Q: What Is the Earliest Date Hobbits Could Have Settled in the Vales of Anduin?
ANSWER: As I have phrased this question it presupposes that had there been Hobbits living in the Vales of Anduin (perhaps near the Gladden Fields) during the Second Age, someone other than Hobbits would have noticed them and recorded it. In my article, “Who Created the Hobbits?”, I wrote:
… Ilúvatar could just as easily have introduced Hobbits to Arda after the First Age. He has clear authorial license to do so without upsetting Tolkien’s description of the Universe.
Although I was pointing out a plausible possibility, I was not speculating that the Hobbits were created after the First Age. And yet, such speculation would work well for someone writing fan fiction or a role-playing adventure. It keeps things neat, so to speak.
My article inspired someone to submit the following question in August 2017:
I was reading your article about when and where Hobbits were created etc. It seems to me regarding Hobbits in the Anduin Vale, whether they were created there by Eru directly or arrived from elsewhere, they could not have been there until a good while after the War of the Last Alliance. Surely the Ents and Entwives would have noticed them, and Treebeard known about them? And when the Ents searched for the Entwives, it is hard to imagine an entire race of people escaping their notice, especially in the nearby Anduin Vale; it seems more likely the Hobbits only appeared in the Vale after the Ents had given up the search for the Entwives and pretty much withdrawn behind the borders of the Entwood for good [or at least until the attack on Isengard]. Since we know when the Hobbits do historically appear in the Vale, this might provide a clue as to how long the search for the Entwives lasted too.
Maybe. Maybe not. There is, to my knowledge, no Tolkien text that places Hobbits anywhere in Middle-earth prior to the Third Age. Hence, all we can do is speculate on where and when they arrived.
But they could certainly have dwelt in or near the Vales of Anduin prior to and during the War of the Last Alliance. Either the Men would have ignored them or been unaware of them. One need not assume these earlier Hobbits existed in any great numbers. They could have been limited to a small population for thousands of years until they crossed the Misty Mountains and came into contact with the Dunedain, whose realms (even in the north) were quite powerful compared to the tribes of Northmen living in the east.
I think, however, that had there been Hobbits dwelling in the Vales around the middle of the Second Age they would have been caught up in the War of the Elves and Sauron. After all, the essay “Of Dwarves and Men” says that the Northmen who lived there in the first half of the Second Age were all but destroyed during the war, and the survivors were driven into the deep woods and mountains. And in any event I think we can rule out any Hobbits living alongside those early Northmen even as far east as the Carnen during the first half of the Second Age. They would have been sheltered by the strong Northman tribes until the war, and thus could have grown in numbers. A sizable population would be hard to overlook. Their numbers must have been relatively few in their earliest prehistory.
Oropher’s people still dwelt in southern Greenwood during the latter half of the Second age, and they maintained communication with Amdir (aka Malgalad) in Lothlorien up until the War of the Last Alliance. It seems unlikely to me that there could have been Hobbits living in the Vales without the Elves knowing about them. In which case, if they did settle there at that time, why didn’t anyone remember them? Even so, they would have been relatively safe after the Downfall of Numenor. This was the period when Gil-Galad’s power extended toward the east due to the disruption of Sauron’s empire. The Vales of Anduin may have been relatively safe for 100 years or longer. And if Hobbits had settled there during the days of peace, they might have fled when Gil-galad and Elendil led their great army south.
On the other hand, Sauron reasserted control over the lands south of the Greenwood by the time of the war. The Brown Lands, where the Entwives lived, were the site of the first great battle between Gil-Galad/Elendil and Sauron. It’s hard to imagine primitive Hobbit clans wanting to live in the vicinity. In fact, the Entwives could have been enslaved or before Sauron went to Numenor. We know that Tolkien says warfare never wholly ceased between Sauron and the Elves after the end of the first great war in the middle of the Second Age. If the Entwives were already enslaved at the time of the Last Alliance, they might have been incapable of fleeing (which could explain why they might have died out at that time).
If the Ents did not begin their great search until after Isildur died then I think that chapter in their history would have ended prior to the arrival of the Easterlings, who settled near southern Greenwood in the 5th Century (Third Age).
Given the above assumption, we must then ask if the Hobbits could have arrived prior to the Easterlings or perhaps in advance of their own encroachment. Why did the Hobbits migrate west if they had survived for uncounted years somewhere in the distant east? Clearly, the eastern lands must have changed in some way.
I don’t think the Hobbits would have arrived after the Easterlings began attacking Gondor. The Easterlings would have been very numerous and powerful by that time. The first Easterling attacks occurred in Third Age year 490. If we allow the Ents about 100 years to learn about the Entwives’ loss and conduct their great search (I suspect it would have required only a few years’ searching before they gave up), there is a window of approximately 390 years in which the Hobbits could have arrived in the Vales of Anduin. If we assume they were fleeing the encroachments of Easterlings, then that would place their earliest known migration sometime in the 400s, perhaps as late as 450-490.
The Ents could have conducted their search for the Entwives all the way up to that time.
As for the Entwives, if they were indeed all wiped out in the Second Age, then one can argue that maybe they did know about the Hobbits. The secret would have died with them. For the sake of writing fan fiction or role-playing adventures, however, one could speculate that the Entwives knew about the Hobbits, that some of them survived the War of the Last Alliance, and that they withdrew into hiding while maintaining some sort of relationship with the Hobbits (unbeknownst to the Hobbits). That could explain the “walking tree” reference in “The Shadow of the Past” (although I’ve always been of the opinion this was just an undeveloped idea Tolkien left in the story).
