Bree is a fictional village inJ. R. R. Tolkien'sMiddle-earth, east ofthe Shire. Bree-land, which contains Bree and a few other villages, is the only place whereHobbits andMen lived side by side. It was inspired by the name of theBuckinghamshire village ofBrill, meaning "hill-hill", which Tolkien visited regularly in his early years at theUniversity of Oxford, and informed by his passion for linguistics.
In Bree isThe Prancing Ponyinn, where thewizardGandalf meets theDwarfThorin Oakenshield, setting off the quest toErebor described inThe Hobbit, and whereFrodo Baggins puts on theOne Ring, attracting the attention of the Dark LordSauron's spies and an attack by theBlack Riders.
Scholars have stated that Tolkien chose the placenames of Bree-land carefully, incorporatingCeltic elements into the names to indicate that Bree was older than the Shire, whose placenames are English withOld English elements. Others have commented that Bree functions as a place of transition from the comfort and safety of home to the dangers of the journey that lies ahead.
'Well, Master Underhill', saidStrider, 'if I were you, I should stop your young friends from talking too much. Drink, fire, and chance-meeting are pleasant enough, but, well – this isn't the Shire. There are queer folk about. Though I say it as shouldn't, you may think', he added with a wry smile, seeing Frodo's glance. 'And there have been even stranger travellers through Bree lately', he went on, watching Frodo's face.[T 1]
Bree was the starting point for theFallohide brothers and leaders, Marcho and Blanco, when they travelled west in the year 1601 of theThird Age. They led theirHobbits across the river Baranduin and took the land there to foundthe Shire.[T 2]
Two important events leading up to theWar of the Ring take place atThe Prancing Pony. The first is "a chance-meeting" of theWizardGandalf and the exiledDwarfThorin Oakenshield; this meeting leads to the destruction ofSmaug.[T 3] The second occurs during the journey ofFrodo Baggins toRivendell, when he and his companions stay atThe Prancing Pony for a night. After singingThe Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late, Frodo accidentally slips theOne Ring on his finger, and becomes invisible. The minor villain Bill Ferny and a squint-eyed "Southerner", a person from some land far to the south, see him vanish, and inform the Black Riders, who attack the inn.Aragorn saves him and leads the party away, after the innkeeperBarliman Butterbur delivers a letter from Gandalf which he had forgotten to deliver months earlier.[T 1][T 4]
Bree is an ancient settlement of men inEriador, some 40 miles (64 km) east of the Shire. After the collapse of the kingdom ofArnor, Bree continued to thrive without any central authority for many centuries. As Bree lies at the meeting of two large roadways, the Great East Road and the long disused Greenway or Great North Road,[a] it has for centuries been a centre of trade and a stopping place for travellers. When Arnor in the north waned, Bree's prosperity and size declined.Pipe-weed flourishes on the south-facing side of Bree-hill, and the Hobbits of Bree claim to have been the first to smoke it; travellers on the road includingDwarves,Rangers, andWizards took up the habit when they visited the village on their journeys.[T 2] Directly west of Bree are theBarrow-downs and theOld Forest. Bree is the chief village of Bree-land, and the only place in Middle-earth wheremen and hobbits live side by side. The hobbit community is older than that of the Shire, which was originally colonized from Bree. By the time ofThe Lord of the Rings, Bree is the westernmost settlement of men in Middle-earth, and there is no other settlement of men within a hundred leagues of the Shire.[T 1]Tom Bombadil knows of Bree, saying in his metrical speech "four miles along the road / you'll come upon a village, / Bree under Bree-hill, / with doors looking westward."[2]
Tolkien wrote of two different origins for the people of Bree. One was that Bree had been founded and populated by men of theEdain who did not reachBeleriand in the First Age, remaining east of the mountains in Eriador. The other was that they came from the same stock as theDunlendings.[T 1][T 5]
