IN THE SHIRE-RECKONING by Diane Finnis-Robb  

| | |

Part One; Chapter Five "The Farthing Stone"

   ‘It’s too much, Gondo,’ Twoody had said. ‘Honestly tell me, how could hobbits, even if every hobbit in the Bree-land came forth to make a new home for themselves- which I very much doubt that they will of course- then how, tell me, few as we are, might we ever hold, develop and establish ourselves in this great a land?’

   ‘Well, because there are, I believe, many more of us than we know of, Twoody,’ Gondo had replied casually. ‘And the only thing that travels faster among hobbits than good news is bad news, I’d say. Bad news in foreign lands is what brought so many of us to the Bree-land in the first place, as you remember.

   ‘Now,’ Gondo continued, speaking with that casual and perfect frankness which other hobbits, including Twoody, found so hard to argue against, ‘what we have here is very, very good news and I believe that every hobbit in the north, facing bad news of their own, will come to hear of it much sooner than you might expect. Look how well those folks who’ve come up from the Greyflood have done over in Stock. And they’ve many more cousins and kinfolk coming up behind them from what I can hear.’

   This conversation between the two friends happened in the early winter of 1601 of the Third Age. This was in the month we now call December and recently designated as the end of Year One in the new Shire calendar. It was Twoody’s first foray into the new lands where Gondo had been a resident for some months, meeting and working alongside the other pioneers. Twoody had never thought of himself as anything like a pioneer but had agreed to accompany Gondo on an extended survey of the lands. They had stopped at some of the earliest settlements together, but most of the past eight weeks had seen the two friends tromping about the open lands, sleeping outdoors beside campfires and even hunting their own food. Twoody had very little experience “roughing it” in this way, but he could see that they stood in the middle of a land that was undeniably beautiful and filled with promise. The Great Road stretched out far before and behind them and, from their walks further west, Twoody had been able to see the peaks of tall white-capped mountains rising in the west. It was not noon yet when Gondo had brought him to the Far-stone which stood on a little hill near the Road-side below a grove of birch trees. If the Sun was glimmering on those distant peaks illuminating a mystery of white and purple sheets high above at the very edge of the world they could not see it from here. But together they had seen it not five days earlier. Twoody had never beheld a mountain before and had only his grandfather’s tales to describe them. It stirred his heart somehow, as if the very sight of it found within his chest some unrecognized and previously distant ache to wander. Gentle grasses had rolled over the hills before the two friends then. The Road, even-cut though not well-tended, rolled on and over those hills with an ease that seemed to invite Twoody toward travel.1 But Twoody’s cautious mind, very much in control of his incautious feet, told him to go no further. He was not, at this or any other stage of his life, as fond of travel as his friend Gondo was. But he could not deny that he felt its deep and unsettling urgings. And so, on his request, they had turned back from their view of the West to come here and discuss what should be done next.

   Gondo had made this survey trip of theirs very easy and enjoyable. Nob the pony, now a veteran in these new lands, walked along beside them carrying their packs and necessities. Gondo had also outfitted himself and his friend with two very fine walking sticks which he himself had carved.

   ‘I do not know what the wood is called,’ Gondo had told him, ‘but it grows in the older forested areas here in the south and west of the Shire. It is a fair tree in life, and some virtue seems to be in its limbs for finding and returning. I lost my way in this new land many times before I had cut my first crude staff of this wood and now it seems to guide me in my uncertain roving.’2

   As the two friends talked together then in the closing days of 1601 the possibilities of the Shire lay lustrous before them in a way that few other hobbits could grasp. Only Gondo himself had seen enough of the Shire to understand its size and knew that there was yet much to be seen and mapped out. But Twoody and Alaura had already registered deeds for more than six hundred settlers who had cautiously crossed the Brown river (as hobbits and Bree-folk had begun to call it then) to set up small encampments and stake their claims to farms and homes. Those Shirefolk were expanding very rapidly and all three of the friends knew that by the springtime, when the families came, there would be more hobbits here in this new land than anywhere else in the known world. It was agreed that some organization of these lands, along with more detailed maps, was becoming necessary, and Twoody, seeing it now for the first time, was discovering not just the beauty of the Shire but the true scale of the King’s Agreement which he and Gondo had negotiated. It was such a great gift that he had never really had the opportunity to consider the size of it. The hobbitfolk of the North had been given safe and open lands by the king and told that here they would have his protection; all that they needed to do in return was maintain the Road and make the land bountiful once more.