More than one reader has asked me if it’s possible the Entwives somehow made it to the Shire. I don’t have any textual support for such a thesis. The Shire wasn’t founded until Third Age year 1600, hundreds of years after the Hobbits entered Eriador. How could the Entwives have followed the Hobbits and remained hidden for all those centuries while the Dunedain fought with Angmar? Well, they looked like trees, but still. Secretive Entwives seems a bit of a stretch to me (at least as far as Tolkien’s story-telling is concerned).
My best guess is that the Hobbits probably did not arrive in the Vales of Anduin prior to Third Age year 400. I don’t see any reason why they should have arrived sooner. But Tolkien had his own ideas. My early extrapolations about the history of the Northmen were proven completely wrong by Christopher Tolkien’s subsequent publication of Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth and The Peoples of Middle-earth. The plain truth is that we just don’t have enough clues to solve these puzzles. They may very well have been connected in Tolkien’s thought, but if he ever wrote down such a connection I have not heard of such a text from anyone.
See Also
When Did Hobbits become Divided into Fallohides, Stoors, and Harfoots?
Did Hobbits Ever Live in Tribes?
Where Did Hobbits Live in the First Age?
Did Hobbits Live by the Anduin?
Where Do Hobbits Live in Middle-earth?
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There is time enough for the entwives, what remnant survived the conflicts in the Wild, to have fled west and north. They might have already been there. The appendices mention that the king had numerous farms and gardens in the region that would become the Shire. Perhaps the entwives were part of the reason for their development.
I remember reading, somewhere, that Tolkien once said that Hobbits are “human”, in that they are very closely related to Men, more so than even the Elves.
If so, they may not have existed from the beginning. There is a present-day medical condition called “Laron’s syndrome”. The most obvious result is dwarfism, but unlike most dwarfisms, the “victims” are often quite healthy. To quote one report, “In 2011, it was reported that people with this syndrome in the Ecuadorian villages are resistant to cancer and diabetes and are somewhat protected against aging.”
It is carried by a recessive gene, so both parents have to have the gene, and is found in a few European populations. The Ecuadorians seem to have gotten the gene from Europe. If this gene developed in the 2nd or 3rd ages, a relatively isolated population could have allowed it to become common enough that “victims” would selectively mate with each other, perpetuating the condition, and giving rise to a new “Race”.
Those with condition today are still able to mate, and have healthy offspring, with “normal” humans, which could also explain the lack of a Hobbit population today. As conditions changed, they bred back into the general population, leaving the gene as a recessive feature in a few areas of the world.
I imagine the Hobbits to have been semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes for most of their existence. That’s a much easier way to evade notice and conflict than fencing and tilling fields. Déagol and Sméagol were fishing on that fateful day, not farming. Hunter-gatherer Hobbits would have had more in common with Ents than with Entwives, The Hobbits of the Shire and the Entwives missed each other by an entire Age of Middle-earth.
The Vales of Anduin run nearly the length of the Misty Mountains. The Hobbits, much like the ancestors of the Rohirrim, could have moved repeatedly between the north and south. The also might have faded into Greenwood the Great or made their way both west and east around the northern and southern reaches of the Wood, dodging conflict at every move. They might have lived west of the mountains in the First Age or remained in the far East, feeling fortunate that so many of the Big Folk had moved away to the West…
I’m currently engaged in an online discussion of “settlement” as it applies to the history of my community. This topic fits in nicely. My town’s commonly accepted date of settlement is based on the first recorded land deed, rather than Carbon-14 dating of artifacts unearthed in the region, or annals of events that happened on the other side of current municipal borders. Essentially, the town chose the oldest verifiable fact that could be tied to modern municipal coordinates. In that sense, unless someone unearths another scrap of paper from the Tolkien archive, this, like many other questions discussed in this forum, will never be settled.
Early Third Age seems to be the most likely period, any earlier date is problematic. First, we know that the Last Alliance had passed through many places in Vales of Anduin and that in the Disaster of Lis (where there would be
an main Hobbit colony in the future) we don’t have the mention of Hobbits or small people at all. An event of such great historical importance would have an account of all the details (from meetings, alliances to names of involved)
Unless of course they were very few and irrelevant but this didn’t explain the Elves and Dunedains not knowing Hobbits prior to the founding of the Shire. In Unfinished Tales it is said that Arnor and Gondor shared information about immigrations of peoples by their lands, given the complete absence of records even from the Elves (who lived in Amon Lanc at the time) this lead us to believe that Hobbits did not live in the Anduin before the Third Age, or if they did, they were very fews and far from the records, more like the Nibin Noegs in Beleriand.
On the origins, they probably existed long before that, probably as primitive peoples, is what Tolkien says.
”The beginning of Hobbits lies far back in the Elder Days that are now lost and forgotten. Only the Elves still preserve any records of that vanished time, and their traditions are concerned almost entirely with their own history, in which Men appear seldom and Hobbits are not mentioned at all. Yet it is clear that Hobbits had, in fact, lived quietly in Middle-earth for many long years before other folk became even aware of them. And the world being after all full of strange creatures beyond count, these little people seemed of very little importance. But in the days of Bilbo, and of Frodo his heir, they suddenly became, by no wish of their own, both important and renowned, and troubled the counsels of the Wise and the Great.”