The Prancing Pony was Bree's inn. It served beer to locals, and provided accommodation and food to travellers. One ofEriador's major cross-roads was just outside the village: the meeting of the Great East Road and the Greenway. The inn was at a road junction in the centre of the village, at the base of the Bree-hill.The Prancing Pony was frequented by Men, Hobbits andDwarves.Bucklanders fromthe Shire occasionally travelled to the inn. The art of smoking pipe-weed was said to have begun in Bree, and fromThe Prancing Pony it spread among the races of Middle-earth. The inn was noted for its fine beer, once sampled by Gandalf.[T 6] The building is described inThe Lord of the Rings:
"Even from the outside the inn looked a pleasant house to familiar eyes. It had a front on the Road, and two wings running back on land partly cut out of the lower slopes of the hill, so that at the rear the second-floor windows were level with the ground. There was a wide arch leading to a courtyard between the two wings, and on the left under the arch there was a large doorway reached by a few broad steps. ... Above the arch there was a lamp, and beneath it swung a largesignboard: a fat whitepony reared up on its hind legs. Over the door was painted in white letters: THE PRANCING PONY by BARLIMAN BUTTERBUR."[T 1]
The philologist J. Wust considers what script the writing over the door was in. He notes that the Hobbits had learnt to write from theDunedain of the Northern kingdom, and could read thePrancing Pony inscription but thatPippin could not read the inscriptions on the houses inMinas Tirith, the city in the Southern land of Gondor. Wust suggests that in the North, a "full writing mode" was used for theTengwar inscriptions, whereas in Gondor, the abbreviatedtehta mode (with dots and marks above or below the consonants to indicate vowel sounds) was employed, presenting the text quite differently.[4]
Tolkien stated that the name "Bree" means "hill"; he justified the name by arranging the village and the surrounding Bree-land around a large hill, named Bree-hill. The name of the village ofBrill, inBuckinghamshire, which Tolkien visited when he was at theUniversity of Oxford and which inspired him to create Bree,[T 7] is constructed exactly the same way:Brill is a modern contraction ofBreʒ-hyll.Both syllables are words for the same thing, "hill" – the first isBrythonic (Celtic) and the secondOld English.[5] The Tolkien scholarTom Shippey writes that the nameBrill's construction, "hill-hill", is "therefore in a way nonsense, exactly parallel withChetwode (or 'wood-wood') in Berkshire close by."[6] The first element "Chet" in "Chetwode" derives from the Brythonicced, meaning "wood".[7]
Shippey notes further that Tolkien stated[T 8] that he had selected Bree-land placenames – Archet, Bree, Chetwood, and Combe – because they "contained non-English elements", which would make them "sound 'queer', to imitate 'a style that we should perhaps vaguely feel to be “Celtic”'."[8] Shippey comments that this was part of Tolkien's "linguisticheresy", his theory thatthe sound of words conveyed both meaning and beauty.[8] The philologist Christopher Robinson writes that Tolkien chose a name to "fit not only its designee, but also the phonological and morphological style of the nomenclature to which it belongs, as well as the linguistic scheme of his invented world."[9] In Robinson's view, Tolkien intentionally selected "Celtic elements that have survived in the place names of England" – likebree andchet – to mark them as older than the Shire placenames which embody "a hint of the past" with their English and Old English elements. All of this indicates the "remarkable care and sophistication" with which Tolkien constructed the "feigned history and translation fromWestron personal and placenames".[9]
![The name "Bree" was inspired by the name of the village of Brill, Buckinghamshire; it contains the Celtic Breʒ and the Old English hyll, both meaning "hill".[6]](/mt/?noimg=&dark=on&url=http%3a%2f%2fen.wikipedia.org%2fwiki%2fFile%3aBrill_village_from_Brill_Common_-_geograph.org.uk_-_538330.jpg)
![Brill, Chetwode etymologies from Brythonic ('Celtic') and Old English[6]](/mt/?noimg=&dark=on&url=http%3a%2f%2fen.wikipedia.org%2fwiki%2fFile%3aBrill%2c_Chetwode.svg)
