The Great Tolkien Reread: At the Sign of the Prancing Pony, Strider

"The Prancing Pony" by Tomás Hijo

There were also many families of hobbits in the Bree-land, and they claimed to be the oldest settlement of Hobbits in the world, one that was founded long before even the Brandywine was crossed and the Shire colonized. They lived mostly in Staddle though there were some in Bree itself, especially on the higher slopes of the hill, above the houses of the Men. The Big Folk and the Little Folk (as they called one another) were on friendly terms, minding their own affairs in their own ways, but both rightly regarding themselves as necessary parts of the Bree-folk. Nowhere else in the world was this peculiar (but excellent) arrangement to be found.

After several chapters spent in the wilderness, the hobbits return to civilization with their arrival at the village of Bree. Which is a rare example in this book of a location that is the home of ordinary people, not royalty or high elves, and which is both familiar and not. On the one hand, it is a place whose rules are understood by the hobbits, and much-missed by them (when introducing their company to innkeeper Barliman Butterbur, Frodo refers to himself, Merry, and Pippin as "Mr.", and Sam as "Sam Gamgee"). On the other hand, it is the hobbits' first prolonged encounter with the Big People and with places designed for their comfort, and they find it disorienting ("Sam stared up at the inn with its three storeys and many windows, and felt his heart sink").

This confused quality is obviously useful to Tolkien. It makes Bree a transitional space where the hobbits begin to flip over from a world where nearly everyone they meet is of their kind, to one where they are the minority, and eventually, creatures out of legend. But as the quote above suggests, it's a choice that throws up a startling worldbuilding detail: alone among all the settlements of Middle Earth, Bree is a place where humans and hobbits—or perhaps, any two different races—coexist.

Tolkien is a writer who thinks deeply about how people move through a landscape, and how communities form in places that are hospitable to habitation. We saw this already in the "Concerning Hobbits" prologue, which elaborated on how hobbits traveled towards and eventually settled the Shire. We see it in the opening paragraphs of "At the Sign of The Prancing Pony", which offer a brief history of how both humans and hobbits came to live in the four villages that make up Bree. We will see it again in The Silmarillion, in which the colonization of Middle Earth by elves and humans is related. It is therefore hard to know how to react to this insistence that all other settlements in Middle Earth are ethnically homogenous. After thousands of years of living on the same continent, there should be dwarf neighborhoods in Minas Tirith, and human settlements near Lothlórien. It's not until the novel calls attention to Bree as the exception that you realize how strange it is that these other examples do not exist.

As I wrote in the introduction to this series, one of my goals with it is to talk about Tolkien as an intentional writer, but nevertheless I am not sure he understood how loaded a worldbuilding choice this was. It may simply have been more convenient to treat every other location in the book as uniform in its population. But although "At the Sign of The Prancing Pony" has little more to say about Bree's uniquely heterogenous nature, it is concerned with how the movement of populations affects, and destabilizes, the communities they encounter.

The Men and Dwarves were mostly talking of distant events and telling news of a kind that was becoming only too familiar. There was trouble away in the South, and it seemed that the Men who had come up the Greenway were on the move, looking for lands where they could find some peace. The Bree-folk were sympathetic, but plainly not very ready to take a large number of strangers into their little land. One of the travelers, a squint-eyed ill-favored fellow, was foretelling that more and more people would be coming north in the near future. 'If room isn't found for them, they'll find it for themselves. They've a right to live, same as other folk,' he said loftily. The local inhabitants did not look pleased at the prospect.

For the rest of The Lord of the Rings, we will have little time to talk about how the war it depicts creates crises of refugeeism and displacement. But Bree, as noted, is a rare example in this novel of a town where ordinary people live, and as such it has the ordinary—if also horrible—problem of what happens when refugees show up on your doorstep. As we see in these two chapters, what happens (at least to begin with) is that normal models of trust break down. It is no longer possible to say that outsiders are suspicious and locals are trustworthy. When trouble is made by newcomers to Bree, it's with the connivance of local boys Bill Ferny and the gate guard. And though Butterbur correctly identifies the Black Riders as a menace who are not to be trusted, he quickly lumps them in with the Rangers and Strider, the very people who have been protecting him from them.

The breakdown of trust models becomes more pressing for the hobbits in "Strider", in which they must decide whether trust the title character. And to be clear, it is Strider we are talking about at this point; not Aragorn, who will not appear until at least Rivendell. The person we meet in these chapters is something closer to the ground; more cynical, more roguish, bleakly amused at his situation. On a second reading, you can sense Strider's frustration with the problem of getting Frodo to trust him. Anything he could say that was a secret between Frodo and Gandalf might be seen as proof that he is a spy. Anything ingratiating could be taken as manipulation. So instead he chooses to be mysterious and a little overbearing, the prototype for every D&D rogue-style character of the last six or seven decades. 

What these imitations miss, however, is that Frodo clocks this as a performance almost at once—"I think you are not really as you choose to look. You began to talk to me like the Bree-folk, but your voice has changed"—and that Strider himself is putting on this performance at least partly in the hopes that the hobbits will see through it.

'As soon as I had made up my mind, I was ready to tell you whatever you asked. But I must admit,' he added with a queer laugh, 'that I hoped you would take to me for my own sake. A hunted man sometimes wearies of distrust and longs for friendship. But there, I believe my looks are against me.'

When Frodo finally decides that Strider is not a servant of the Enemy, it is because "I think one of his spies would—well, seem fairer and feel fouler". Strider, who is really going through some stuff in these chapters, takes this kind of personally. But really, this is just the starting pistol for his journey of transformation. What will begin with setting the Strider persona aside will end with him being described as "kingly" in practically every other sentence. So don't worry, Aragorn: soon everyone will think you both look and feel fair.

Next time: On April 7th, the desperate, final race to Rivendell is covered in "A Knife in the Dark" and "Flight to the Ford"

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