Bree (Middle-earth)
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 Bree is a fictional village in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, east of the Shire and south of Fornost Erain. It is sometimes said 1 to have been inspired by the Buckinghamshire village of Brill which Tolkien visited regularly in his early years at Oxford (supposedly Tolkien also lived in Brill for a short while). Bree was a very ancient settlement of men in Eriador by the time of the Third Age of Middle-earth, but after the collapse of the kingdom of Cardolan, which had claimed it, Bree continued to thrive without any central authority or government for many centuries. As Bree lies at the meeting of two large roadways, the Great East Road and the (now disused) Greenway, it had for centuries been a center of trade and stopping place for travellers, though as Arnor in the north waned its prosperity declined. Bree was the most westerly settlement of men in all Middle-earth by the time of the War of the Ring, and became one of only three or four inhabited settlements in all of Eriador. During the War of the Ring a day's ride east from the village along the road lay The Forsaken Inn, according to Aragorn, although nothing else is known of that place. Directly west of Bree were the Barrow-downs and the Old Forest. Bree was the chief village of Breeland, a small wooded region near the intersection of the main north-south and east-west routes through Eriador. Breeland was the only part of Middle-earth where Men and hobbits dwelt side by side. The name Bree means hill, according to Tolkien, referring to the fact that the village of Bree and the surrounding Breelands were clustered around a large hill. There were three villages in Breeland in addition to Bree proper. The name of the village Brill, which Bree may well be influenced by, has an interesting meaning. Quoted from the Brill Village Website- "Our name means 'hill' - twice over. Brill is a modern abbreviation of Bre-hyll. Both syllables of Bre-hyll mean ‘hill’ – the first is Celtic, and the second Anglo-Saxon."
Bree was said to be founded and populated by men who did not make it to Beleriand in the first age, having forsaken their relatives who would become the edain, east of the mountains and remained in Eriador. Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
In The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo Baggins met Strider (Aragorn) at the largest and most popular inn in Bree, The Prancing Pony, owned by Barliman Butterbur. Later on in Fellowship, some of the Ringwraiths attempted to kill the hobbits, but Strider anticipated them, and the hobbits were in his room instead of their own when the Black Riders struck. Gandalf later said that the Riders actually threw down the gates of the town and rode through it like a fierce wind and that all the Bree folk were left cowering and expecting the end of the world. The hobbits also returned to Bree near the end of the story, on their way home. Bree is also the place where, earlier, seemingly by accident, Gandalf and Thorin Oakenshield met. They were both thinking about the same problem: the Dragon Smaug at the Lonely Mountain. The meeting led to the undertaking of the Quest of Erebor, which resulted in the death of Smaug and the finding of the One Ring by Bilbo Baggins. If Smaug had lived until the War of the Ring, he would have posed a serious threat. In Peter Jackson's movie The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo and his companions arrive at Bree almost immediately after the scene in which they leave the Shire, giving the impression (perhaps unintentionally) that the two are much closer together than described by Tolkien.
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