Stoor

The Stoors are one of the three races of Hobbits.

In their earliest recorded history the Stoors, like the other Hobbits, lived in the Vale of Anduin. They were a riverside people that dwelt in the Gladden Fields, and were fishermen. They were broader in build than the other Hobbits, and had large hands and feet. Among the Hobbits, the Stoors most resembled Humans.

Stoors were the only Hobbits who normally grew facial hair. A habit which set them apart from the Harfoots who lived in the mountain foothills, and the Fallohides who lived in forests far to the north, was that many Stoors used boats, and could swim. They also wore boots.

After the Harfoots had migrated westward, and the Fallohides followed them in 1150 of the Third Age, the Stoors long remained in the vale of Anduin, but between 1150 and 1300 they, too migrated west. Unlike the other Hobbit-kinds they took the Redhorn Pass, ending up in Eregion and Dunland. Some Stoors went to the Angle south of Rivendell and mingled with the Harfoots and Fallohides that lived there, but most settled in the Swanfleet near Tharbad, which most resembled their old lands.

After 1300 when Angmar began to threaten Eriador, many Stoors fled south to their kin in Dunland, where they became a woodland people. Some few returned to the vale of Anduin and resettled the Gladden Fields, becoming the riverland people Déagol and Sméagol-Gollum belonged to. This is evident from Gandalf's description I guess they were of hobbit-kind, akin to the fathers of the fathers of the Stoors in The Fellowship of the Ring. Some of these villages might have survived until the War of the Ring, when they were sought out by the Ringwraiths.

However, most Stoors fled to the north and west, ending up in the newly founded Shire around 1630. There they mingled with the Harfoots and Fallohides, becoming the Shire-folk. The Hobbits of the South Farthing remained very Stoorish in appearance and character, as did some of the Hobbits of Bree and Buckland. The clan of the Brandybucks had many Stoor elements.

The squinty-eyed Hobbit who spied on Frodo Baggins in the Inn of the Prancing Pony may have been one of the surviving Stoors of Dunland, who like the Mannish Dunlendings had fallen under the control of Saruman.