Q: Why Does Tolkien Call the Hobbits’ Land the Shire in The Lord of the Rings?
ANSWER: The name of the Shire in The Lord of the Rings is one of the most mis-understood names in Tolkien’s lexicon. Many readers have suggested that J.R.R. Tolkien was using “Shire” to denote some sort of special relationship to England — i.e., they believe that Tolkien was hinting that the Shire was supposed to be identified with modern England.
There is some truth to this proposal, but only in a limited sense. That is, the Shire is not intended to be geographically or politically associated with England in a literal sense. Rather, it is presented to the reader in terms that would have been familiar to someone who was native to England. While this intention might seem like the clenching proof one needs to show that the Shire must be England, Tolkien ruled out that possibility in the notes he prepared for translators of The Lord of the Rings.
In “Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings” Tolkien wrote:
It is desirable that the translator should read Appendix F in Volume III of The Lord of the Rings and follow the theory there set out. In the original text English represents the Common Speech of the supposed period. Names that are given in modern English therefore represent names in the Common Speech, often but not always being translations of older names in other languages, especially Sindarin (Grey-elven). The language of translation now replaces English as the equivalent of the Common Speech; the names in English form should therefore be translated into the other language according to their meaning (as closely as possible).
In other words, translators were instructed to make the geography of The Lord of the Rings familiar to readers in other languages. Hence, the Shire would have to be identified with some region OTHER than England in a properly translated version of the story. To make his point more clear, Tolkien wrote:
A further difficulty arises in some cases. Names (of places and persons) occur, especially in the Shire, which are not ‘meaningless’, but are English in form (that is, in theory the author’s translation of Common Speech names), containing elements that are in the current language obsolete or dialectal, or are worn-down and obscured in form. (See Appendix F.) From the author’s point of view it is desirable that translators should have some knowledge of the nomenclature of persons and places in the languages used in translation, and of words that occur in them that are obsolete in the current forms of those languages, or only preserved locally. The notes I offer are intended to assist a translator in distinguishing ‘inventions’, made of elements current in modern English, such as Rivendell, Snow-mane, from actual names in use in England, independently of this story, and therefore elements in the modern English language that it is desirable to match by equivalents in the language of translation, with regard to their original meaning, and also where feasible with regard to their archaic or altered form. I have sometimes referred to old, obsolescent, or dialectal words in the Scandinavian and German languages which might possibly be used as the equivalents of similar elements in the English names found in the text. I hope that these references may be sometimes found helpful, without suggesting that I claim any competence in these modern languages beyond an interest in their early history.
So while this document presents the discriminating reader with what we might call a Theory of Literary Transmogrification for Translations, there is still another element or layer to Tolkien’s use of “shire”.
The word shire is very ancient and is used to denote a district or region that has its own special administration. According to the Online Etymological Dictionary linguists have proposed a Proto-Germanic asterisk-word, *skizo, as an ancient root for “shire”. In an early draft for the appendix on languages to The Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien wrote:
$41. The nomenclature of the Hobbits themselves and of the places in which they lived has, nonetheless, presented some obstacles to the satisfactory carrying out of this process of translation. Their place-names, being (in the Shire especially) almost all originally of C.S. form, have proved least difficult. I have converted them into as nearly similar English terms as I could find, using the elements found in English place-names that seemed suitable both in sense and in period: that is in being still current (like hill), or slightly altered or reduced from current words (like ton beside town), or no longer found outside place names (like wich, bold, bottle). The Shire seems to me very adequately to translate the Hobbit Suza-t, since this word was now only used by them with reference to their country, though originally it had meant ‘a sphere of occupation (as of the land claimed by a family or clan), of office, or business’. In Gondor the word suza was still applied to the divisions of the realm, such as Anorien, Ithilien, Lebennin, for which in Noldorin the word lhann was used. Similarly farthing has been used for the four divisions of the Shire, because the Hobbit word tharni was an old word for ‘quarter’ seldom used in ordinary language, where the word for ‘quarter’ was tharantin ‘fourth part’. In Gondor tharni was used for a silver coin, the fourth part of the castar (in Noldorin the canath or fourth part of the mirian).20
This text predates some of the changes Tolkien introduced into his language names. Where he writes “Noldorin”, for example, the published Lord of the Rings would instead use “Sindarin”. But the identification of suza with the word “fiefs” (which Tolkien used to describe the various regions of Gondor in the published narrative) was dropped from the published version of this text. Nonetheless, Tolkien’s explanation here is still relevant and necessary to understand the story, for there is a rather obscure passage which is only fully understood in the light of this passage. When Gandalf is explaining his failure to meet Frodo at the Council of Elrond, he recites the following exchange he had with Radagast:
` “Gandalf! ” he cried. “I was seeking you. But I am a stranger in these parts. All I knew was that you might be found in a wild region with the uncouth name of Shire.”
