Barliman Butterbur

The Prancing Pony

Butterbur kept the Prancing Pony, the old inn at the meeting of the Great East Road and the Greenway in Bree, which his family had run for generations. He was a stout, red-faced man of the Bree-folk, on easy terms with the hobbits of the village and with the travellers, Dwarves and Rangers who passed through, and his house was the centre of all the news of the Bree-land. He was kind, honest and endlessly busy, and his weakness was memory: one thing drove another out of his head, and he was famous for it.

The letter

In the summer of 3018 Gandalf passed through Bree in haste and left Butterbur a letter for Frodo at Bag End, urging him to leave the Shire at once and to trust a Ranger named Strider. Butterbur could find no one going that way, then forgot the letter entirely. The hobbits accordingly set out in ignorance and reached the Pony on the night of 29 September with the Black Riders already in the Bree-land. Butterbur made them welcome, worried over the stranger who was watching them, and warned Frodo against him; then Frodo's disappearance in the common room after his song sent Butterbur into a fluster, and it was only when he saw Frodo's face that the letter came back to him. He fetched it, confessed, and was forgiven, and the letter that vouched for Aragorn settled the hobbits' doubts.

That night the Riders raided the inn. Butterbur had let the hobbits' rooms be made up to look occupied while they slept elsewhere, and the beds were slashed and the windows broken, but no one was hurt. All the ponies and horses in the stable had been driven off, and Butterbur, to his own cost, paid the hobbits eighteen silver pennies for their loss and gave three times its worth to Bill Ferny for the only pony left in Bree, the half-starved beast that became Bill. Gandalf arrived the next evening, learned everything, and, though he was furious at the delay, left a blessing on the house which the Bree-folk said kept its beer good for years.

The return

When Gandalf and the four hobbits came back on 28 October 3019 the gate was barred and Butterbur opened the inn to them with a club in his hand. Bree had suffered. Ruffians from the south had settled in the land, Bill Ferny had gone off with them, there had been a fight in which three Men and two hobbits were killed, and trade had all but stopped; Butterbur was much thinner and had almost nothing to tell of the wide world. Gandalf told him that Strider was now the King, which Butterbur could not at first believe, and that the Greenway would soon be a road again. He was delighted to find Bill the pony alive and well, and Bob the ostler fetched him in. Butterbur's inn was the last civilised house the hobbits saw before the Shire and the first after it, and his muddled kindness is remembered as the pattern of the Bree-land at its best.

Still keeping the Prancing Pony at the end of the War of the Ring; his death is not recorded.