Bree (Middle-earth)

• 1. Introduction

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  Bree is the fictional village J. R. R. Tolkien placed at the hinge between two worlds. To the west lies the comfortable, close-knit Shire; to the east lies the vast wilderness of Eriador. Above the door of its most famous inn hangs a painted sign reading THE PRANCING PONY by BARLIMAN BUTTERBUR. That name for an innkeeper is no accident, and neither is anything else about Bree. What drove Tolkien to build a village down to the linguistic roots of every place name and every surname? And why do two of the most consequential moments in Middle-earth history take place inside this single roadside inn?

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• 2. A Crossroads Town

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  At the junction of the Great East Road and the long-disused Greenway, Bree had served as a centre of trade for centuries. The Greenway was also known as the Great North Road, and its decline reflected the fall of the northern kingdom of Arnor. After Arnor's collapse, Bree carried on without any central authority for many centuries. Dwarves, Rangers, and Wizards passed through on their travels and stopped at the village inn.

  Pipe-weed flourishes on the south-facing slopes of Bree-hill. The Hobbits of Bree claim to have been the first people anywhere to smoke it. The practice spread outward as travellers on the road carried the habit home.

  Tom Bombadil knew of Bree by name. His verse locates it precisely: "four miles along the road / you'll come upon a village, / Bree under Bree-hill, / with doors looking westward." The Barrow-downs and the Old Forest lie directly west of the village. At the time of The Lord of the Rings, Bree is the westernmost settlement of Men in all of Middle-earth.

  Tolkien wrote that Bree was founded by men of the Edain who did not reach Beleriand in the First Age. These men remained east of the mountains in Eriador, possibly from the same stock as the Dunlendings. Their settlement predated even the founding of the Shire.

  In the year 1601 of the Third Age, two Fallohide brothers named Marcho and Blanco departed from Bree. They led their Hobbits westward across the river Baranduin and took the land beyond to found the Shire.

  The Prancing Pony stood at the road junction at the base of Bree-hill. Frequented by Men, Hobbits, and Dwarves alike, its fine beer had once been sampled by the wizard Gandalf himself.

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• 3. Fates at the Inn

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  Gandalf and Thorin Oakenshield met at The Prancing Pony without prior arrangement, in what Tolkien called "a chance-meeting." That encounter led directly to the quest to Erebor. The quest ended with the destruction of the dragon Smaug, as recounted in The Hobbit.

  Frodo Baggins arrived at The Prancing Pony during his journey to Rivendell, along with his companions. After singing "The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late," Frodo accidentally slipped the One Ring onto his finger. He became invisible instantly. Two men in the room witnessed him vanish: Bill Ferny, a minor villain, and a squint-eyed man the text calls only a "Southerner." The Southerner was described as a person from some land far to the south. Both informed the Black Riders, who attacked the inn that night.

  Aragorn was already at the inn and saved Frodo's party, leading them away from Bree. The innkeeper Barliman Butterbur had held a letter from Gandalf for months without sending it. At the moment of departure, he finally handed it over.

  Tolkien describes the inn in The Lord of the Rings with unusual specificity. Its two wings ran back into the hillside, "partly cut out of the lower slopes," so that the second-floor windows at the rear sat level with the ground. A wide arch between the wings led into a courtyard, with broad steps on the left rising to a large doorway. Above the arch hung a lamp, and from it swung a signboard bearing a fat white pony reared on its hind legs.

  Tolkien's care with names at Bree extended far beyond any single character. The place names of Bree-land were chosen from a linguistic theory about how ancient peoples leave traces in the names of the landscape.

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• 4. Hill-Hill and Wood-Wood

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  The village of Brill, in Buckinghamshire, gave Tolkien the name Bree. He visited Brill regularly during his early years at the University of Oxford. Brill is a contraction of the older form Breʒ-hyll, in which both syllables carry the same meaning. The Celtic element Breʒ and the Old English hyll both translate as "hill."

  The scholar Tom Shippey calls this "in a way nonsense, exactly parallel with Chetwode in Berkshire close by." In Chetwode, the Brythonic element Chet derives from ced, meaning "wood," and the second half repeats the same meaning in Old English. These doubled names mark the seam where one language replaced another, both communities having named the same feature in their own tongue.

  Tolkien stated that he selected the four place names of Bree-land, Archet, Bree, Chetwood, and Combe, because they "contained non-English elements." His goal was to make them sound "queer," to imitate "a style that we should perhaps vaguely feel to be 'Celtic'." Christopher Robinson argues that Tolkien fitted every name to "the phonological and morphological style of the nomenclature to which it belongs." Shippey calls this aspect of Tolkien's approach a "linguistic heresy": his belief that the sound of words carries both meaning and beauty.

