Bree

The village

Bree stands on the western slope of Bree-hill, a wooded height that rises abruptly from the flat lands of central Eriador some forty miles east of the Brandywine Bridge. It is a village of perhaps a hundred stone houses, most of them built along the road as it climbs and bends around the hill, protected on the landward sides by a deep dike and a thick hedge. Gates in the hedge, closed at nightfall, guard the road where it enters from the west and leaves toward the south, and a gatekeeper sits in a lodge to question strangers.

Bree is the largest of the four settlements of Bree-land. Staddle lies on the south-eastern slope of the hill and is mostly hobbit-inhabited; Combe sits in a valley on the eastern side; and Archet is a hamlet on the edge of the Chetwood to the north. Together they make up a pocket of tilled land and coppiced woodland only a few miles across, surrounded on every side by empty country.

The village's fame rests on its crossroads and its inn. The Great East Road passes through Bree on its way from the Grey Havens to Rivendell, and here it meets the old North Road, called the Greenway because grass had long since overgrown it, running north to Fornost and south to Tharbad. The Prancing Pony, which stands where the Road bends around the hill, was the natural meeting place of travellers from every direction and the source of most of the news that reached the Shire from outside.

The Bree-folk

The Men of Bree were brown-haired, broad and short by the standards of the Dúnedain, cheerful and independent, and older in the land than any other Men of Eriador. They claimed descent from the first Men to come west over the mountains, and they had outlasted the whole history of Arnor without ever being more than a village. They kept the Road open, farmed the slopes of the hill, and regarded themselves as the centre of the world.

Bree was also unusual in being the one place where Men and Hobbits lived side by side. Hobbits had settled in Bree-land about T.A. 1300, three centuries before the founding of the Shire, and the Bree-hobbits considered themselves the older and more sensible branch of their people. The two communities dwelt on friendly terms without intermingling, the hobbits mostly in Staddle and on the hillsides, the Men in the village and the outlying farms. Dwarves passing between the Blue Mountains and the east were frequent guests, and so, less welcome, were the grim wandering Men whom the Bree-folk called Rangers.

Before the War

Bree-land survived where kingdoms failed. It was already there when Elendil's people founded Arnor, it lived through the wars against Angmar and the Great Plague, and it kept its inn open across the thousand years in which the Greenway grew grass and the towers of the Dúnedain fell into ruin. Its people never knew that the Rangers who drank in their corner of the common room were the last remnant of the kings who had once ruled them, or that those Rangers were the reason the country around Bree was safe enough for a hobbit to walk in.

The Prancing Pony, September 3018

Gandalf rode through Bree at the end of June 3018 and left a letter for Frodo with Barliman Butterbur, who forgot to send it. Three months later the Black Riders came up the Greenway, questioned the gatekeeper Harry Goatleaf and bought the services of Bill Ferny, a local ne'er-do-well, and a squint-eyed Southerner who was one of Saruman's agents. On the night of September 29 Frodo and his companions arrived at the Pony, Frodo put on the Ring in front of a room full of Bree-folk, and Strider, Aragorn in his guise as a Ranger, offered his help.

The hobbits' rooms were broken into before dawn on the next day and the beds slashed, but the party had slept elsewhere on Strider's advice. Every horse and pony in the stables had been driven off, and Butterbur was forced to buy Bill Ferny's ill-used pony at three times its value. The company left by the East-gate on September 30 with the whole village watching.

The Bree-fight

Bree's troubles did not end when the hobbits left. During the following year ruffians came up the Greenway and there was fighting on the Road; five Bree-folk, three Men and two hobbits, were killed. When Gandalf and the four travellers returned on October 28, 3019, they found the gates barred at dusk and the Pony half empty. Gandalf told the Bree-folk that a King had returned who would keep the roads safe again, and the hobbits rode home the next day to deal with the Shire's own troubles. In the Fourth Age Bree resumed its old position on a road that once more carried the King's messengers between Annúminas and Gondor.

A village on the west slope of Bree-hill at the junction of the Great East Road and the Greenway, about forty miles east of the Brandywine Bridge; Staddle, Combe and Archet lie on the other sides of the hill, with the Chetwood to the north-east.