journals that the expression “news out of Bree” first became popular in the north. If so, then it was undoubtedly taken as happy news to hobbits everywhere at that time rather than the ominous connotation it would have in the days of Frodo and Bilbo Baggins.

   It was agreed that families would not move into the Shire until the following springtime, for work had not begun until the Pioneers’ Quest in June (Year One of the Shire-reckoning) and, while winters were not expected to be particularly harsh in the new land, few hobbitholes would be ready and it was far too late in the year for planting. The earliest pioneers instead put much of their attention into the building of roads and small towns during that first summer and fall as well as communal places where a store of goods might make their expansion much easier. In the deeds and licenses issued during this period many hobbits exhibited their usual proclivity for renaming themselves and some work was needed to keep track of what wives and children belonged to what husbands and fathers. Alaura began the first GENEALOGICAL REGISTRY OF THE SHIRE in that winter and some proud Shirefolk say that in it she invented the very first diagram of trees as a means of explaining a family’s lineage. This may be true for that motif does not appear in the genealogical records of the Edain before the Fourth Age and the Elves, from what we can tell, cared very little for diagrams of this sort.

   Almost from the start Shire-settlers began their rapid development of the land along two paths; north and south along the Baranduin river and westward following the Great Road in accordance with the maps Gondo was now drawing for them. Upon his return Gondo had been very fortunate to discover three other young hobbits who, like himself, had an interest in map-making and so these early explorations went much easier. One of them was his friend and Alaura’s youngest brother, Clothair Pudifoot, who would go on to great acclaim in the Shire’s western expansion. Copies of maps were being sent back to the Bree-land so often that Alaura and Twoody could hardly keep up with all of the new discoveries.

   Just beyond the Stonebows bridge they found a series of low hills and large fields which stretched on for many miles west along the Road to the Far-stone. This rich and fertile land had taken on the name of Bridgefields by some of the first pioneers who chose to be farmers set their claims there. It was bordered to the north and to the south by two as yet unnamed rivers and there, in the Shire’s first year, is where the earliest encampments arose. In December of Year One and on the eastern edge of Bridgefields Twoody’s older brother, Childebrand Swiftalk, moved his trading post from the Bree-land stables, to a place on the Road about three miles from the Stonebows bridge. Childy, the second son of Hincmar Swiftalk but no less of an entrepreneur, had in a very short time seen the opportunity of the new land and seized it quickly. That settlement’s original name remains unknown, but later writings refer to it as Childesbank and it became a site of major importance in the Shire’s early history.

   To the north and south of the Bridgefields and alongside each of the two unnamed rivers two other towns also grew quickly. Just two leagues south of the bridge, where a small but deep river met the Branduin, a community of hobbits from the far-off Greyflood river built a fishing village which would continue to do great trade throughout the Shire’s history. So plentiful were the fish where this river met the Baranduin that the town became called Stock and the river the Stockbrook; for it was said that any hobbit with a hook and a string could "make stock for himself" there in a few short hours.

   Across the Stockbrook and further south along the Baranduin was a yet unexplored area that Gondo had labeled “the Marish”; a lowland of fens nearby the river. Not many hobbits ventured there in the first ten years of Shire-reckoning for it seemed boggy and difficult to traverse with its ditches and briars. But those lowlands would yield to better ground away from the river turning into a land of wide fields and bright-flowering meadows. Years later many other hobbits from the south would come there and learn to grow the pipeweed for which all of the Shire would one day become famous.

   Ten miles to the north of the Bridgefields and along another unnamed river was the settlement of Budge. To that location old Heindewin Bolger, breaking with the agreement of the other settlers, took his large and still-growing family in the second month of the Shire’s development. Old Heindewin had ten sons and seven daughters, many of them were older and with families of their own, and so earliest reports tell us that as many as seventy-five Bolgers went north of the Stonebows in Year One to settle in a place of their own. The Bolgers were a hearty, thoughtful, bright-spirited, charismatic, handsome (if sometimes chubby) folk who were very popular and skilled in many different professions. Gondo or Twoody or any of their neighbours could not quite stop them from coming to make ‘a town unto themselves’ and the other young pioneers, lonely as they may have been, were not jealous to see all of the Bolger family together; for in all of the Shire’s long history no one was ever known to dislike any of the Bolgers. In fact there were many younger pioneers who followed them (perhaps in pursuit of old Heindewin’s daughters and granddaughters) so that the lands between Budge and the Great Road filled up rapidly with farms making the northeastern end of the Shire quite popular in its earliest years. It was from the Great Road to the settlement of Budge that the first road in the Shire was developed and the first inn, the Budge’n Bridge, was established at that corner on the First Day of Year Two.¹ The town of Budge itself was built at a ford of the yet unnamed northern river and within a few years the town grew to a size that it encompassed both shores. It was called Budgeford in the time of Frodo Baggins, and the Bolgers were still its major inhabitants even in those far distant days.

   As farms grew along the smaller river near Budge many hobbits decided to follow it upstream. It ran west-by-northwest in a gentle winding turn and, not far along, two other features from Gondo’s early maps were discovered. The first was a low wet marsh surrounded by hills perhaps midway between the Stonebows and the Far-stone and about five miles north of the Great Road. The marsh was fed by natural springs from the hills making it an ideal place for hobbitholes. It is said that Isengrim Tinyfoot came to this part of the land late in his years and after the death of his wife, but no reliable record may be found to support this. By Year Three of the Shire-reckoning only a few settlers had come there, but it had already acquired its long lasting name as Frogmorton.

