WHERE IS THE SHIRE?

I like to believe Tolkien was the first alternate reality historian. Middle-earth was just as real to Professor Tolkien as the country in which he lived. In his imagination he’d walked all over the hills and woodlands of the Shire, and sat in front of the blazing fireplace at Rivendell, and even climbed the dizzying stairs of Cirith Ungol. He’d visited all of these places in his mind and then he wrote about them with a clarity few authors have rivaled.*

Middle-earth was all in his head. But thankfully, now it’s in our heads too.

Even though early Medieval England is not the setting for the Shire, many of the place-names come from the Anglo-Saxon era. The word “shire” itself, for example, is Old English for “county.”*

The Shire is eighteen thousand square miles—about the size of the states of Vermont and New Hampshire put together. The United Kingdom, by comparison, is five times that size. Hobbiton, where Bag End is located, is situated almost exactly in the center of the Shire.*

When the Hobbits first settled their little country, around thirteen hundred years before Bilbo Baggins was born, they became instantly attached to the land and developed what Tolkien called “a close friendship with the earth.” It’s a beautiful way of saying they are as much a part of the Shire as the soil, stones, rivers and trees.