Beorn

The name Beorn is given without gloss in the book that tells his story, and Tolkien nowhere explains it inside the narrative; it is an Old English word for a man or warrior, and behind that an older poetic term for a bear, so that the two shapes its bearer takes are held together in a single word. That silent doubling is characteristic of the way the men of the upper Anduin are named in the same book, whose speech is rendered throughout in northern forms rather than translated into Common Speech. The pronunciation follows the rules Tolkien set out for names of this kind: the vowels of the first syllable are sounded separately as a falling diphthong, not run together into a single English sound. He is called a skin-changer in the text, a term used of him and of nobody else, and reported rather than defined — the word arrives in Gandalf's mouth as something the travellers are expected to find alarming, and no account of the mechanics of the change is offered anywhere.

What people he belonged to is left genuinely open. He lives among no kindred and claims no lineage, and the two possibilities the narrative sets side by side — descent from the bears that held the mountains in an earlier age, or descent from the earliest men of that country — are alternatives, not stages of one explanation. Neither is confirmed later. In the classification of the later histories he is counted with Men, and his descendants are plainly a people of Men who speak their own tongue and live by their own law; but the record of his own generation gives no father, no origin in the west or the south, and no arrival from anywhere. He is simply present in the land between the mountains and the forest when the story reaches him, in a hall he built and beside a rock he named.

One further name attaches to him only by inheritance. The people who took their name from his — the Beornings of the later histories — are so called after him, and their lords carry the name forward in compounded form, so that a personal name became first a dynastic one and then the name of a nation holding a stretch of the Anduin. The reverse process is visible in the geography he shaped: the Carrock is his own coinage, a plain descriptive word for the rock he had climbed and cut, and he is said to have called it that because rock was the only word he had for such things. The book presents this as a small joke at his expense and also as a fair account of how names are made in the north — flatly, from the thing itself, without ceremony.

Beorn enters the record in the summer of 2941 of the Third Age, when Gandalf brought Thorin Oakenshield's company to his door after their flight from the goblin tunnels of the Misty Mountains and their rescue from the wargs by the Eagles. The travellers had been set down on a tall rock standing in the Anduin, which Beorn himself had named the Carrock and up which he had cut the steps; his timber hall lay a short march eastward, on the near edge of the lands between the mountains and Mirkwood. Gandalf, who alone of the party had met him before, managed the introduction with care, telling the story of the journey in instalments and letting the dwarves appear two at a time so that their host's patience should not be spent all at once. The tactic worked: Beorn, who had no particular love for dwarves and no reason to trust strangers, was drawn in by the account of goblins slain in the tunnels and stayed to hear it out.

He did not take the tale on faith. That night he left the hall and was gone until the following evening, riding out to see for himself what had happened in the mountains; when he returned he had found the gathering-place of the wargs and goblins and confirmed every particular, and a warg's hide and a goblin's head were set up outside his gate as notice of his verdict. Satisfied, he turned host in earnest. He furnished the company with provisions that would keep — bread of a kind that stayed good for long journeying, nuts, dried fruit, jars of honey — with skins for water, and with bows and arrows, and lent them ponies for the road east and a horse for the wizard, on the strict condition that all the beasts be sent back at the eaves of Mirkwood. With them went his warnings: that the forest road was not to be left on any account, and that the dark water crossing it was not to be drunk or bathed in.

The animals were returned as he had required, and Beorn passes out of the narrative for the length of the journey through Mirkwood and the events at Erebor. He reappears at the crisis of the battle fought before the Lonely Mountain later that same year, arriving alone and in bear's shape after the fighting had turned against the allied host. His coming broke the goblin line: he scattered the guard about Bolg, the captain of the orcs out of the North, and killed him, and the leaderless host gave way. In the same onset he lifted Thorin, mortally hurt, out of the press and carried him clear. Bilbo, who was invisible and then senseless for much of the day, saw none of this; the account in the record is what he was told afterwards.

Beorn travelled west again with Gandalf and Bilbo when they left the Mountain, and the two guests wintered in his hall, arriving near Yule and staying until the passes were open; the hobbit remembered the midwinter there as the most comfortable stretch of the whole journey, with people of the neighbourhood coming in to feast and hear the news. In spring Beorn escorted them as far as the mountain road and turned back. What followed for him is summarised rather than narrated: he became a chief among the men of that country and ruled a wide territory between the mountains and the forest, and in his time and that of his heirs the last of the goblins were driven out of the northern range, so that a measure of peace came to the borders of the Wild that had not been there before.