   Twoody remembered well the words of king Argeleb the Second as he and Gondo stood with him that last night in his garden under the stars. That place was built atop the walls of Norbury, the summit of a cliff face sculpted to stand like a long finger pointing west, its walls high above the surrounding countryside. Then, as a memory within memory, Twoody also recalled the first time he described those gardens to Alaura on the day they sat alone high on Bree-hill outside her father’s house.

 

   ‘The king’s garden, Alaura. “Arnorsant” he had called it in a language which some of his people speak at times.3

   ‘Oh, it is a high and mighty place, walled for war as all their works seem to be, but chiefly protected, as if all their hope lay in holding the defense of this place open to light and beauty no matter what else might come. Norbury- “Fornost” they call it- is more vast than you can imagine, a great walled fortress as some stories speak of but which most folks like us never see. This was the high garden of a high king, Alaura, grand and, while peaceful somehow, well, it was also sad and foreboding, I might say.

   ‘If Gondo and I were to walk it from one end to the other it might take more than an hour.4 Its width was not much more than four hundred paces and, tall as the King and his knights were, I imagined they could always see the edge of this precarious wonderland from anywhere they stood. At those edges were low walls and battlements, not so tall as to hide the view of the garden from the rest of the world. Below there were sheer cliffs a hundred feet high which no army could scale. Only the warming light of the westerning sun could reach that high and defensible place of beauty.

   ‘Oh, but it was a wonder. Great trees there were, for all of the garden’s narrowness and its height. It was the king himself who told us of the trees as we walked there, and he did so with the care a gardener might take in his own works. That seemed very strange and very comforting to me at the same time; the idea that a great Sea-king of such highness knew something of the history of even the common things which grew around him.

   ‘The trees and flowers had such beautiful names, Alaura, dream-sounding the words were and I wrote many of those names down so that I might tell them to you. I don’t know that I’ll say them just as the king did, for the language that the names come from is not our own, and I know for certain that I’ll never describe them rightly, but I will try if you won’t laugh at my ignorance.

   ‘“Nessamelda,5” is what the king called the great big conifers, and they lined the walkway and narrowed our view so that all entering the garden must first look directly west. They were tall and lean, rising to the height of ten or twelve hobbits, dark dense pines which smelled like rosemary grown to an impossible height. They cast great shadows along the lane and, as we were there at sunset, they filled the whole place with the light and smell of homefires. I could not say if they had a power in them for such things, but the smell of Nessamelda made me lonesome and aching for home.

   '“Laurinquë”6 and “Lairelossë”7 the king showed us as well, and I’m sure I’ve butchered their names horribly and lack any decent skill to describe them, Alaura, but I shall try. The first was a short tree with low-hanging pale yellow flowers, growing in big clusters, like exploding puffballs of delicate petals and shoots. All about the path came the second, “Lairelossë”, a yellow-flowered gorse bush they were, which, even in the day’s end shadows, seemed more brilliant than any flower I know of. I looked to the edges of the wall and there I saw what they called Seregon,8 a ground cover which spilled over the wall’s edge as if they dripped with the color of blood or sunset. Finally, beside each bench and meeting place in the king’s garden, there was planted the tree which the king called “Yavannamírë”9; “Jewel of Yavanna” that means, and it sounds more beautiful coming from the lips of those who know how to speak it. But more beautiful still is the tree itself. It grows all year long and bears a scarlet fruit like the most luscious apples any gardener might wish for.10

   ‘Alaura,’ Twoody had said then, shyly, ‘it is not my favorite garden in all the world, but I do wish you could have been there to see it with us.’

   ‘You will be left in peace,’ the king had told Gondo and Twoody on that evening as the sun set in his high garden at Fornost Erain, and Twoody remembered it now, memory within memory, as he stood with his friend in this wide new land. ‘And for as long as I and my line may grant it, you will be given our protection. We are a diminishing people of old Númenor and you, if I perceive it rightly, have some great future in these lands. If hope may indeed still be found in Middle-earth then, I believe, it should come from a better understanding of our future than dwelling upon our former glories and lost past.’

