Holbun, the Mad Wanderer

Of their original home the Hobbits in Bilbo's time preserved no knowledge. A love of learning (other than genealogical lore) was far from general among them, but there remained still a few in the older families who studied their own books, and even gathered reports of old times and distant lands from Elves, Dwarves, and Men. Their own records began only after the settlement of the Shire, and their most ancient legends hardly looked further back than their Wandering Days. It is clear, nonetheless, from these legends, and from the evidence of their peculiar words and customs, that like many other folk Hobbits had in the distant past moved westward. Their earliest tales seem to glimpse a time when they dwelt in the upper vales of Anduin, between the eaves of Greenwood the Great and the Misty Mountains. Why they later undertook the hard and perilous crossing of the mountains into Eriador is no longer certain. Their own accounts speak of the multiplying of Men in the land, and of a shadow that fell on the forest, so that it became darkened and its new name was Mirkwood.

In one telling of the tale of the Wandering Days, Holbun, the Mad Wanderer, was a troublesomely explorative hobbit who kept leaving the Warrens near the Anduin to see strange places. It was thus by chance that she first saw Eriador, with its promise of plenty in a time when the tribe was hungry and desperate, beset by unchecked Easterlings, and a mysterious hostility in their ancient paths in Greenwood the Great.

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