Hobbits of Middle-earth — Harfoots, Stoors, Fallohides and the Shire

Quick Answer: Hobbits are a small, long-lived people of Middle-earth, about half the height of Men, who settled the Shire in Third Age 1601. Tolkien divides them into three breeds: Harfoots (smallest, hill-dwelling, the most numerous), Stoors (heavier, riverside folk, boat-users) and Fallohides (taller, fair, woodland friends of the Elves). They speak Westron, the Common Speech. The Elves call them Periannath, "the Halflings" (singular perian), and that Sindarin word is the one Gondor uses for Pippin.

Of all the peoples in Tolkien's legendarium, Hobbits are the ones he invented first and explained last. The Hobbit (1937) introduced them with almost no history at all. Only in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings, "Concerning Hobbits", and in the Appendices did Tolkien give them a past: where they came from, how they split into breeds, how they won a country of their own, and what language they actually spoke. This guide gathers that material in one place and marks clearly what comes from the books and what comes only from the films.

This post is part of our series on the peoples of Tolkien's world. For the full map, start with the Races of Middle-earth complete guide.

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Who Hobbits Are

Tolkien describes Hobbits as a little people, usually between two and four feet tall by the measure of the Prologue, shorter than Dwarves and without their beards (with an exception among the Stoors, covered below). They have curly brown hair, leathery soles that make shoes unnecessary for most of them, and nimble brown fingers. They dress in bright colours, especially yellow and green, and they eat six meals a day when they can get them.

The Prologue stresses that Hobbits are an unobtrusive people. They avoid the "Big Folk", move quietly, and can vanish into hedges when large clumsy feet approach. That habit later explains why the Shire was almost unknown in the wider world, and why Sauron gave it so little thought until Gollum named it under torment (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book I, chapter 2).

Two other features matter for the story. First, Hobbits live a long time by their own reckoning: they come of age at thirty-three, and a hundred is a respectable age (Bilbo's 111th birthday is remarkable precisely because it is so high). Second, Tolkien insists that Hobbits are related to Men. In the Prologue he writes that they are relatives of Men, "far nearer to us than to Elves or even than to Dwarves", although their exact origin was already forgotten in the Third Age. They are not a separate creation like the Dwarves, and they are not Elves.

Tolkien himself enjoyed the comparison. In a letter of 1958 (Letters, no. 213) he listed his own hobbitish habits, from plain food to ornamental waistcoats, and joked that he was a hobbit in everything but size.

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The Three Breeds: Harfoots, Stoors and Fallohides

The Prologue says that by the time Hobbits first appear in the records of other peoples they were already divided into three somewhat different breeds. The differences were small and tended to blur after they settled together in the Shire, but they explain a great deal about individual families in the books.

Harfoots

The Harfoots were browner of skin, smaller and shorter, and beardless and bootless. Their hands and feet were neat and nimble, and they preferred highlands and hillsides. They were the most normal and representative variety of Hobbit, in Tolkien's words, and by far the most numerous.

Two details stand out. The Harfoots had the longest friendship with Dwarves, because in the early days they lived in the foothills of the mountains and traded with them. And they kept longest to the ancestral habit of living in holes and tunnels, which Hobbits call smials. The classic hobbit-hole of Bag End belongs to this tradition, though by Bilbo's time the Bagginses were thoroughly mixed.

Stoors

The Stoors were broader and heavier in build, with larger hands and feet. They preferred flat lands and riversides, and they were the only Hobbits who used boats, swam, or wore boots in muddy weather. Many Stoors could grow a little beard, which no Harfoot or Fallohide could.

The Stoors were the last to leave the lands by the Great River. Some lingered long near the Gladden Fields, and The Fellowship of the Ring (Book I, chapter 2) says that Sméagol came from a family of a Stoorish kind living by the Anduin. Gollum is, in other words, a Hobbit of sorts, which is why Gandalf finds his riddles and his memories so close to Bilbo's. If you want to see that kinship played out, our Hobbit riddle game explained walks through the contest in the dark under the Misty Mountains.

In the Shire, the Stoorish strain was strongest in the Eastfarthing and in Buckland, among the families along the Brandywine. That is why the Brandybucks are the only Shire hobbits at ease with boats and why Frodo's parents could drown in a boating accident on the river, a fact other hobbits found deeply suspicious.

Fallohides

The Fallohides were fairer of skin and hair, taller and slimmer than the others. They loved trees and woodlands, preferred hunting to tilling, and were more skilled in language and song than in handicraft. Most importantly, they had long been friendly with Elves.

The Fallohides were fewer than the other two breeds, but they were bolder and more adventurous, and the Prologue says they were often found as leaders or chieftains among Harfoots and Stoors. Even in the late Third Age a strong Fallohide strain could be noticed among the greater families, such as the Tooks and the Masters of Buckland. That inheritance helps explain why the hobbits who go out into the wide world, Bilbo with his Took mother, Frodo, Merry and Pippin, all come from these families.