   Twoody looked out on the rolling hills of the new land and towards the distant mountains. He and Gondo had traveled for weeks making careful maps and copious notes for Alaura, still back in the Bree-land, that she might copy and explain to the other potential settlers. The trip would last another ten days and the two friends would have a wonderful time together; romping alone through the hillside and confiding in one another as they had done throughout their childhood. Apart from missing his own featherbed and a fireside mug of good ale, Twoody could not deny that he felt comfortable and at peace in the Shire in a way he had never expected.

   But the land was so vast. If the calculations that Twoody, Gondo and Alaura had made were correct it might be as much as 20,000 square miles.11 It would take many such trips to map so much territory. But how would hobbits ever manage to settle it all?

 

*****

 

   The true story regarding the discovery of this land is vague and seldom recounted even by the more scholarly hobbits of the Fourth Age. Twoody knew, just as Gondo and Alaura did, that Marcho and Blanco were unreliable reporters when at their best and, at their worst, quite apt to embellish their own deeds. The twins had taken their first foray into the new land, nine years before the signing of the King’s Agreement, and at that time only a very small portion of the land had been explored. It is true that the brothers had, rather bravely it should be said, crossed the great Stonebows bridge before any other hobbit. But it is also true that from the first they believed that they had come into the land of the Dwarves of which their father had spoken.

   Tales differ on the diplomatic methods and boldness those two heroic explorers displayed in their first journey. Some will say that they waited weeks before crossing the river, like patient and hesitant houseguests, hoping that the Dwarves would appear at the gates and politely welcome them. These same recorders of history will also say that the brothers hunted in the woods on the eastern side of the river during this time so that they might bring offerings for the people of its farther shore. They also say that each night for many weeks the brothers lit fires alongside the Road near to the Bridge’s foot hoping to draw the attention of the silent protectors of this new land; calling for entry from the unmanned garrison which they saw on the river’s other side. If these stories are true we cannot say, but those unfriendly histories certainly conflict with the later Shirefolk’s opinion of the courageous discoverers.

   Other historians and hobbit-gossipers would tell us of the haste and courage which the twins employed moving forward into the new land. How they saw the Bridge from afar and laughed at its defenses. Of how riding forth (whether on pony or wolf as some tell it) they crossed into the open and undefended lands, found it to be empty of challengers, and boldly claimed it for their own. With no flags to plant, it is said that the brothers blew long blasts on great horns and planted spears of warning to mark the conquered bridge as their own. There are many to this day who believe that only through such bold challenges was the new country seized for all courageous hobbits.12

   Whatever version of history one chooses to follow it is clear that Marcho and Blanco did eventually cross the Stonebows bridge without permission of any kind. And it is also known that they made their first camp in the old guard tower of the bridge, that same one which would be called the Bow’s Barrel some 375 years later when Tawarengil and his friends came there and were treated to an unexpected feast.13

   But no one ever came to the brothers in all the time they waited there and the land remained silent.

   After long days, and much deliberation, we know that Marcho and Blanco decided to go further. They followed the Road; for stories long before the memories of hobbits had called it “the Old Dwarf Road” and so, of course, it should only stand to reason that they might expect to find Dwarfish communities lying just beside it. That any hobbits of this time, including their own father Isengrim Tinyfoot, had any accurate image of a Dwarfish community seems quite unlikely, but the brothers looked to every rocky outcropping for some clue or secret door as old legends describe. They went further along the Road, expecting danger at every turn and finding nothing but green and fertile lands to either side and a seemingly endless path before them. From all they could see the land seemed silent, lush and unpeopled; a land of great potential.

   Whether the brothers themselves realized this potential is unknown to us through any later writings. Marcho and Blanco were the sons of a blacksmith and not a farmer after all, and they had become unlikely explorers who had previously lacked any notice for skills or traits other than their boisterousness and tomfoolery.

   While we lack any documentation of their deeds or their reasoning, it seems that after ten leagues of exploration, after encountering no one and finding no sign of anything other than emptiness, the brothers’ sense of adventure had quite finally been tapped. So there on a small hill above the Road, perhaps fearing the way forward or perhaps wanting to go back and to brag about their new discovery, they decided to set their mark.

   ‘The Far Stone,’ as the brothers called it, was laid as a border of their first exploration; the biggest, heaviest single stone that these two small hobbits and their ponies could move and place beside the great Road as evidence of just how far they had come. Thirty-six miles from the Stonebows bridge, it was a fairly unassuming single column-like boulder which stood three-quarters the height and twice the breadth of an average hobbit, placed there in the summer months of 1592 of the Third Age. While the stone grew to be of great importance to all Shire-hobbits in later years it was never very complex nor particularly lovely in its shape or color; just a tallish and unadorned marker on a long and lonely road.

