There's no doubt that the Butterburs had kept the Prancing Pony inn in Bree for an exceptionally long time, but it is difficult to judge precisely how long that time might have been. All we know for sure is that they had been landlords from a time before records were kept, but this tells us little. The very earliest Shire records were in the book known as Yellowskin, going back some nine centuries before the War of the Ring, but there is no way to be sure whether a similar date applied in the Bree-land. Realistically speaking, nine hundred years does seem to be an extraordinarily long time, and the family was likely rather younger than this. As a counterexample, though, the Brandybucks could trace their ancestry back more than a thousand years, so nine hundred years of Butterburs may not be absolutely impossible.

Though the Butterburs were noted as the keepers of the Inn of Bree, it hardly seems plausible that every single member of the family would have remained there over a period of perhaps centuries. By the end of the Third Age, there were doubtless other Butterburs to be found elsewhere in the Bree-land, or perhaps even farther afield.

The butterbur (Petasites hybridus) is a low-growing plant with fleshy leaves and reddish-pink flowers. Butterburs prefer to grow in watery conditions, which perhaps connects the family name of Butterbur with the Midgewater Marshes that lay near Bree.