A small village that lay in the upper valley of the Water in the Shire's Westfarthing, far to the north of the East Road. The sparsely populated landscape of the northern Westfarthing around Needlehole lay at a place where the land was rising toward the Hills of Evendim, which lay about fifty miles to the north of the village.
The only settlement known to be close to Nobottle was the village Needlehole, about ten miles to the east.2 A road connected the two villages and then ran southward, veering away from the Water to avoid the marshlands of nearby Rushock Bog. Further southward from Nobottle this road split, with one fork leading southward to Waymeet, while the other ran along the course of the Water toward Hobbiton, some forty miles distant.
Notes
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The name Nobottle comes from the Old English for 'new building', or at least this is the origin of the name of the real village of Nobottle in Northamptonshire, England (from Old English nīwe bōtl; the same Old English element bōtl, 'building', appears in Hardbottle, the hometown of the Bracegirdle family). Actually, as used by the Hobbits, the name Nobottle was apparently coined by Christopher Tolkien when he prepared the Shire map for his father, and he recalled that he interpreted the name to mean that the remote village did not possess an inn (as quoted in The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion).
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The village of Little Delving probably also lay relatively close to the west of Nobottle, though the exact position of Little Delving is not shown on any map, so it is difficult to state this with any certainty. The large-scale map of the Shire also shows another road branch directly eastward from Nobottle that runs off the northern edge of the map. The destination of this road is unknown; here we speculate that it led to a small hamlet or farm, though it might equally have been a route towards more villages on the upper Water. |
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- Updated 10 November 2022
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