Strange as news from Bree...
© Michael Martinez
Word has it that we won't see much of Bree in Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" movies. Bree is the little village east of the Shire where Frodo and his companions meet up with Aragorn (who is known there as Strider). I expect most of the Bree scenes will deal with how the Hobbits come to travel with the Ranger, and the movie will just move on. Will we even see Bree in the third movie? It's too early to say.
It seems a shame that Bree will be given so little screen time, but I suppose if someone ever creates a television series based on the movies there is a good chance they'll base it on Bree. The 1980s mini-series "Anne of Green Gables", starring Megan Follows, led to a sequel mini-series and finally a television series which lacked both Anne and Megan and that really had nothing to do with the Anne/Green Gables stories. It was just set in the town where Anne eventually grew up.
Would such a television series do Bree right, I wonder? Unfortunately, the movies won't do it right. Jackson's Bree is a pseudo-medieval set and it's not yet clear that Bree hill is anywhere around. (This is one of Tolkien's linguistic jokes, btw: "Bree" means "hill", so the town of Bree is actually the village of "Hill" -- can it be the same without the hill?)
Tolkien says so little about Bree I wouldn't be surprised to find that many people miss a great deal of the information he actually provides the reader. Bree is hardly a thriving metropolis. Tolkien says it contained about 100 stone houses "of the Big Folk". The majority of the houses were situated on the hillside and they had windows looking west (so they were on the western side of the hill). The village was protected by a deep dike and a hedge which ran in a half-circle away from the hill on the western side. The great road passed through the western side of the hedge and exited on the southeast corner, going round the hill.
A dike and hedge for 100 stone houses. That description implies a great deal of wealth existed at some time in Bree's past. Building with stone is not so rare in some regions where stone is easy to be had, but even the hobbits tended to build with brick in the Shire. So Bree apparently had access to a quarry, a valuable asset in the larger economy of Eriador in past times when there would have been more people and some demand for stone.
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