Picturing Pre-migratory Harfoots, Fallohides, and Stoors
- Miriam Ellis
- Apr 28, 2025
- 4 min read
Have you ever tried to envision the three separate hobbit branches living in the beautiful Vales of Anduin before their great westward migration began in the early 1000s of the Third Age? J.R.R. Tolkien gives us wonderful clues about their appearances, customs, and habits, once again teaching us that the beautiful model of nature is diversity.
Hobbits are an ancient people, a branch of Men who were alive as far back as the Elder Days. We can treasure the tidbits of information we have about hobbit ancestry, relishing its rich variety. It adds such interest and depth to the better-known hobbit tales which occur some 1,800 years after the first migrations away from the River Anduin.
Here, I have pictured a chance meeting along a streamlet of the Great River. The Carrock is glimpsed in the distance as a touchstone of locality, and a swift interplay of rain clouds and sunlight speak of generativity and the passage of time in the green valley. Little-regarded by larger Men, long-ago hobbits are going about their daily lives...
The Three Ancestral Varieties of Hobbits
The Harfoots
Here we see two Harfoots out gathering wild ramsons in the valley. This most numerous branch of the hobbit family has the dark, curly hair, warm complexions, and stoutness we most readily associate with hobbits. They are the shortest folk, small-footed, and clever-handed, with a fondness for living in hillsides and high country, and a particular affinity with dwarves. They keep up the traditions of living in smials the longest of any of the ancestral hobbit groups. I hope you can see the good nature of their faces here, and their kindness in telling chance companions the location of the delicious plants they've been harvesting. We do not know the full history of hobbit agriculture, but surely their later love of tilled earth and gardens has very ancient roots.
The Fallohides
Here, two Fallohide brothers are going hunting in the eaves of Greenwood the Great in the time before it became Mirkwood. Perhaps they are the longfathers of Marcho and Blanco who will lead the further westward migration over the Brandywine some 1,300 years before the events of The Hobbit. Fallohides are taller, slenderer, cooler-complected, and have fairer hair than is usual in the other branches, and their skill with bows is a hint at why we later learn of hobbit archers supposedly going to the Battle of Fornost. They are not as dexterous at crafts as the Harfoots, but have special facilities with music and language, a love of woodlands, and an affinity with elves. They appear to posses the talent of leadership, eventually becoming the chieftains of other hobbit groups, and by the time of The Lord of the Rings, the descendants of this least-numerous branch are most commonly found in Buckland and the Tookland. Perhaps you can see something of the princely merriment of Merry and Pippin in this painting, as the two Fallohides share a moment of laughter with the little Harfoots.
The Stoors
Poling along in his little reed boat, we see a sturdily-built, big-footed-and-handed, bearded Stoor on a fishing trip. They are a remarkable folk, both for their love of water and their facial hair. They felt the closest affinity to Men. Readers may feel a little worried about the Stoors, given that they are the branch from which the unfortunate Sméagol hails, but if you take the time to imagine this rustic, simple Little Folk living peacefully along rivers, weaving watercraft in level lands, and rowing about amid reeds and rushes, they are truly charming. Near the end of the Third Age, there was still a notable Stoor presence in water-rich Buckland, where boating was still practiced, and local hobbits sometimes had facial hair. Might Old Rory, the Master of Brandy Hall, have had a beard? How about Merry in his maturity?
So Much Lost in the Mists of Time
This rare glimpse of pre-migratory hobbits is an attempt to capture anything I can about the faint record of their early history. They only first enter the written records of Men in Eriador in T.A.1050, and though their own oral traditions held a vague memory of the Wandering Days of their great migration over the Misty Mountains due to the darkening of Mirkwood, the hobbits of Bilbo and Frodo's day knew very little about it. Their written family trees only went so far back, making any ancient detail incredibly valuable to readers.
The culture we see at the time of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is thousands of years old. The three ancestral branches are, by then, blended through generations of marriage, though heritage is still, in some cases, detectable by the hobbits. Their societies must have undergone so many changes across millennia, and so it took some thinking to make artistic decisions about how the three groups might have appeared at a given point in time in their Anduin days.
I very much doubted that Mr. Baggins' distant progenitors had umbrellas and gold-buttoned weskits, so I have clad them in simple tunics of rather coarse cloth, and tried to hint at their cultures via the activities they are pursuing in this painting. It was my hope that they would look both hearty and goodly, yielding clues to the enduring stuff of which Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin, and their Eriador neighbors are ultimately made.
But I am sure I'm not alone in wishing with all my heart that we had more than a few paragraphs of text about the Harfoots, Fallohides, and Stoors. I wish the Fairbairns of Westmarch had possessed 20 books of lore devoted solely to hobbit history! Lacking this, I hope my ongoing digging into textual remnants is helping your own imagination to more fully picture and enjoy the hobbits. Please, spend a few minutes today with them in the Vales of Anduin, long, long ago, via this video short:
