Fallohides

Character

The Fallohides were the third and smallest of the breeds of Hobbits, and the least like the common picture of the race. They were fairer of skin and hair than the Harfoots and Stoors, taller and slimmer, and drawn to woodland rather than to hillside or riverbank. Where the Harfoots were craftsmen and the Stoors fishermen, the Fallohides were hunters, singers and talkers: more skilled in language and song than with their hands, more interested in what lay beyond the next hill, and readier than any other Hobbits to deal with Elves. This restlessness made them natural leaders. They were often found at the head of Harfoot communities as chieftains, and when the Shire was settled it was Fallohide families who took the first places in it.

Wanderings

The Fallohides were a northerly people, and when the Hobbits began to leave the vales of the Anduin they took a route of their own. Around T.A. 1150 they came into Eriador from the north, down the valley of the Hoarwell, and there they fell in with the Harfoots who had preceded them by a century. The two strains mingled freely, the more numerous Harfoots providing the population and the bolder Fallohides the leadership, and together they drifted west to the Bree-land when the rise of Angmar made the eastern lands unsafe.

Founders of the Shire

The Fallohides' most consequential deed was the founding of the Shire. In T.A. 1601 the brothers Marcho and Blanco, Fallohides of Bree, obtained the leave of King Argeleb II to cross the Brandywine and led the great migration that gave the Hobbits a country of their own. In the Shire the Fallohide strain was strongest in the Tookland, where the Tooks of the Great Smials became the greatest family of the Shire and, from T.A. 2340, its hereditary Thains. It was also marked in the Brandybucks of Buckland, despite their Stoorish river-craft. Both families were known for producing occasional adventurers, a trait that the rest of the Shire found more embarrassing than admirable.

The Tookish strain

Almost every Hobbit who mattered to the history of the Age had Fallohide blood through the Tooks. Gerontius, the Old Took, was a friend of Gandalf and lived to a hundred and thirty; his daughter Belladonna was the mother of Bilbo Baggins, and his daughter Mirabella the grandmother of Frodo. Bandobras Took, the Bullroarer, was tall enough to ride a horse. Peregrin Took and Meriadoc Brandybuck, both grandsons of Tooks, became the tallest Hobbits on record. The Tookish taste for Elves, Dwarves, wizards and travel, so often deplored in Hobbiton, is simply the Fallohide temperament surviving into the Third Age.

Fate

As a distinct people the Fallohides had ceased to exist long before the War of the Ring, but their strain remained visible in fair hair, long legs and an appetite for the strange. In the Fourth Age the Thains of the Took line sat as Counsellors of the North-kingdom, and the Great Smials at Tuckborough became one of the three great libraries of the Shire.

Fairer of skin and hair than other Hobbits, taller and slimmer, and lovers of trees and woodland.

Hunters rather than tillers; skilled in speech and song; friendly with Elves; the born chieftains of their people.

A northern branch of the Hobbit people, already distinct in the vales of the Anduin.

Merged into the Shire-folk, surviving most clearly in the Tooks and Brandybucks.