Brandywine River

The Brandywine River, called Baranduin by the Hobbits before they turned the name, is the great brown river that bounds the Shire on its eastern side. It is the river that the Fallohide brothers, Marcho and Blanco, crossed with a great following of Hobbits in the one thousand six hundred and first year of the Third Age, having set out from Bree and obtained permission from the high king at Fornost. They passed over the Bridge of Stonebows, built in the days of the power of the North Kingdom, and took all the land beyond to dwell in, between the river and the Far Downs. The crossing of the Brandywine became Year One of the Shire, and all later dates were reckoned from it, beginning the Shire-reckoning. The river thus marks the founding moment of the Shire as a distinct Hobbit land, a boundary between the world of Men and the sheltered country the Hobbits made their own.

The Founding Boundary of the Shire

The Brandywine was not merely a geographical feature but a political and historical boundary. When the Hobbits crossed it, all that was demanded of them was that they should keep the Great Bridge in repair, and all other bridges and roads, speed the king's messengers, and acknowledge his lordship. In name they remained subjects of the king, but in fact they were ruled by their own chieftains and meddled not at all with events in the world outside. The river thus became the line between the Shire and the wider history of Men and Elves, a line the Hobbits crossed only rarely. To the last battle at Fornost with the Witch-lord of Angmar they sent some bowmen to the aid of the king, or so they maintained, though no tales of Men record it. After the North Kingdom ended, the Hobbits took the land for their own and chose from their own chiefs a Thain to hold the authority of the king that was gone. The Brandywine, then, is the river that both connects and separates: it was the route by which the Hobbits entered their new land, and the moat that kept the troubles of the wider world at bay for a thousand years.

The Search for the Captured Hobbits

Centuries later, the Brandywine's banks became the scene of a desperate search. After the capture of Meriadoc Brandybuck and Peregrin Took by the Orcs, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli searched the ground near the river-bank where the battle had been fought. Aragorn came to the ashes of the watch-fire near the river-bank and began to retrace the ground back towards the knoll where the battle had been fought. There he found news: a broken leaf of golden hue, a mallorn-leaf of Lórien, now fading and turning brown, with small crumbs on it and a few more crumbs in the grass, and pieces of cut cord lying nearby. Gimli drew out of a tussock a short jagged blade, an orc-weapon with a carved handle shaped like a hideous head with squinting eyes and leering mouth, the haft from which it had been snapped lying beside it. Legolas read the riddle with bitter irony: a bound prisoner had escaped both from the Orcs and from the surrounding horsemen, stopped in the open, cut his bonds with an orc-knife, and then sat down and quietly ate some waybread. The mallorn-leaf was enough to show that the prisoner was a hobbit. The river-bank thus became the site of a crucial piece of detective work, where the three hunters pieced together the fate of their friends from scattered crumbs and cut cords, and where the strange riddle of the escape was first posed.

The River of Return and Reclamation

In the final days of the War of the Ring, the Brandywine again marked a threshold, this time for the returning Ring-bearers. When Frodo Baggins confronted a ruffian in the Shire, he spoke of the changed world beyond the river: the Dark Tower had fallen, there was a King in Gondor, and Isengard had been destroyed, with Saruman a beggar in the wilderness. The King's messengers would ride up the Greenway now, not bullies from Isengard. The ruffian mocked him, snapping his fingers in Frodo's face and dismissing the King's messengers, but the confrontation showed that the Brandywine no longer shielded the Shire from the world's history. The river that had once kept the Hobbits apart from the wars of Men had been crossed by the war itself, and the returning hobbits brought the news of the wider world back across it. The Brandywine, which had been the boundary of a sheltered land, became the boundary of a land that had been drawn into the great events of the age, and the river's crossing marked the beginning of the Scouring of the Shire and the reclamation of the hobbits' home.