The Shire

The Shire
Middle-earth location
Part of the Shire created for Peter Jackson's films of Middle-earth, on a farm near Matamata, New Zealand
First appearance	The Hobbit
Created by	J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre	High fantasy
In-universe information
Type	Region
Ruler	Thain, Mayor
Ethnic group(s)	Harfoots, Stoors, Fallohides
Race(s)	Hobbits
Location	Northwest of Middle-earth
Capital	Michel Delving on the White Downs

The Shire is a region of J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional Middle-earth, described in The Lord of the Rings and other works. The Shire is an inland area settled exclusively by hobbits, the Shire-folk, largely sheltered from the goings-on in the rest of Middle-earth. It is in the northwest of the continent, in the region of Eriador and the Kingdom of Arnor.

The Shire is the scene of action at the beginning and end of Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Five of the protagonists in these stories have their homeland in the Shire: Bilbo Baggins (the title character of The Hobbit), and four members of the Fellowship of the Ring: Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, Merry Brandybuck, and Pippin Took. At the end of The Hobbit, Bilbo returns to the Shire, only to find out that he has been declared "missing and presumed dead" and that his hobbit-hole and all its contents are up for auction. (He reclaims them, much to the spite of his cousins Otho and Lobelia Sackville-Baggins.) The main action in The Lord of the Rings returns to the Shire near the end of the book, in "The Scouring of the Shire", when the homebound hobbits find the area under the control of Saruman's ruffians, and set things to rights.

Tolkien based the Shire's landscapes, climate, flora, fauna, and placenames on Worcestershire, a rural county in England where he lived. In Peter Jackson's films of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the Shire was represented by countryside and constructed hobbit-holes on a farm near Matamata in New Zealand, which became a tourist destination.