‘”Your information was correct,” I said. “But do not put it that way, if you meet any of the inhabitants. You are near the borders of the Shire now. And what do you want with me? It must be pressing. You were never a traveller, unless driven by great need.”
Why would Radagast think “Shire” is an uncouth name? In other words, why would the name of “Shire” for a specific country seem to lack sophistication to someone like Radagast? It would only seem so if the word was in fact a rather common name.
And this would also explain Sauron’s inability to figure out where Bilbo’s country was. For the name “Shire” and Tolkien’s identification of suza with both “Shire” and “fief” means that Sauron would have been unable to determine from the name of Bilbo’s land where it should have existed. There were, in fact, MANY shires scattered across western Middle-earth, perhaps throughout Middle-earth wherever Adunaic had had an impact on local languages.
It is unfortunate that Tolkien did not provide the reader with more clues to the subtlety of the Shire’s name. Clearly in light of this knowledge we can see that in the Hobbits’ colloquial usage they had become accustomed to referring to “our shire” as “THE Shire” simply because — in the wake of Arnor’s fall in Third Age year 1974 — there were no other shires in their vicinity such that they needed to distinguish their own from them. By the time Bilbo met Gollum the Hobbits of the Shire only knew of one Shire, their Shire.
This intuitive analysis of Tolkien’s idiom may also explain one of the subtleties in Frodo’s conversation with Gildor Inglorion in “Three’s Company”:
‘I cannot imagine what information could be more terrifying than your hints and warnings,’ exclaimed Frodo. ‘I knew that danger lay ahead, of course; but I did not expect to meet it in our own Shire. Can’t a hobbit walk from the Water to the River in peace?’
‘But it is not your own Shire,’ said Gildor. ‘Others dwelt here before hobbits were; and others will dwell here again when hobbits are no more. The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out.’
Gildor understood that the Shire was simply a district that was at that time in the care and administration of the Hobbits. To his elvish point of view, mortal peoples came and went but the countries continued in one fashion or another.
Tolkien alluded to this point of view in Letter No. 131, in which he outlined and explained the entire cycle from Silmarillion to Lord of the Rings for Collins editor Milton Waldman:
Their chief settlement, where all the inhabitants are hobbits, and where an ordered, civilised, if simple and rural life is maintained, is the Shire, originally the farmlands and forests of the royal demesne of Arnor, granted as a fief: but the ‘King’, author of laws, has long vanished save in memory before we hear much of the Shire. It is in the year 1341 of the Shire (or 2941 of the Third Age: that is in its last century) that Bilbo – The Hobbit and hero of that tale – starts on his ‘adventure’.
Demesne is a curious word for Tolkien to use for it is, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, an Anglo-French word; however, he was not using demesne within the lexicon of the narrative but rather simply to explain to Waldman — a well-read man of sophisticated education and experience — what the relationship of the Shire was to the Kings of Arnor/Arthedain.