   We know that six years later on a second expedition into these open lands Marcho and Blanco were accompanied and encouraged by the enterprising young Gondolpho Bucklestrap, and together they went further into the surrounding countryside. Gondo was many years younger than the twins at this time, but he knew how to read and write, had a keen hand for drawing and map-making, and a rare desire to see more of the world. Some folks say that the three traveled another seven leagues down the Great Road at this time, for the sight of the distant mountains had called to Gondo even in his youth. Others say they went less far west and instead explored those fertile regions to the south and north, their minds and conversations now filled with hope for profit rather than blind adventure. But it is well known, and later recounted by Alaura in her earliest editions of THE SHIRE-RECKONING, that the three of them traveled in those lands for more than a year and found no significant dangers and no folk, whether goblin, elf, dwarf, man or hobbit, tending the land and calling it their own.

   It should also be said that Twoody and Alaura knew the heart of their friend Gondo to be that of an explorer and so together the three had established the true purpose for this second expedition; to create a hobbit settlement of their own. How this notion first came into the minds of the three friends remains unknown; certainly Gondo’s restless need for discovery played a great part. It has also been suggested that Twoody’s older brother Childebrand, sensing a rare business opportunity, encouraged Gondo and the brothers to take this trip and even to later seek the King’s Agreement. Many others believe that the idea of forming a new nation of hobbits began solely in the mind of Alaura Fairheart who, even at such a young age, had always been a champion of personal liberties. In that first year of the Shire-reckoning hobbits had come to refer to Gondo and Twoody as the “townfathers” and even Alaura, who they all knew to play an equally important role, was referred to (albeit very loosely) in this same manner.

   In the earliest maps drawn in Gondo's quick and deliberate hand we see new and attractive features which guided the future settlers. He and the brothers had turned from the Road at the White Downs, choosing to search the rich farmlands to the north and south and thinking the Downs to be a very reasonable and natural border. In those early maps Gondo had recorded the location of the “Stonebows” and “the Marish”, “the Water” and the “North Moors”, the “White Downs” and the “Green Hill Country” all from their relative position to the Far-stone, making it seem the center of the land. And it was a version of this map, later refined with Alaura’s help, that Gondo and Twoody had taken north to show the king.

  What might have been discussed in the court of the king at Norbury is only known to the two hobbit ambassadors Thuedebald Swiftalk and Gondolpho Bucklestrap (for the brothers Marcho and Blanco, never fond of ‘the Big Folk’, were not present on this trip and it is said that their involvement with the establishment of the Shire became more ‘legendary’ and less ‘practical’ by this time). If there were any records of the conversations made by the king’s own scribes they did not survive the fall of Fornost Erain three-hundred and seventy-four years later. But the King’s Agreement surely allowed hobbits to freely settle into this part of the North and to order it as they saw fit under the king’s name. More surprising, the size of this land in that document was much greater than the hobbits had ever anticipated. The king had used the Far-stone as a center just as Gondo had proclaiming that the borders should stretch for twelve leagues in each direction from which it had been laid, making the land of the hobbits much greater than anyone had yet to imagine or thought explore.

   Though later histories make no mention of it, at the time of the Witch-king’s downfall (the Three Hundred and Seventy-fourth Year of Shire-reckoning) one could still clearly see the map and legend that was carved on this stone. For here it was that the townfathers Gondo and Twoody had first ordered the lands into what became known as ‘the Four Farthings’; all of which (at one time) held this stone as a boundary. The East-farthing, West-farthing, North-farthing and South-farthing14 were shown in their original design, believed to be carved in the hand of Gondolpho Boldbuck (as he was then called). And it is also recounted that below this map were the words; ‘By The Gift of Argeleb II, T.A. 1601, To His Friends. Shire Year 1.’15 It is generally agreed upon that this was written in the flowing script of Theudebald Swiftalk, later called Took after his death, and patriarch of the largest and most powerful family in the Shire. It was here that the two famous friends discussed all of their hopes and made their best plans for the future. But in two years time they would be parted and all of these hopeful dreams would be in doubt.

end of chapter five

Chapter End Notes

Notes

1)  This part came in with the revisions of early 2026. My whole restructuring of the Shire in accordance with better geographical references suggest that the Blue mountains could not be visible from the Farthing-stone and it would be better that way. So this version suggests that Twoody and Gondo had gone as far as the Chalk Hills in this expedition; not far enough to see the Elf Towers, but far enough to see the distant mountains.

