Men of Bree

Origins

The Men of Bree were, by their own account and the lore of the Dúnedain, the oldest human inhabitants of Eriador still living where their ancestors had lived. They were of the same ancient stock as the Dunlendings and the Men of the White Mountains, a brown-haired, broad, cheerful people who had settled around the hill of Bree long before the Númenóreans came and who had taken the Common Speech from the kings of Arnor. A few of their place-names, Bree itself and Chetwood and Archet, preserved words of their older language. When Arnor fell and the North Kingdom's people scattered, the Bree-folk simply stayed, kept the inn open and went on with their business, and the memory of kings faded into a saying about times that would return when the king came back.

Bree-land

Bree-land was a small country: the village of Bree on the western slope of the hill, Staddle on the south-east, Combe in a valley to the east, and Archet on the edge of the Chetwood, all within a few miles of each other and ringed by a hedge and dike. Bree stood at the crossing of the Great East Road from the Shire to Rivendell and the old North Road, the Greenway, from Fornost to Tharbad, and though both roads were nearly empty by the end of the Third Age the village lived on the memory and the remnant of their traffic. Its heart was the Prancing Pony, the inn kept by the family of Barliman Butterbur, where dwarves, wandering hobbits and Rangers passed through and where news was the chief commodity. Bree also had a west gate and an east gate in its hedge, shut at nightfall and watched by a gatekeeper.

Men and Hobbits

Bree was the only place in Middle-earth where Men and Hobbits lived in one community. The Big Folk mostly lived in the village of Bree itself and the Little Folk of Bree, who claimed to be the oldest hobbit settlement anywhere, lived mainly in Staddle and on the hill's upper slopes. The two peoples kept their own customs and houses but got along, calling each other neighbours and holding themselves both to be the proper folk of Bree against outsiders. The hobbits of the Shire looked down on Bree as a backwater; Bree, in turn, thought Shire-folk rustic. The art of smoking pipe-weed, according to the Shire's own historians, was learned from Bree, where it was grown on the hill's southern slopes.

Rangers and strangers

The Bree-folk were watchful of strangers but saw many. Rangers came through, dark, weathered men whom the villagers regarded with suspicion and a certain fear, never guessing that they were the last of the kings' people and the reason the Bree-land had had no Orc raid or wolf-pack in living memory. Dwarves passed on the road to the Blue Mountains, and in the last years before the War of the Ring rougher men came up the Greenway from the south, refugees or ruffians, and the villagers grew uneasy.

On 29 September 3018 Frodo and his companions came to the Prancing Pony, met Aragorn there under the name Strider, and were attacked in the night by the Black Riders' agents; the hobbits' ponies were driven off and the inn's rooms wrecked. Bill Ferny, a Bree-man of bad reputation, sold them his half-starved pony and was later revealed as an agent of the ruffians. In the following year Bree suffered as the Shire did: men came up the Greenway in force, there was fighting at the gates in which five Bree-folk, three Men and two hobbits, were killed, and the village shut itself in. When the hobbits returned in October 3019 Butterbur greeted them as heroes and heard, with amazement, that Strider was now the king.

Relations with other peoples

The Bree-folk were friendly to hobbits, tolerant of dwarves, wary of Rangers and hostile to the southern ruffians. They had no dealings with Elves and little knowledge of Gondor. Their kinship with the Dunlendings was one of blood and old language only; they had long forgotten it, and in temper they were as far from the hill-men of the south as the Shire from Dunland.

The Men of Bree were broad, rather short and brown-haired, with cheerful faces and a comfortable build; Butterbur is the type, fat, bald and red-faced. They were not warriors and had no particular skill at arms, though they could defend a gate with sticks and bows when driven to it. They dressed as country folk and innkeepers, and had nothing of the Númenórean look about them.

Bree was a village society without lords. Its Men lived in stone and timber houses, kept inns, farms and small trades, and governed themselves by custom and the opinions of the inn's common room. Their family names were mostly botanical: Butterbur, Ferny, Goatleaf, Heathertoes, Mugwort, Rushlight, Appledore, Thistlewool. They spoke Westron in a slightly old-fashioned country form. Their chief interest was news, and their chief institution was the Prancing Pony, whose common room was the exchange of Eriador. They grew and smoked pipe-weed, and the Shire-hobbits believed the habit had begun in Bree. The gates in the hedge were shut at dark, and the villages of Combe and Archet kept themselves to themselves.

The Men of Bree descended from the first Men to settle Eriador in the Second Age, before the Númenóreans, of the same stock that elsewhere became the Dunlendings and the Men of the Mountains. They settled Bree-hill for its position at the crossing of two roads, took the Common Speech and the ways of the North Kingdom, and outlasted it.

Bree survived the troubles of 3019 with losses at its gates and came under the protection of the Reunited Kingdom. King Elessar's Rangers returned to the roads, the Greenway was reopened, and Bree resumed its old role as the crossroads inn of the north, its people no doubt as unimpressed by the Fourth Age as they had been by the Third.