The Prancing Pony

The Prancing Pony stands on the Great East Road inside the West-gate of Bree, where the road bends to pass around the foot of the hill. It is a substantial three-storeyed house of stone and timber, with two wings running back into the slope so that the yard behind is enclosed, and an arched entrance under the sign of a fat white pony rearing on its hind legs. Its windows look west along the road, and its common room, warm and crowded on most evenings, was for centuries the place where the news of Eriador changed hands: hobbits from Staddle, farmers from Combe, dwarves travelling between the Blue Mountains and the east, and the occasional silent Ranger in a corner.

The inn was built to serve both of Bree's peoples. Its main rooms were sized for Men, but a row of hobbit-rooms opened off the ground floor of the north wing, with round windows at ground level, and the Butterburs kept two hobbits, Nob and Bob, as servant and ostler. At the time of the War the innkeeper was Barliman Butterbur, a fat, kindly, endlessly distracted man whose memory failed him at the worst possible moment.

The Pony was old when the hobbits came to it, and its earlier history is the anonymous history of every inn on a great road. Its place in the tale of the Ring rests on three days at the end of September 3018. Gandalf had passed through in June and left with Butterbur a letter of warning for Frodo; the letter stayed in the innkeeper's pocket. When Frodo arrived on the 29th under the name of Underhill, he was tempted into a song on the table of the common room, fell, and slipped the Ring on his finger. The vanishing was noticed by the whole room, by Bill Ferny and the Southerner, and by the weather-beaten Ranger called Strider, who followed the hobbits to their parlour and revealed himself as Aragorn. Butterbur finally remembered the letter, which confirmed Strider's story.

That night the beds in the hobbits' rooms were slashed by intruders and the inn's horses were driven off. Butterbur, honest to a fault, paid for Bill the pony out of his own purse. A year later Gandalf and the four hobbits sat again in the Pony's parlour on their way home, drank Butterbur's beer, which Gandalf had blessed, and told him that a King had come back to the North.

An inn on the Great East Road just inside the West-gate of Bree, at the foot of Bree-hill.