A town or village in the Shire. It was the home of Diamond, who married Peregrin Took eight years after his return from the War of the Ring. The name 'Cleeve' comes from the Old English word for a cliff or stony bank.
Long Cleeve was the home of the North-tooks, a distant branch of the Took clan who were descended from Bandobras the Bullroarer. This connection implies that it lay in the Shire's Northfarthing, which in turns ties in with the likely meaning of its name (because much of the Northfarthing was rocky in nature), though none of this is stated specifically by Tolkien himself.
Notes
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We're never told specifically where in the Shire Long Cleeve was to be found, be we do know that it was the home of a branch of the Took family known as the North-tooks. Given the known geography of the Shire, and working on the assumption that the North-tooks lived to the northward of the Tookland where the main branch of the family made their home, it seems all but inevitable that the folkland of the North-tooks must been somewhere in the Northfarthing.
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'Long Cleeve' first appeared on a map of the Shire created by Christopher Tolkien in 1943, along with a series of other place-names that don't appear in any published work. It seems to refer to a long bank or cliff which (given that it was a settlement of Shire-hobbits) was presumably the site of several Hobbit-holes. Long Cleeve was not the only location in the Shire to include 'Cleeve' in its name: a place named 'Sandy Cleeve' ('sandy cliff' or 'sandbank') appeared on the same map.
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- Updated 31 January 2019
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