A quick comparison

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From the Vales of Anduin to the Shire

The westward wanderings

According to the Prologue, the earliest home of the Hobbits that anyone remembered lay in the upper Vales of Anduin, between the eaves of Greenwood the Great (later Mirkwood) and the Misty Mountains. Why they left is uncertain. The Prologue mentions the growing numbers of Men and a shadow falling on the Greenwood, which we now know was the Necromancer settling at Dol Guldur.

The migration came in waves during the Third Age, as Appendix B records. The Harfoots crossed the Misty Mountains first, around Third Age 1050, and wandered into Eriador. The Fallohides came about a century later by the passes north of Rivendell, and the Stoors crossed by the Redhorn Pass and moved down into the Angle between the Hoarwell and the Loudwater, and later into Dunland. Many Hobbits settled around Bree, which is why the Bree-land still had hobbit families living side by side with Men at the time of the War of the Ring.

The founding of the Shire

In the year Third Age 1601, two Fallohide brothers, Marcho and Blanco, led a large following of Hobbits across the Brandywine River from Bree. They had permission from the King at Fornost, Argeleb II of Arthedain, to settle the fertile land between the river and the Far Downs. In return they promised to keep the Bridge of Stonebows in repair, speed the King's messengers, and acknowledge his lordship.

The Hobbits made that year Year 1 of their own calendar, the Shire Reckoning. To convert, add 1600 to a Shire year and you get the Third Age year. Bilbo's farewell party, for example, takes place in S.R. 1401, which is T.A. 3001.

The Brandywine also carries an Elvish name. Its Sindarin form is Baranduin, and the Prologue notes that the Hobbits turned it into Branda-nîn, "border-water", and then, as a joke, Bralda-hîm, "heady ale". It is a small, lovely example of how Hobbits remade the Elvish landscape in their own homely terms.

How the Shire was governed

The Shire hardly had a government. When the last king fell at Fornost in T.A. 1974, the Hobbits chose a Thain to hold the king's authority. The first Thain was Bucca of the Marish, and later the title passed to the Old Took's family. The only real elected official was the Mayor of Michel Delving, who presided at banquets and served as Postmaster and First Shirriff. The Shire was divided into four Farthings, North, South, East and West, with Buckland and later the Westmarch added on.

Hobbit history in brief

The Shire was not entirely peaceful. The Prologue and Appendix B record the Dark Plague, the Long Winter of 2758, and the Fell Winter of 2911, when white wolves crossed the frozen Brandywine. In S.R. 1147 (T.A. 2747) Bandobras Took, called the Bullroarer, won the Battle of Greenfields against an orc band, knocking the head off the goblin chief Golfimbul, which according to the Prologue sailed into a rabbit-hole and so invented the game of golf. The last battle fought in the Shire was the Battle of Bywater in S.R. 1419, at the end of The Return of the King, against Saruman's ruffians.

Pipe-weed is also a Hobbit contribution to Middle-earth. The Prologue credits Tobold Hornblower of Longbottom, in the Southfarthing, with first growing it in gardens around S.R. 1070.

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Hobbit Life and Culture

The Prologue paints Hobbit culture in loving detail. Hobbits love peace and quiet and good tilled earth. They are skilled with tools but dislike machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom. They are fond of jokes, parties and family trees, and almost every Hobbit can tell you their cousins to the ninth degree.

Smials and hobbit-holes

The oldest Hobbit dwellings were holes dug into hillsides and banks. By the end of the Third Age only the richest and the poorest still lived in true holes, the rich in large smials with many rooms, like Bag End or the Great Smials of the Tooks at Tuckborough. Most others built houses of wood, brick or stone, often still long and low, with round windows and doors in imitation of the old holes.

Mathoms, birthdays and presents

Hobbits give presents on their own birthdays rather than receiving them. Anything a Hobbit has no immediate use for, but is unwilling to throw away, is a mathom, and the Michel Delving Mathom-house was full of them. The custom explains Bilbo's party, where every guest receives a gift, some of them pointed jokes.

Food, books and genealogy

Hobbits keep large family books and love maps that show only the Shire. They take great pleasure in books filled with things they already know, set out fair and square with no contradictions. The Red Book of Westmarch, from which Tolkien pretends to have translated The Lord of the Rings, began as Bilbo's diary and became a family heirloom of Sam's descendants.

Courage under the surface

Gandalf tells Frodo that there is more to Hobbits than people expect, and the story bears him out. Their endurance under hardship, which the Prologue calls almost incredible, is what lets two of them walk into Mordor. Tolkien said several times in his Letters that the Hobbits embody the ordinary person who rises to greatness without wishing for it.