   As more families began moving west along this river to set their communities it had, for a time, been given a name; the Norbourn.² Further upstream above Frogmorton, perhaps twenty miles as the river meandered, was a placid lovely pool bordered on all sides by low hills with small stands of fruit trees; just the perfect spot for digging small homes with round doors and simple gardens which the residential hobbits in the Bree-land had come to enjoy. This pool was fed by another river coming down from the north which they at first called the Shire-water so that the waters here were clean and bright and cool even in the summer. When word of it came back to the other settlers many hobbits abandoned their earlier stakes in Bridgefields, Stock or Budge to build anew and fulfill their private dreams of becoming country gentlefolk. The settlement there was most immediately named Hobbiton-by-the-Water for the success and great comfort it offered to all.

   But Gondo Bucklestrap, now the Boldbuck, had established himself elsewhere. He and a few of the more ambitious pioneers whom he gathered together in the first year, went quite a bit further, fifty miles and more from the Stonebows bridge, west and south to the green hill land that Gondo had found there in his earlier journeys. In the months before, alone and with just a small shovel to aid him, Gondo had begun excavation of the first hobbithole on a tall hilltop which looked out into the west. Sarehole he had called his home then, but it would have a different name before the end of his lifetime.

   In this isolated area Gondo had also discovered and dug the first large well within the Shire, anticipating how a great settlement might one day grow in this part of the land. It was only the bravest, the youngest, the most rebellious and, some might say, the most economically desperate of pioneers who followed him there, drawn by Gondo’s charisma and daring as well as their own hope of some different future. They named this area the Buckland³ in Gondo’s honor for, in the characteristic repurposing of names which seems to delight all hobbits, they referred to him now as “the Bold Buck”. From the central positioning of his earliest well they built a small town and surrounding homes which grew for nearly two decades in its quiet and relative isolation from other communities. It is unfortunate that this name “Buckland” was eventually changed and its history has been forgotten by most of its later inhabitants. But a very great town grew there and that became the home for a unique community of hobbits who for many generations maintained the spirit, if not the original name, of their adventurous founder.

   Gondo’s own property of Sarehole, and much of the other properties in the Buckland, were not registered in the earliest records of the Shire. These pioneers did not travel back to the Bree-land to stake their claims; they waited for the politics and bureaucracy of the Shire to come to them. If this was a practice which Gondo himself had fostered we do not know. But for many years the Buckland was a well established but entirely undocumented settlement of the Shire.

   Gondo’s early maps had shown the location of many other landmarks; the Green hill Country, the Woody End, two other rivers to the south and a large forested area which he named the Bindlewood to the far north. But in the first three years of hobbit migration there are no records of hobbits ever settling so far. We can see from the registered deeds that most of the new families set up their farms and businesses along the Great Road between the Bridgefields and the Far-stone. The town of Buckland remained the only settlement in an area that would eventually be called the West-farthing. It grew quite rapidly as well, for more and more young and bold bachelor hobbits came there, ambitiously building large homes in the green hillsides and hopeful of raising big families in a land which they could call their own. Gondo’s example had meant something to these young folk and, with the second year of Shire-reckoning, they came to Buckland in increasing numbers.

   While he had not yet fully committed to moving to the Shire, Twoody still lived back in the Bree-land during the first two years. With aid from Alaura, he had taken on most of the administrative duties of the expansion. He saw to the proper enrollment of deeds and the surveying of lands. The establishment of small towns also became part of his duties and he carefully advised new businessmen on where the best opportunities might be and where builders and excavators might be hired. This was quite a lot of work in those early days and he seldom had much time to think about his own desires for a future.

   Gondo was likewise busy. The building of his home had been going well and he certainly had no shortage of friends among the young Bucklanders to aid him in that task. But there were disputes to be settled among many of the new settlers in other towns and, not very much to his liking and quite unintentional within his new found position, he had proven to be good at calming such arguments. He found that many of his days were spent riding their pony Nob to numerous places in the Shire to advise the new settlers. Gondo had also proved himself to be quite good at organizing the hobbits and it was with his guidance that much of the early work of roads and fences, barns and mills, townwells and supply lines were accomplished. Throughout the first long summer and autumn of Shire-pioneering he was drawn into disputes and declarations, quasi-formal meetings and informal altercations; quite against his intentions he became a settler of arguments more than a settler of lands. He rode to wherever he was asked, suggested what he could, advised on the matters he knew, counseled for patience on matters which he did not and exercised an uncomfortable authority when it was required. But during all of this time Gondo thought mostly of the spring, when his life in the Shire might truly begin.

end of chapter four

Chapter End Notes

Notes

1)  This is another creation of my own, but it suggests that the Bridge Inn popular in Frodo’s day had, under another name, been the first inn of the Shire.

2)  “Norbourn is only mentioned in the detailed index J.R.R. Tolkien was preparing for The Lord of the Rings, but which was eventually left unfinished. In the map ‘A Part of the Shire’ an unnamed river flows from the north to the Bywater Pool. It might be Norbourn, though it is also possible that Norbourn flowed straight to Brandywine more in the north.” (Tolkien Gateway) But there is also mention that “the water” as Bilbo calls it in The Hobbit is another river coming down from the North Farthings; “The Shire-water” it was called originally but just “the Water” in Bilbo’s day. This is where the Old Mill was built that we see in Tolkien’s earliest drawings of the Shire.

3)  Some readers will be surprised to see the mention of Buckland here in the earliest days of the Shire. The Buckland which most of us may be thinking of, on the eastern side of the Brandywine river would, indeed, not be established for another 740 years or so. This earlier settlement, a creation of my own, will have ramifications within our story.