In the shape of the narrative Beorn occupies a position between two wildernesses: he holds the ground on the near side of Mirkwood where the mountain road comes down to the river, and travellers pass through his country or not at all. He belongs to no people that the record names, keeps no company, and answers to no authority; Gandalf, introducing him, gave two competing accounts of what he was — a descendant of the old bears of the mountains from before the coming of the giants, or a man of the first inhabitants of that country from before Smaug and the goblins were in the hills — and declined to say which he believed. The wizard was more definite on one point: whatever the change of shape was, it was not laid on Beorn by anyone else, but was his own. He is thus the rare figure in these books whose power is neither inherited from the Elder Days nor granted by a ring, a smith, or a lord.

The abilities set down are few and consistent. He passes between man-shape and bear-shape apparently at will, taking the bear at night and covering long distances in it — the journey to the mountains and back inside a day and a night is the measured instance — and in that form he is strong enough to break a line of goblins single-handed, which is the only occasion on which he is shown fighting at all. Beyond the change itself no magic is attributed to him. What surrounds him instead is a household of animals: ponies, dogs, sheep and horses that understand his speech, carry and serve at his table, and are not eaten by him or by his guests, since he keeps no flesh in his hall and lives on cream, honey, bread and his own bees. He speaks to them in a tongue of animal sounds, which is described but not explained.

The limits are as plain as the powers. At the time of the quest Beorn commands nothing and no one beyond his hall and his beasts; his help is given personally, in food, mounts and warning, and it stops at the edge of the forest, which he will not enter and beyond which he would not send his ponies. He works no enchantment on the road ahead and offers no counsel on the dragon or the treasure, in which he takes no interest; his warnings about Mirkwood are those of a neighbour who knows the outside of a place rather than a guide who knows its interior. His intervention at the Lonely Mountain was made alone and unasked, and after it he went home. The power that grew afterwards was of a different kind — territorial, held with his kin, and exercised over a stretch of country rather than in any single feat.

Every connection Beorn has to the wider story runs through Gandalf, and the two are shown as acquaintances rather than allies. The wizard knew enough of his temper to warn the company that their host could be appalling when roused and agreeable when handled well, and he arranged the visit accordingly, without ever suggesting that Beorn could be asked for anything as a matter of obligation. The one lateral link in the conversation is Radagast, whom Gandalf named as a kinsman of his own living near the southern eaves of Mirkwood; Beorn knew the name and allowed that, measured against wizards generally, that one was tolerable. It is a small exchange, but it shows how he ranked people: by what he had seen of them in his own country, not by rank or reputation carried from elsewhere.

With the travellers themselves he made a clear distinction. The dwarves he tolerated as a group and never warmed to individually; his interest was in their news, and his hospitality was extended to the party rather than to any of them. Bilbo he singled out almost at once, prodding at the hobbit's waistcoat, laughing at his size and appetite and fixing on him a nickname taken from the small creatures of his own farmyard. The teasing is not incidental: Beorn treated the least dangerous member of the company as the most interesting, and it was the hobbit, not the leader of the expedition, whom he kept talking to.

Beorn appears in the second and third parts of Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy, played by the Swedish actor Mikael Persbrandt, who performed the man-shape on set while the bear was realised digitally. The films give him a history that the novel does not: he is presented as the last surviving member of his kind, the rest having been hunted down and destroyed by the orcs of the North, and he himself is said to have been held captive by them before escaping. This converts the flat, unexplained hatred of goblins recorded in the book into a personal grievance with a stated cause, and it closes the question the novel deliberately leaves open about what he was and where he came from. It also contradicts the book's remark that the change of shape continued in his descendants for generations, since a Beorn who is the last skin-changer can have no such line. The careful managed introduction at the hall, with the company presented a few at a time while Gandalf spun out the tale, is dropped in favour of a pursuit: the travellers reach the house with the bear behind them.

His part in the battle before the Lonely Mountain is likewise rearranged. In the third film he is carried to the field by the Eagles in company with Radagast, rather than arriving alone, on foot and unlooked-for after the fighting has turned; the killing of Bolg is given to another character, and the rescue of the wounded Thorin from the press is not shown at all. Nothing corresponding to the return journey follows, so the winter spent in his hall and his escort of the travellers back to the mountain road have no place in the trilogy, and he does not appear again after the battle. The earlier animated television version of the novel, made for American broadcast, cuts him out of the story altogether, taking the company from their rescue in the mountains to the edge of Mirkwood without a halt; the adaptations drawn from The Lord of the Rings have no occasion for him, since in that book he is only named in report.