In other words, when Argeleb II granted the Shire to the Hobbits, he was exercising his personal authority over the region. Tolkien describes the event in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings:
…it was in the one thousand six hundred and first year of the Third Age that the Fallohide brothers, Marcho and Blanco, set out from Bree; and having obtained permission from the high king at Fornost, they crossed the brown river Baranduin with a great following of Hobbits. They passed over the Bridge of Stonebows, that had been built in the days of the power of the North Kingdom, and they took ail the land beyond to dwell in, between the river and the Far Downs. All that was demanded of them was that they should keep the Great Bridge in repair, and all other bridges and roads, speed the king’s messengers, and acknowledge his lordship.
The entry for the year 1601 in “The Tale of Years” simply reads: “Many Periannath migrate from Bree, and are granted land beyond Baranduin by Argeleb II.” The land grant had clear boundaries that obviously predated the migration event itself. The Shire in fact abuts the Hills of Evendim, in which Elendil had built the royal city of Annúminas on the southern shore of Lake Evendim. As Arnor’s people dwindled and the kings consolidated their power at Fornost Erain (100 miles north of Bree) it seems logical to assume that the region that became the Hobbits’ Shire must have declined in both importance and population. Hence, Argeleb II had no reason to hold it back when the Hobbits of Bree needed more land. His realm would have been considerably strengthened by the grant.
It is easy to assume that there must have been several shires in Arnor originally. These shires would have been spread across Eriador and they gradually ceased to exist as Rhudaur and Cardolan seceded from Arnor and then were destroyed through the wars with Angmar. Their former populations dwindled and moved on. The administrative functions simply ended. After 1973 Bree might have been the only other surviving shire of Arnor, but through local custom and tradition the Bree-folk stopped referring to whatever shire they had once belonged to. The Hobbits were more conservative and less ready to forget how they had arrived in the land. In my essay “Of Thegns and Kings and Rangers and Things” I wrote the following argument concerning the mechanism for preservation of Arnor’s royal authority after the kingdom was destroyed by Angmar:
That is, Aranarth seems to have realized that if he simply abandoned Eriador, his descendants would never have the legal authority to re-establish the Kingdom of Arnor. But if at least some of the services of the Kingdom of Arnor were maintained by the Dunedain, then they would have the legal authority to re-establish their realm. The local populations, protected by the Dunedain, would have no reason to oppose the restoration of royal authority. It may even be that Aranarth consulted with Tharbad, the Shire, and Bree (and any other surviving communities) and shared his plan with them. And then, a thousand years later, people had simply forgotten the whole deal, except for the Dunedain.
…
So, in essence, Aranarth’s legal contrivances had prepared the way for Aragorn. Aranarth couldn’t restore the kingdom of Arnor. He had too few people to do that. But he preserved the royal authority of the Kings of Arnor through his title Lord of the Dunedain (in “The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen”, Aragorn introduced himself as “Aragorn, Arathorn’s son, Isildur’s Heir, Lord of the Dunedain”). And Aranarth also took the title Chieftain of the Dunedain, which may have denoted a diminution in the status of the Dunedain of Arnor. But it seems possible that the title was in fact a self-appointed military rank.
By extension, one must ask if the title, or rank, of chieftain inducted all the Dunedain (including women and children) into a formal military order. That is not really necessary. Instead, Aranarth became their captain in war, and his descendants inherited the office. But the Rangers were probably not the principal military force of the Dunedain. That is not to say that the Dunedain maintained a standing army. Rather, it may be that they initiated the custom of maintaining a muster, and the chieftain was the captain of the muster. The Shire-folk appointed their Thain “to hold the authority of the king that was gone”.
It’s a curious expression to use for a hereditary leader who was replacing a king, but the word thain appears to be a derivative of thane, from Anglo-Saxon thegn. A thane was “a freeman granted land by the king in return for military service in Anglo-Saxon England”. Or, a thane was “a dignitary under the Anglo-Saxons and Danes in England. Of these there were two orders, the king’s thanes, who attended the kings in their courts and held lands immediately of them, and the ordinary thanes, who were lords of manors and who had particular jurisdiction within their limits. After the Conquest, this title was disused, and baron took its place.” (Cf. http://www.theenglishdictionary.org/definition/baron).
