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Simple Hobbits Have Lots of Friends - Page 3

© Michael Martinez

But Saruman ran afoul of the law, so to speak. That is, he turned against the White Council and the Free Peoples of Middle-earth. When his henchmen started beating up on the local trees, the Ents formed a vigilante committee and set out to lynch Saruman and his bururum, his Orcs. Well, they took down Isengard's outer wall but the Ents couldn't get to Saruman himself. All they could do was lay siege to the tower of Orthanc and wait him out. In the meantime, Rohan, once rid of the Isengard menace, turned its attention to Sauron and forgot about Isengard. But Saruman's contacts in the Shire weren't extinguished. Undoubtedly, cut off from Isengard, Lotho went on a rampage. There may even have been a brief period of gang warfare. Drive-by swordings and late-night massacres of Saruman's most trusted henchmen as they partied with local Hobbit girls most likely helped ensure Lotho's control over the Isengarder organization. In the meantime, the local families were slow to figure out what was going on. They never expected new blood to come in from Isengard and Dunland. They had been running the Shire since the 1900s, and had a pretty good deal. They were landowners now, respectable, and didn't really think about organizing bands of resistance fighters as in the old days when the Realm of Angmar was sending armies to overrun the Hobbits. But the Shire had its own Mafia-like history and organization. The original Mafiosi fled to the hills of Sicily when the Arabs (or Norman French) showed up. They fought back secretly, and they eventually seized control over the Sicilian government. The Shire families, led by their chieftains, moved into the hills. When Angmar attacked they resisted. Eventually, the chieftains got together and elected a Thain to lead the local bully-boys and resistance fighters. But things settled down after that and the Shire families prospered. They even became aristocratic. But they stayed close together. Some of the families, like the Tooks and Brandybucks, adhered to the Old Ways. The Brandybucks had once been called the Oldbucks, and they had controlled the Shire for generations. But in what was obviously a turf war (probably over control of wine production in the Southfarthing) the Tooks ran the Oldbucks out of the Shire. The Oldbucks settled across the Baranduin (Brandywine) river in what became known as Buckland. There in Brandy Hall the Master of Buckland continued to exercise considerable influence in the Shire. It's said that many people in the nearby Marish continued to look to the Master of Buckland as their leader. Undoubtedly some of the fees of the Buckleberry Ferry and the Stone Bridge made their way into Brandybuck coffers.

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