2)  This is, of course, an echo of Faramir giving the walking sticks to Frodo and Sam in The Two Towers; difficult to try and quote while remaining oblique. The wood that Gondo does not know the name of is ‘lebethron’ on which there is “ a virtue of finding and returning”. This is my first use of the wood, but it will apply to the hobbit bowmen in later chapters of The Fall of Arnor.

3)  “Arnorsant” is a construction of my own; “Arnor” meaning “king’s land” and “sant” meaning “garden, enclosure” in Sindarin.

4)  As I write this on May 20th, 2023 my wife and I are in an apartment in New York City having just walked Central Park from one end to the other, a trip which takes, at my age, just over an hour.

5)  “Nessamelda” this plant may have been called in Agreleb’s day. An evergreen and fragrant tree which grew in the province of Nísimaldar in Númenor, where it was brought from Tol Eressëa by the Elves. The name apparently means 'beloved of Nessa' in Quenya.

6)  “Laurinquë”, a tree with “long-hanging clusters of yellow flowers” which grew in the province Hyarrostar in Númenor, where it was brought from Tol Eressëa by the Elves. The name is derived from Quenya “laurë” or golden.

7)  A yellow-flowered gorse bushes, “Lairelossë” also comes from Númenor.

8)  “Seregon” is a plant with deep red flowers that grew upon the summit of the hill of Amon Rûdh in Beleriand, with the result that the hill looked as if dripped with blood. The name can be translated from Sindarin as 'blood of stone'. Christopher Tolkien also stated that it resembled the real-world plant stonecrop.

9)  “Yavannamírë”; an evergreen and fragrant tree with globed and scarlet fruits that grew in the province of Nísimaldar in Númenor, where it was brought from Tol Eressëa by the Elves. The name can be translated from Quenya as 'jewel of Yavanna'.

10)  So very many of these descriptions of plants and trees come very directly from Tolkien Gateway. I cannot believe anyone who has been reading this so far has not encountered that fabulous resource and it seems ridiculous to keep citing it. Go there. If you’re bothering to read Tolkien fanfic that goes this deep you will find it to be the most amazing and abundant resource you might hope for.

11)  This is, of course, a correct calculation for the land first granted to the hobbits was roughly 20,000 square miles; fifty from east to west and roughly forty from north to south. Thanks, once again, to Tolkien Gateway for making this information so accessible.

12)  Hmmn. I find as I write about the “Founders”Marcho and Blanco I am increasingly interested in the manufacturing of nationalist myths; and certainly, writing from my own perspective as an American living in the early twenty-first century, that position is different from Tolkien’s own, an Englishman in the early and mid- twentieth. But our purposes are, I think, quite the same, for Tolkien despised nationalism as I do and often used hobbits as an example of the narrow-mindedness of his own countrymen. But I am, as an American, more interested in their “pioneer spirit” and the justification we make around this idea of “Manifest Destiny” which is, after all, our own American rebranding of European Colonialism. I write this now while I’m “in the text”, still feeling my way into the story. It will be interesting to see how it develops.

13)  If you are looking for the name “Tawarengil” on Tolkien Gateway you will not find it.This is a reference to one of the characters found in my own work, “The Fall of Arnor”, and places this story where I first began writing it; between Books II and III of that series.

14)  Maps of the four Farthings see quite a bit of creative energy in things like fanfic and gaming, so they are not always clear in Tolkien’s legendarium. The one I am using, flawed though it may be, is the one I’ve decided to go with for locating the various settlements. But it seems logical to me that some earlier version existed in which the Farthing-stone was the convenient corner of all four Farthings and this had somehow changed by the War of the Ring.

15)  Argeleb II was the king of Arthedain in 1601 and made the gift to the hobbits, but it isn’t quite clear to me if he thought of them as subjects nor if the hobbits saw him as their own king rather than the king of the Big Folk. This idea goes a long way into how the Shirefolk think of their responsibilities to his heir with the coming war in 1975 of the Third Age and will, of course, be explored further in these writings.

Table of Contents | Leave a Comment