Whilst The Shire remains the most instantly recog­nis­able loca­tion in Tolkien’s leg­en­dar­ium, it can be argued that three of the best loved loca­tions of The Lord of the Rings are found in the neigh­bour­ing Bree-land.  The Old For­est, the Barrow-downs and Bree itself are the main loca­tions which see the Hob­bits flee from The Shire and begin their great adven­ture.  The chap­ters which detail the jour­ney from Crick­hol­low to the Pranc­ing Pony, The Old For­est, In the House of Tom Bom­badil, Fog on the Barrow-downs and At the Sign of the Pranc­ing Pony are often cited as fans favourites, mine included.  The appeal of read­ing about the seem­ingly help­less Hob­bits blun­der­ing around from peril to deadly peril, with lit­tle or no help, and bear­ing the One Ring, makes for fas­ci­nat­ing reading.

Much of the jour­ney through the Bree-land is com­monly excluded from adap­ta­tions of The Lord of the Rings.  The films by Peter Jack­son and Ralph Bak­shi, as well as the 1981 BBC Radio adap­ta­tion, move straight from The Shire to Bree itself, miss­ing out entirely the adven­tures in the Old For­est and the Barrow-downs.  Addi­tion­ally one of the most impor­tant, and best loved, char­ac­ters of The Lord of the Rings, Tom Bom­badil, has not been included in any of the major adap­ta­tions.  For this rea­son, many play­ers of LotRO who are unfa­mil­iar with the books will expe­ri­ence these loca­tions and char­ac­ters for the first time in-game.

Some quick his­tory.  Bree-land was part of Arnor, the North King­dom.  It stood at the cross­ing of two impor­tant roads, the Great East Road and the Green­way, and was thus an impor­tant set­tle­ment.  Dur­ing the later years of Arnor the land around Bree became divided between Arthedain and Car­dolan, and the var­i­ous ruined walls and for­ti­fi­ca­tions which dot the land­scape in game are evi­dence of the strug­gles which blighted the Dunedain in the North.

The town of Bree itself existed before the Numenore­ans returned to Middle-earth and founded their realms in exile.  It is likely that men, descen­dants of the House of Haleth, dwelling around Gwathlo (Greyflood) in the lands of Min­hiriath and Ened­waith were forced north and east from their homes by the Numenore­ans who began to defor­est the land.  Whilst most of their kind set­tled in the vales of the west­ern Misty Moun­tains (Dun­land) a small num­ber con­tin­ued north, com­ing to the land near the Barrow-downs.  These downs had been set­tled long ago, in the First Age, by the ances­tors of the Edain.  They remained an impor­tant his­toric site to the Numenore­ans dur­ing the Sec­ond Age, and indeed were used as a major set­tle­ment, and finally refuge, by the peo­ples of Cardolan.

By the time of the Third Age Bree-land is a well estab­lished, yet iso­lated, set­tle­ment of small towns and vil­lages.  As well as Bree itself the land includes the vil­lages of Archet, Coombe and Stad­dle.  The once thriv­ing area is in ter­mi­nal decline how­ever.  Lit­tle to no trade comes up the Green­way from the south any­more, and the lands imme­di­ately out­side the set­tle­ments are dan­ger­ous and wild.  Bree-land, like The Shire, is an island in the wilder­ness.  The peo­ple of Bree are obliv­i­ous to their peril, how­ever, and carry on with their lives much as they ever did.  They note that strangers have been com­ing up the Green­way, and that times are cer­tainly hard, but they have no knowl­edge of events out­side their own lands, much like their Hob­bit neighbours.

Bree-land in game is a pleas­ant, rural area, not dis­sim­i­lar to The Shire, if not quite as idyl­lic.  The set­tle­ments clus­ter around the cen­tre of the map and the zone is neatly dis­sected by the Green­way and East-West Roads.  The two main quest­ing areas, the Old For­est and Barrow-downs, are tucked in the south-west cor­ner and quite self-contained.  The open fields and relaxed, coun­try­side feel to the zone seem quite authen­tic.  You do get the impres­sion that inhab­i­tants of Bree-land could almost be for­given for think­ing that all was well in the world.  A typ­i­cal Bree-lander would never dream of ven­tur­ing any­where near the Bar­rows or the Old For­est, and those who do form the basis of in-game quests.

So how do the main areas of the zone com­pare to their depic­tion in the books?  Let’s start with the Old For­est.  The Hob­bits move through this area slowly, feel­ing oppressed, threat­ened and gen­er­ally gloomy.  This is actu­ally often the response play­ers have to the zone, although they will claim that this is due to frus­tra­tion at not being able to find their way around.  Cer­tainly, the Old For­est is a very easy place to get lost in.  You will find that, unless you know exactly where you are going, most paths do lead, just like in the book, to Old Man Wil­low.  The instant power-drain you get from just being near the tree is a nice way to express the effect that the Hob­bits felt when they were lulled into a near fatal sleep next to the roots.  There are a few too many mobs in the zone for it to be really con­vinc­ing how­ever.  There were no wolves or bats in the books, and cer­tainly no other Hob­bits.  How­ever, you have to have some­thing other than trees to kill, so this is understandable.