![Placenames of Bree-land, with the villages of Bree, Combe, Staddle, and Archet in the Chetwood, that Tolkien meant to sound and feel Celtic.[8]](/mt/?noimg=&dark=on&url=http%3a%2f%2fen.wikipedia.org%2fwiki%2fFile%3aBree_Map.svg)
Men of Bree oftenused plant names as surnames, as with the character Bill Ferny. Barliman Butterbur's surname is the name of the herbaceous perennialPetasites hybridus. Tolkien described the butterbur as "a fleshy plant with a heavy flower-head on a thick stalk, and very large leaves." He evidently chose this name as appropriate to a fat man; he suggested that translators use the name of some plant with "butter" in the name if possible, but in any event "a fat thick plant".[T 9][10] The Tolkien scholarRalph C. Wood writes that the forename "Barliman" too is descriptive, hinting at "thehops that he brews" for his inn,[11]barley being the grain used to make beer.[12]
The Tolkien scholarThomas Honegger writes that Bree functions "as a point of transition between the hobbit-homeland and the wide expanse of Eriador",[13] with its mixed population of hobbits and Men. It is clearly separate from the Shire, butits architecture retains "some degree of Shire homeliness and comfort."[13] The inn is "mannish" but it welcomes Hobbits with rooms "built into the hill, thus imitating traditional hobbit-architecture."[13] This made it one ofFrodo's five Homely Houses.[14] Bo Walther, inTolkien Studies, writes that Bree, withThe Prancing Pony inn, is "creepy but also familiar", a place where the Hobbits can begin to face their fear of the unknown, "cheered up by the recognizable bouquet of beer and the sight of jovial hobbit faces."[15]
The scholar of humanitiesBrian Rosebury quotes at length from the Hobbits' approach to Bree and their arrival atThe Prancing Pony, "to bring out the leisurely pace, and the patient attention to sensory impressions, typical of the narrative".[16] He comments that there is much more detail than would be found in anallegory, and that it describes the "emotional experience of arriving at an unfamiliar place: the little-travelled and socially-deferential Sam (Frodo's servant) feels an anxiety from which the others are relatively free."[16] He states that Tolkien sets "both comforting and terrifying events" inThe Prancing Pony, insisting that "it remains resolutely unallegorical": it is "neither a symbol of comfort, nor the abode of giants which it half-appears to Sam".[16] Rosebury adds that theuse of proverbs specific to Bree, like Butterbur's "there's no accounting for East and West as we say in Bree, meaning the Rangers and the Shire-folk, begging your pardon", provides both a comic element and "fix[es] the geographical contact-but-distance between the two communities."[16]
Butterbur appears in bothRalph Bakshi's animated1978 adaptation ofThe Lord of the Rings andPeter Jackson's epic live-action 2001 filmThe Fellowship of the Ring, but in both adaptations most of his scenes are cut. Alan Tilvern voiced Butterbur (credited as "Innkeeper") in the animated film,[18] whileDavid Weatherley played him in Jackson's epic.[19]James Grout played Butterbur inBBC Radio's 1981 serialization ofThe Lord of the Rings.[20] In the 1991 low-budget Russian adaptation ofThe Fellowship of the Ring,Khraniteli, he appears as "Lavr Narkiss", played by Nikolay Burov.[21] In the 1993 television miniseriesHobitit by Finnish broadcaster Yle, Butterbur ("Viljami Voivalvatti" in Finnish, meaning "William Butter") was portrayed by Mikko Kivinen.[22]
In Jackson's film, far from being a friendly place as in the book, Bree is constantly unpleasant and threatening; and whereas in the book the Ring just makes Frodo disappear when he puts it on inThe Prancing Pony,in the film there are special effects with a strong wind, blue light, and the Eye ofSauron.[17] A character credited as "Butterbur, Sr" appears briefly during the prologue of Jackson's 2013The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, portrayed by Richard Whiteside.[23]
Bree and Bree-land are featured prominently in the PC gameThe Lord of the Rings Online, which allows the player to explore the town.[24]
1991 Хранители (фильм-спектакль) Лавр Наркисс
