Law and Institutions
in the Shire
 

I offer here a case study in Tolkien's realism: an analysis of the Shire as a social order. The Shire, that curiously utopian little enclave so well insulated from most of the history of Middle-Earth, smugly self-satisfied in the manner of Victorian and Edwardian England with its own stuffy matter-of-fact everydayness, yet also had its own history, from which we may learn something.

To begin with then, the quantitative facts, so far as we possess them: Karen Wynn Fonstad (1981, p. 69) estimates that the Shire occupied an area of some 21,400 square miles. Based on the relative body sizes of hobbits and medieval farmers and on the efficiency of preindustrial agriculture, this might have supported some 3,852,000 hobbit farmers, with perhaps 10% as many in other occupations. In fact, Fonstad believes that the Shire was "well-settled, yet uncrowded, with lots of Hobbits but plenty of elbow room" (1981, p. 69), and the picture Tolkien gives us seems to support this. So let us suppose that the Shire had between one-third and one-fifth as many inhabitants as would fully occupy it, or between 850,000 and 1,400,000 hobbits.

This area was divided into four Farthings, with one outlying region, the Buckland, across the Brandywine River from the Shire proper. The Buckland was the home region of the Brandybuck family, whom in an early letter (Carpenter, 1981, letter #25) Tolkien lists as one of the twelve wealthiest families of the Shire — the others being Baggins, Boffin, Bolger, Bracegirdle, Burrowes, Chubb, Grubb, Hornblower, Proudfoot, Sackville, and Took. Maps of the Shire, both Tolkien's and Fonstad's, show a region called the Tookland, located at the eastern end of the West Farthing, whose principal settlement, Tuckburrow, was the seat of the Thain, the head of the Took family and leader of the Shire's military forces.

In these two regions, we may guess at the outlines of an earlier time in Shire history, when the great families were more powerful and also more tied to specific folklands, At such a time the Shire's excellent systems of roads and internal communication would have been little developed, its reliance on markets and trade small, and each region would have been very largely self-sufficient. Indeed, the Shire may for much of its history have had nothing very similar to government, not even the very limited government of Bilbo's and Frodo's time. Note Tolkien's remark about the comparable situation in Bree (Carpenter, 1981, letter #210):

The landlord does not ask Frodo to 'register'! Why should he? There are no police and no government... If details are to be added to an already crowded picture, they should at least fit the world described.

Nominally the Shirefolk owed allegiance to the King of Gondor and Arnor from whom they had received their land grant, but realistically generations might go by without any contact between the Shire and either of these states. And the Shirefolk showed no inclination to appoint their own king, nor to engage in large collective ventures apart from the occasional defensive war.