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Westron: The Language Hobbits Speak

Adopting the Common Speech

Hobbits had no language entirely their own by the end of the Third Age. Appendix F explains that in their wanderings they took up the speech of the Men they lived among, and in Eriador that meant Westron, the Common Speech used across the lands of the old kingdoms. Westron itself descends from Adûnaic, the language of Númenor, mixed with the tongues of Men of Middle-earth and with many Elvish loanwords. Our guide to Westron, the Common Speech of The Lord of the Rings covers its history in detail, and the Adûnaic guide follows it back to Númenor.

The Hobbits' older tongue was largely forgotten. Appendix F says that traces survived in Hobbit names and in a few words of the Stoors, who had lived longer near the Dunland Men. Their Westron also had a rustic flavour of its own, which Tolkien renders as English country speech.

Tolkien's translation game

A central conceit of The Lord of the Rings is that Tolkien translated everything written in Westron into English. That includes Hobbit names. In Appendix F he reveals some of the "real" forms behind his translations: the Hobbits' own word for themselves was kuduk, Sam's real name was Banazîr Galbasi, and Frodo's was Maura Labingi. The word "halfling" translates the Westron banakil.

Appendix F also connects kuduk to the Rohirric kûd-dûkan, "hole-dweller". Tolkien chose to render the Rohirric word as holbytla, "hole-builder", in Old English style, because he represented the language of Rohan with Old English. Théoden uses holbytlan when he meets Merry and Pippin at Isengard. Our guide to the Rohirric language of Rohan explains that Old English disguise.

So the English word "hobbit" is, within the fiction, Tolkien's modernised equivalent of a worn-down Westron word that once meant "hole-dweller". It does not come from Quenya or Sindarin.

Hobbits and Elvish

Hobbits were not ignorant of Elvish. Bilbo learned a good deal in Rivendell and translated from it, and Frodo knew some, enough to greet Gildor Inglorion's company in the Shire, as our Elvish in the Shire and beyond overview describes. Sam is famously moved by the songs of the Elves, and in Cirith Ungol the Elvish invocation of Elbereth rises to his lips in a tongue he does not know. If you want to see the Elvish phrases the Hobbits actually hear on their journey, our collection of Lord of the Rings Elvish phrases gathers them with sources.

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Hobbits in Elvish: Perian and Periannath

This is where the Hobbits enter the Elvish languages. Tolkien gives one attested Sindarin word for them, and it appears at some of the most memorable moments of The Return of the King.

What the word means

Perian is the Sindarin word for a halfling. The ending -ath forms a collective plural in Sindarin, a word for a whole people or group, so Periannath means the Halflings collectively. Tolkien uses it as the Elvish and Gondorian name for the Hobbits.

The "half" in "halfling" refers to their height, half the stature of Men. The idea is the same as in the Westron banakil, which suggests that the Elvish and Mannish names grew from a shared observation rather than from any Hobbit name for themselves.

Prince of the Halflings

When Pippin arrives in Minas Tirith with Gandalf, the guards and later the people of the city call him Ernil i Pheriannath, "Prince of the Halflings" (The Return of the King, Book V, chapter 1). Ernil is attested Sindarin for "prince". The change from P to Ph in Pheriannath is not a spelling variant: after the plural article i, Sindarin applies nasal mutation, which turns an initial p into ph. Pippin, being a Took and the Thain's son, is in fact a sort of prince in the Shire, which makes the title less of a joke than he first thinks.

Praise at Cormallen

At the Field of Cormallen, after the Ring is destroyed, the hosts of the West greet Frodo and Sam with Cuio i Pheriain anann! Aglar'ni Pheriannath!, "Long live the Halflings! Glory to the Halflings!" (The Return of the King, Book VI, chapter 4). Here Pheriain is the plural "halflings" and Pheriannath the collective. The blessing is often misattributed to Rivendell; our guide to Elvish battle cries and blessings sets the record straight.

A film-only line

In Peter Jackson's films, Aragorn has a line in Sindarin that uses the same word, Pedich i Pheriannath?, "Do you speak of the Halflings?" That sentence was written by David Salo for the films and is not in Tolkien's writings. It is good Neo-Sindarin, but it is film-only. Our list of Aragorn's Elvish quotes marks which of his lines are Tolkien's and which were written for the screen.

What Tolkien does not give

Tolkien gives no attested Elvish name for the Shire itself, and none for the three breeds, Harfoots, Stoors and Fallohides. Those names are English renderings of Westron words. If you see a "Sindarin name for the Shire" online, treat it as invented.

Two other Elvish words are worth knowing for a Hobbit reader. The Sindarin mellon, "friend", opens the Doors of Durin for the Fellowship, and Gandalf, the wizard who brings Bilbo and Frodo into their adventures, is called Mithrandir, "Grey Pilgrim", by the Elves. Our guide to Gandalf's Elvish name Mithrandir explains that name, and you can look up more words in the Elvish dictionary of common words.