The Barrow-downs, the sec­ond major encounter for the Hob­bits, are instantly threat­en­ing in game.  Wights and other nas­ties are walk­ing about all over the place, which is a major depar­ture from what Tolkien tells us about the area.  In The Fel­low­ship of the Ring, the downs are “silent except for the whis­per of air over the edges of the land”.  Tur­bine attempt to show that the Hob­bits pas­sage through the downs has dis­turbed the slum­ber of the Wights and also that the rise of Angmar once again in the north has roused all evil things.  Again, empty zones, whilst being true to the depic­tion in the books, make for dull game­play.  Inter­est­ingly, Tur­bine have added a ruin to the south of the Barrow-downs, Ost Gorthad (lit­er­ally, City of the Bar­rows).   This is pre­sum­ably intended to be what’s left of the cap­i­tal of Car­dolan, which is never actu­ally men­tioned in Tolkien.

In between the Old For­est and the Barrow-downs, we meet Tom Bom­badil.  I know that some play­ers find Tom a lit­tle annoy­ing, but for the major­ity the time when they first meet him in game is a high­light.  Every­thing about the encounter is superbly well done.  Tom looks like he’s sup­posed to look.  His house sits between two areas of dread yet man­ages to appear wel­com­ing and homely.  The music which kicks in when you approach his house is among the best in the game.  Even stand­ing next to him gives you hope.  He’s child­like, skip­ping around singing to him­self, seem­ingly unin­ter­ested in events around him.  Exactly like he is in the books.

The town of Bree itself must have been a tricky place to design in game.  Eri­ador has no cities, no cap­i­tal.  It has vil­lages in The Shire, it has the town of Bree and it has Riven­dell.  MMO’s will usu­ally have a large city, full of quests and ser­vices, which is acces­si­ble to all at a very early stage of the game.  In LotRO, this is Bree.  How­ever, Bree in the books is quite a bit smaller than cap­i­tal cities in other games.  So the Bree we see in game is larger and busier than the Bree which Tolkien describes to us in The Fel­low­ship of the Ring.  Indeed, Bree is described in sev­eral places as a ‘Vil­lage’, not a town at all.

Tolkien tells us that Bree had some “hun­dred stone houses.….mostly above the road”.  In game, most of the set­tle­ments are actu­ally south of the road.  There are Hob­bit holes, cor­rectly placed above the Big-folk houses, on the slopes of the Bree-hill.  In game, we can see part of an older set­tle­ment in areas of Bree.  There are walls and ruins which have been built around them, very much like a mod­ern Eng­lish town such as Chester.  There is no sug­ges­tion that Tolkien’s Bree had such design, but it makes for inter­est­ing explor­ing.   The iconic build­ing in Bree is, of course, The Pranc­ing Pony.  The Inn is prob­a­bly larger in the game than in the book, but the gen­eral shape of the build­ing is well done.  The Com­mon Room seems very well designed, if a lit­tle less smoky in game than it is in print.

Bree-land is the base for many of the ear­lier Epic Book quests.  The events, as with many other areas, see us clean­ing up after The Ring has passed through the area.  We assist the Rangers in pro­tect­ing first Archet and then Bree-land itself from attack from south­ern invaders.  These are men from Dun­land, in the ser­vice of Saru­man.  What we see in game is an early sign of the occu­pa­tion of Bree-land and The Shire by Saru­man.  We also meet with Bom­badil and ven­ture into the Barrow-downs, being res­cued in much the same way as the Hob­bits were.  Orcs and gob­lins have moved into the north of the region, pre­sum­ably from Angmar.  There is even a Giant who has strayed into the north-west.  We get no sense of hos­tile crea­tures being actu­ally in Bree-land in The Lord of the Rings, but we know that the Rangers pro­tect the bor­ders from an unnamed threat, and Tur­bine are able to use this to intro­duce chal­lenges to areas which on the face of it seem to be wilderness.

Of course, unlike Peter Jack­son, Tur­bine had no choice but to include the Old For­est and the Barrow-downs in their adap­ta­tion, so just being able to visit these places is won­der­ful.  Whilst Bree-town may be a rather unfaith­ful, yet func­tional, rep­re­sen­ta­tion, and the area of Bree-land itself rather a pedes­trian area, the areas of the Old For­est and the Barrow-downs are very well rep­re­sented in game and ren­der the build­ing of Bree-land a success.

Related posts

• Why LotRO?: Story, Lore and Those Less Fanatic (2)
• What Works and What Doesn’t (6)
• Video Tour of Bree (2)
• Turbine and the ‘Lore’: Part 2. Game Mechanics (9)
• Turbine and the ‘Lore’. (7)