This chapter marks, in many ways, the end of the beginning of LotR. Bree might not be the Shire, but it’s certainly within the Hobbits’ understanding. It’s safe enough and familiar enough. When Frodo & company leave Bree, they are leaving the areas that Hobbits know and are venturing into the wild. It’s a marked change in the story.
It starts out with us getting a glimpse of Fatty Bolger, back in Buckland. The Black Riders have come to call, and naturally that’s the end of Fatty. Nah, just kidding. Hobbits, as Tolkien has told us more than once, are tougher than one might expect. Fatty didn’t cower and hide - he ran, but he ran to sound the alarm. And the Black Riders bailed. Go Fatty!
They find out that their rooms at the Prancing Pony (which Strider had kept them out of) had been attacked, and all their ponies (and every other horse in the place) are missing from the stable. So after a bit of discussion, they look to buy a baggage pony cause it’s a long way to Rivendell. Enter Bill the Pony. Hi, Bill! We love you!
And so the great walk to Rivendell begins. It starts out pleasant (the Chetwood around Bree), then becomes unpleasant (the Midgewater Marshes) (“It’s more midges than water!” “What do they eat when they can’t get Hobbit?”), and then bleak and dreary (the open land between the marshes and Weathertop).
The Weather Hills are kind of like my dream place to just go and explore. A line of hills, with ruined fortresses on the tops, and many of the passes between guarded by ruined fortifications, with a hidden path running the entire length of the hills. I could spend a very happy day backpacking on those hills.
Or I could, if not for Tolkien’s previously mentioned gift for conveying a really rich atmosphere. In this case, there’s a gradually growing feeling of dread for me as the reader, and it matches perfectly what the Hobbits and Strider are feeling:
Senses, too, there are other than sight or smell. We can feel their presence – it troubled our hearts, as soon as we came here, and before we saw them.
We also get some solid clues that Frodo & company are only part of a bigger story – specifically, they find evidence that Gandalf had been there 3 nights previously, and that there was something happening that involved Harry Dresden levels of fire. A night when Frodo and Strider had both seen some odd flashing lights far away in the eastern sky, in a truly remarkable coincidence.
And here we get a great example of how Tolkien’s worldbuilding is unique. They know the Riders are coming, and their best option is to fort up as best they can. And to kill time, Strider tells the story of Beren and Lúthien. It’s a big worldbuilding moment because it gives us readers the deepest indicator yet of just how deep the lore of this world goes – this is a full fledged mythological tale that Strider provides as a campfire story. And it’s uniquely Tolkien in that it was written to have nothing to do with this story. Most stories-within-a-story that one finds in fantasy stories (Fleet from Stormlight, Selitos from Kingkiller, etc) exist to serve a purpose within the greater narrative. This is the other way around. Beren and Lúthien existed long before Frodo, or Bilbo, or Hobbits at all, and the narrative of Lord of the Rings was shaped to fit that preexisting history, not the other way around.
I don’t want to delve too deeply into Beren and Lúthien (because if nothing else, if I’m ambitious enough I might do a Silmarillion read-along after this), but I do want to touch on one point. Tolkien often gets credit for a lack of women, and it’s a complaint that’s not without merit. The Hobbit contains precisely zero women, for example, and the Fellowship is all-male. But if you’re going to point that out, it’s also fair to point out that Tolkien also created Lúthien and Galadriel and Eówyn and Morwen. Lúthien kicks all sorts of butt. When her father Elu Thingol, King of Doriath, sends the uppity mortal Beren on the traditional impossibly dangerous quest to win his daughter’s hand (on the assumption that he won’t return), Lúthien follows close behind him and they complete the quest as partners, side by side. Take that, gender norms!
In a related bit of authorial interest, after his wife Edith died, Tolkien had her gravestone inscribed with “Lúthien” as an epitaph. When Tolkien himself passed two years later, their children gave him the epitaph “Beren.”
As for the actual attack by the Black Riders – they’re freaking scary:
Art is, as always, done by the immensely talented Jian Guo.
So why did the Riders run? Several reasons. One, Strider is a singular individual – they were not expecting any resistance, and the Riders can in fact be killed. They weren’t prepared to face one of the greatest Men of the Age, and there was no particular reason for them to stay and fight. They didn’t know who they were facing, but just by the fact that he was prepared to face them they knew he was formidable. Frodo had been stabbed by the Morgul blade, and the Riders had every reason to think that he was done for.
Friday, our heroes hop on their eagles and take a Flight to the Ford, because obviously terms such as “fly” or “flight” or “flew” can only ever mean "literally flying on the back of an eagle," and not "hurrying." Obviously.