If you want to say Periannath correctly and understand why the p changes to ph, Tengwar's free Elvish course teaches Sindarin pronunciation and mutation step by step, starting with lessons you can try without paying.

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Hobbits in the Films and Adaptations

Peter Jackson's six Middle-earth films are faithful to the spirit of the Hobbits, but several things on screen are film-only:

• The timeline is compressed. In the book Frodo leaves the Shire seventeen years after Bilbo's party; the film makes it feel like a matter of weeks.
• The Scouring of the Shire is cut. The Battle of Bywater, the last battle of the War of the Ring, is not in The Return of the King film. Instead, Frodo's vision in the Mirror of Galadriel shows a ruined Shire.
• Merry and Pippin's characters are lighter. In the books they are capable and well prepared (Merry organises the conspiracy to follow Frodo). The films lean on their comedy.
• Frodo's age. The book Frodo is fifty when he leaves the Shire, though he looks thirty-three because of the Ring. The film presents him as a young man.

The Hobbit trilogy also adds film-only material around Bilbo, though it keeps his Took restlessness. Our piece on the Hobbit films' Elvish, from Thranduil to Tauriel covers the Elvish invented for those films.

Amazon's The Rings of Power shows Harfoots wandering in the Second Age, long before Tolkien's earliest record of them. That is the show's invention: Tolkien's Prologue says nothing about Hobbits before the Third Age, and the series' Harfoot culture is adapted, not drawn from canon.

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How Hobbits Fit Among the Peoples of Middle-earth

Hobbits sit in an interesting position. They are related to Men, which links them to the story told in our guide to Men of Middle-earth. The Harfoots' long friendship with Dwarves connects them to Dwarves of Middle-earth, and the Fallohides' love of the Elves connects them to Elves of Middle-earth.

They also meet nearly every other people in the series. Bilbo is nearly eaten by trolls, Frodo is hunted by the Nazgûl, Merry and Pippin are carried off by the Uruk-hai and befriended by Ents, and Sam faces giant spiders at Cirith Ungol. Even Gandalf, one of the Istari, spends years quietly studying the Shire.

Tolkien built The Lord of the Rings so that the smallest people would carry the greatest burden. That contrast, a hobbit from a quiet garden standing against the Dark Lord, is the heart of the book. It is also why Frodo receives an Elvish epithet in Gondor; our post on Frodo's Elvish name and meaning looks at how the Elves and Men honour him.

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People Also Ask

Are Hobbits human?

Not quite, but they are close. The Prologue says Hobbits are relatives of Men, far nearer to Men than to Elves or Dwarves, although their exact origin was already forgotten. Tolkien never gives a separate creation story for them, unlike the Dwarves, who were made by Aulë.

Why are Hobbits called halflings?

Because they are roughly half the height of Men. The Westron banakil and the Sindarin perian both mean "halfling", and the Elves call the whole people Periannath. The Hobbits themselves rarely used the word and did not like it much.

Which hobbits in The Lord of the Rings are Fallohides?

None of the main characters is a pure Fallohide, because the breeds had mixed by the late Third Age. But the Prologue says the Fallohide strain was strongest in the Tooks and the Brandybucks. Bilbo and Frodo both have Took and Brandybuck blood, as do Pippin (a Took) and Merry (a Brandybuck).

Was Gollum a Hobbit?

Yes, of a kind. Gandalf tells Frodo that Sméagol came from a family of Stoorish hobbits living by the Great River (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book I, chapter 2). The long years with the Ring transformed him.

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Learn the Language the Elves Used for Hobbits

The Hobbits' own Westron is only partly known, but the Elvish they heard, from Gildor's song in the woods to the praise at Cormallen, is something you can actually learn. Try typing a phrase into the English to Quenya and Sindarin translator, or write your own name in Elvish letters with the Tengwar name tool, the same script used for the inscriptions in the Red Book's world. If you want to practise writing it by hand, the Tengwar Scribe checks your strokes, and our Tengwar alphabet guide explains every letter.

Learn Elvish free — 10 lessons of Sindarin and Quenya on Tengwar, from greetings like mae govannen to the mutations that turn perian into Pheriannath. Start the free Elvish course and learn the language Bilbo studied in Rivendell. For a broader overview first, see Quenya vs Sindarin and the complete guide to Tolkien's Elvish languages.

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Related Reading

• Races of Middle-earth — Complete Guide
• Elves of Middle-earth
• Dwarves of Middle-earth
• Men of Middle-earth
• Westron — The Common Speech of The Lord of the Rings
• The Hobbit Riddle Game Explained
• Frodo's Elvish Name and Meaning
• Gandalf's Elvish Name: Mithrandir
• Lord of the Rings Elvish Phrases