Bree (Middle-earth)
It was inspired by the name of the Buckinghamshire village of Brill, meaning "hill-hill", which Tolkien visited regularly in his early years at the University of Oxford, and informed by his passion for linguistics.
In Bree is The Prancing Pony inn, where the wizard Gandalf meets the Dwarf Thorin Oakenshield, setting off the quest to Erebor described in The Hobbit, and where Frodo Baggins puts on the One Ring, attracting the attention of the Dark Lord Sauron's spies and an attack by the Black Riders.
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.
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.
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 including Dwarves, Rangers, and Wizards took up the habit when they visited the village on their journeys.
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.
Above the arch there was a lamp, and beneath it swung a large signboard: a fat white pony reared up on its hind legs.
[5] The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey writes that the name Brill's construction, "hill-hill", is "therefore in a way nonsense, exactly parallel with Chetwode (or 'wood-wood') in Berkshire close by.
[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] 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.
[T 9][10] The Tolkien scholar Ralph C. Wood writes that the forename "Barliman" too is descriptive, hinting at "the hops that he brews" for his inn,[11] barley being the grain used to make beer.
[12] The Tolkien scholar Thomas 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.
"[15] The scholar of humanities Brian Rosebury quotes at length from the Hobbits' approach to Bree and their arrival at The 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 an allegory, 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.
Alan Tilvern voiced Butterbur (credited as "Innkeeper") in the animated film,[18] while David Weatherley played him in Jackson's epic.
[17] A character credited as "Butterbur, Sr" appears briefly during the prologue of Jackson's 2013 The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, portrayed by Richard Whiteside.
