Where Did The Refugees in Bree Come From?

Q: Where Did the Refugees in Bree Come From?

ANSWER: In the chapter “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony” Barliman Butterbur tells Frodo and his companions that a party had come up the Greenway the night before. Tolkien doesn’t say much about them, but a little later on the chapter includes:

The Men and Dwarves were mostly talking of distant events and telling flews 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 travellers, a squint-eyed ill-favoured 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 loudly. The local inhabitants did not look pleased at the prospect.

According to “Appendix B: The Tale of Years”, the Black Riders crossed the Fords of Isen on September 18, 3018. Frodo arrived at Bree on September 29, so the refugees would have arrived on September 28. There is no further mention of the refugees from the south in The Lord of the Rings but Tolkien provided an explanation for where they came from in “The Hunt for the Ring”, which was published in Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth. There, in a passage describing how the Nazgul had failed to find any trace of Gollum or the Ring near the Gladden Fields, Tolkien wrote:

At length they returned; but the summer was now far waned, and the wrath and fear of Sauron was mounting. When they came back to the Wold September had come; and there they met messengers from Barad-dûr conveying threats from their Master that filled even the Morgul-lord with dismay. For Sauron had now learned of the words of prophecy heard in Gondor, and the going forth of Boromir, of Saruman’s deeds, and the capture of Gandalf. From these things he concluded indeed that neither Saruman nor any other of the Wise had possession yet of the Ring, but that Saruman at least knew where it might be hidden. Speed alone would now serve, and secrecy must be abandoned.
The Ringwraiths therefore were ordered to go straight to Isengard. They rode then through Rohan in haste, and the terror of their passing was so great that many folk fled from the land, and went wildly away north and west, believing that war out of the East was coming on the heels of the black horses.

One gathers from this story that more than just one band of people fled north. While some obviously made it as far north as Bree it does not follow that all of them would necessarily have wanted to go that far north. Given that many people in western Rohan possessed Dunlending blood it seems reasonable to infer that some might have been satisfied to settle in Dunland. Others seen to have arrived at Bree after the first party, according to Barliman in “Homeward Bound”:

But he did say much on his own account. Things were far from well, he would say. Business was not even fair, it was downright bad. ‘No one comes nigh Bree now from Outside,’ he said. ‘And the inside folks, they stay at home mostly and keep their doors barred. It all comes of those newcomers and gangrels that began coming up the Greenway last year, as you may remember; but more came later. Some were just poor bodies running away from trouble; but most were bad men, full o’ thievery and mischief. And there was trouble right here in Bree, bad trouble. Why, we had a real set-to, and there were some folk killed, killed dead! If you’ll believe me.’

The refugees could thus have been Rohirrim, Dunlendings living close to Isengard, or a mixture of both. They could have settled near the Bree-land because of the friendly welcome they received from the Bree-folk, but they could also have settled in other parts of Eriador. There is no way to know if they were troubled by the Ruffians whom Saruman sent north to harass the Bree-folk and the Shire.

See also:

• Why Did the Bree-land Survive the Decline of Eriador?
• How Deserted Was Eriador in the Late Third Age?
• Strange As News From Bree (Essay Archive)
• Who Attacked the Inn and Slashed the Bolsters in Bree?
• Who Are the Foes Who Live Within a Day’s March of Bree?

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