Bandobras Took

The tallest of the Tooks

Bandobras was born in T.A. 2704 (S.R. 1104), a younger son of Isumbras III, Thain of the Shire, and a grandson of Isengrim II, the Thain in whose day pipe-weed was first grown at Longbottom. He stood four feet five inches, taller than any hobbit before him, and tall enough to ride a full-sized horse, a thing no other hobbit in the Shire's history is recorded to have done until Merry and Pippin outgrew him with the help of the Ent-draughts. In the Fallohide house of the Tooks, which produced the Shire's few adventurers, he was the most warlike of them all.

The Battle of Greenfields

In T.A. 2747 a band of Orcs from Mount Gundabad, one of many that harried Eriador in the years of the Dwarves' wars with the Orcs, came down into the Northfarthing under a chief named Golfimbul. Bandobras raised the hobbits of the north and met the invaders at Greenfields. The battle was the only one fought inside the Shire between the founding and the Scouring, and the Bullroarer's charge decided it: he rode straight at Golfimbul and struck his head off with a club. The Shire's own account adds that the head flew a hundred yards and dropped down a rabbit-hole, and that the game of golf was invented on the spot. Whatever the truth of that, the Orcs were routed and never came into the Shire again.

Legacy

Bandobras lived to be a hundred and two, dying in T.A. 2806. His descendants settled in the Northfarthing at Long Cleeve and were known as the North-tooks; Diamond of Long Cleeve, who married Pippin in S.R. 1427, was of his line, and so the Bullroarer's blood came back to the Great Smials. His story was told in every Shire nursery. When Gandalf came to Bag End in 2941 to recruit a burglar, it was the memory of the Bullroarer that first stirred the Took in Bilbo.

Died in T.A. 2806 aged a hundred and two; his descendants became the North-tooks of Long Cleeve.