  The philologist J. Wust found that Tolkien's linguistic precision at Bree extended even to questions of script. The Hobbits could read the lettering above The Prancing Pony's door. Yet Pippin could not read the inscriptions on the houses of Minas Tirith, the city of Gondor to the south. Wust's explanation is that in the North, a "full writing mode" was used for Tengwar inscriptions. Gondor employed the abbreviated tehta mode, placing dots and marks above and below consonants to indicate vowel sounds. The two regions had independently developed different writing conventions.

  Men of Bree took their surnames from plants, and each name was chosen to fit its bearer. That same care that governed the map extended to every door.

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• 5. A Village of Plant Names

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  Men of Bree often used plant names as their surnames; Bill Ferny, one of the story's minor villains, is one example. The practice was not casual. Tolkien gave every such name a precise botanical and descriptive logic.

  Barliman Butterbur's surname names a real plant genus: Petasites hybridus, a herbaceous perennial. Tolkien described it as "a fleshy plant with a heavy flower-head on a thick stalk, and very large leaves." He chose the name because it suited a fat man. In notes for translators of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien asked that they use a plant name containing "butter" if possible. He specified that the plant should be, in any case, "a fat thick plant."

  The scholar Ralph C. Wood notes that the forename "Barliman" hints at "the hops that he brews" for the inn. Barley is the grain at the heart of beer-making, making the full name carry Butterbur's entire trade. Tolkien built this kind of fit into every name: the person, the plant, and the place had to belong together.

  The scholar Thomas Honegger has argued that Bree's role in the narrative is more precise than a simple waystation. His analysis draws on the village's unique mix of peoples and architecture.

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• 6. Comfort and Dread

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  Thomas Honegger writes that Bree functions "as a point of transition between the hobbit-homeland and the wide expanse of Eriador." Its mixed population of Hobbits and Men makes this role possible. The village is clearly separate from the Shire, yet its architecture retains "some degree of Shire homeliness and comfort."

  The inn itself is described as "mannish" in character, but it welcomes Hobbits with rooms built into the hill, "imitating traditional hobbit-architecture." This made The Prancing Pony one of Frodo's five Homely Houses.

  Bo Walther, writing in Tolkien Studies, describes Bree and The Prancing Pony as "creepy but also familiar." The Hobbits arriving there begin to face their fear of the unknown. They are, in Walther's words, "cheered up by the recognizable bouquet of beer and the sight of jovial hobbit faces."

  The scholar Brian Rosebury quotes at length from the Hobbits' approach to Bree. He highlights "the leisurely pace, and the patient attention to sensory impressions, typical of the narrative." Sam, Frodo's servant, feels an anxiety from which the others are relatively free; Rosebury attributes this to Sam being "little-travelled and socially-deferential." Tolkien, Rosebury argues, sets "both comforting and terrifying events" in The Prancing Pony, insisting it "remains resolutely unallegorical." In his reading, the inn is "neither a symbol of comfort, nor the abode of giants which it half-appears to Sam."

  A proverb specific to Bree appears in Butterbur's speech: "there's no accounting for East and West as we say in Bree, meaning the Rangers and the Shire-folk, begging your pardon." Rosebury notes that it provides a comic element. He also says it fixes "the geographical contact-but-distance between the two communities."

  Five different filmmakers and broadcasters have since tried to capture Bree.

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• 7. Bree on Screen

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  Barliman Butterbur appears in both Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated film and Peter Jackson's 2001 The Fellowship of the Ring. In both versions, most of his scenes were cut. Alan Tilvern voiced the character in the Bakshi film, credited only as "Innkeeper"; David Weatherley played him in Jackson's production.

  James Grout played Butterbur in the BBC Radio serialization of 1981. In the 1991 Russian adaptation Khraniteli, the character was renamed "Lavr Narkiss" and played by Nikolay Burov. The Finnish broadcaster Yle's 1993 television miniseries Hobitit gave him the name "Viljami Voivalvatti," meaning "William Butter" in Finnish, with Mikko Kivinen in the role.

  In Jackson's film, Bree is rendered as a constantly unpleasant and threatening place, unlike its atmosphere in the novel. The Ring moment at The Prancing Pony is also transformed. In the book, it simply makes Frodo invisible; in the film, a strong wind, blue light, and the Eye of Sauron accompany the moment.

  A character named "Butterbur, Sr" appears briefly in the prologue of Jackson's 2013 film The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, played by Richard Whiteside. The PC game The Lord of the Rings Online features Bree and Bree-land among its most prominent locations. No other settlement of Men stood within a hundred leagues of the Shire at the time of the War of the Ring. That isolation is what made every scene at The Prancing Pony matter: there was nowhere else to go.

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