The Shire’s Thainship therefore established a hereditary military office with some civil duties. “The Thain was the master of the Shire-moot, and captain of the Shire-muster and the Hobbitry-in-arms,” Tolkien notes in the Prologue. A moot was “an ancient English meeting, especially a representative meeting of the freemen of a shire”. Tolkien used the word moot in other ways, such as in the Entmoot and the Folkmoot of Brethil (the latter term is used only in reference to a meeting of the Folk of Haleth in “The Wanderings of Hurin”, published in The War of the Jewels).
So, instead of appropriating the royal authority for themselves the Shire chieftains (most likely the clan or family leaders) acted to preserve the royal authority. They expected, or hoped for, the return of the king. Aranarth was the rightful king, and the Thain was elected in 1979, four years after Aranarth took the title of Chieftain of the Dunedain. The Thainship must therefore have been appointed to the Shire-folk by Aranarth. In essence, he established a feudal relationship with them. They continued to recognize his royal authority, but they also enacted a practical measure for their own defense, which the Dunedain were no longer able to provide for directly.
“The Shire” is thus a word to which Tolkien attached some subtlety, perhaps not as much as I have supposed here — but the complexities of his philosophical musings in numerous notes and essays support the thesis that he may have given considerable thought to the legal processes that might have provided and justified the restoration of regal authority under the House of Elendil at the end of the Third Age. The name of the Shire may be part of the complex thinking. Of course, Tolkien himself was cautious about confusing applicability with intention — a fallacy that readers often fall into. The word “shire” is used in the very earliest versions of the story, years before Tolkien had given much thought to the various ancient laws and traditions that supposedly governed Arnor and Gondor. In The Return of the Shadow Christopher Tolkien notes:
Where in the first and second versions it is said that some of the hobbits at the party came from ‘the other side of the shire’, it is now said that some of them ‘did not even live in that county’, changed to ‘in that Shire’, and ‘in that Shire’ was retained in the fourth version. The use of ‘that’ rather than ‘the’ suggests that the later use (cf. the Prologue to LR, p. 14: ‘The Hobbits named it the Shire, as the region of the authority of their Thain’) was only in the process of emergence.
The divisions of the Hobbits’ country here may be equivalent to the Farthings, which were also somewhat slow to emerge:
It was in this passage that the Four Farthings of the Shire were first devised, as the wording shows: ‘They were not very different from the other hobbits of the Four Farthings (North, West, South, and East), as the quarters of the Shire were called.’ Here too occur for the first time the names Buck Hill and the High Hay – but Haysend goes back to the original version, p. 100. The great hedge is still ‘something over forty miles from end to end.'(3) In answer to Bingo’s question ‘Can horses cross the river?’ Merry answers: ‘They can go fifteen miles to Brandywine Bridge’, with ’20?’ pencilled over ‘fifteen’. In FR the High Hay is ‘well over twenty miles from end to end’, yet Merry still says: ‘They can go twenty miles north to Brandywine Bridge.’ Barbara Strachey (Journeys of Frodo, Map 6) points out this difficulty, and assumes that Merry ‘meant 20 miles in all – 10 miles north to the Bridge and 10 miles south on the other side’; but this is to strain the language: Merry did not mean that. It is in fact an error which my father never observed: when the length of Buckland from north to south was reduced, Merry’s estimate of the distance from the Bridge to the Ferry should have been changed commensurately.’
I think that what these and other passages suggest is that Tolkien experimented with various words for denoting administrative regions. He liked the word “shire” undoubtedly because of its ancient Anglo-Saxon roots but he searched for what seemed an appropriate use for the word. Hence, I submit that my extravagant extrapolations — which have been ridiculed by some people as “utter crap” and “complete speculation” — are not quite so far off the map as they may seem at first glance, even though I cannot show that this is really what Tolkien intended at any point in his thinking about the legal structures and traditions of Middle-earth. Nonetheless, he clearly pondered these kinds of things and returned to them over time to refine his usage and the contexts for his uses of certain words.
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