Does Beorn exist in the continuity of LORD OF THE RINGS?

Cafe Society
1

Let me explain what I mean.

As many of you know, The Hobbit was not originally part of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth legendarium, by which I mean the mythical history whose origins are told in The Silmarillion. Alert readers may observe that the term Middle-earth does not appear in the chronicle of Bilbo’s adventure; nor are halflings mentioned in “Ainulindalë,” “Valaquenta,” or “Quenta Silmarillion.” The Greater Perfesser began composing these stories after his return from the Great War, around 1914 or so, two decades before he began The Hobbit; and LotR, in its earliest conceptions, was a sequel to TH rather than the conclusion of the Silmarillion stories. You can see in the text where he stitches the tales together; the tone and language of LoTRs Book I is far more like TH’s than those of the other five books, for one thing, and, page for page, TH has a lot more overt magic (or so it seems to me).

Beorn’s absence from the events of LotR is odd. Admittedly he is never described as immortal, but I always had the feeling that he was long-lived, and certainly he is vastly powerful–mightier by far than Gandalf, for instance. It is his intervention that ultimately saves the day in the Battle of the Five Armies. And yet by the time of the Nine Walkers he is dead, mentioned only by implication in his namesake, the Beornings.

Why is this?

One possibility that occurs to me is a Great Game one (that is, pretending that the preface to LotR is accurate in calling Tolkien the translator & redactor of ancient manuscripts). In this vein, we can take TH as a work Bilbo wrote not as a serious chronology but rather as a tale for Hobbit children. Certainly he might have cleaned up some more unpleasant aspects of his adventure. In that light, Thorin & Company took refuge, not with a giant were-bear, but rather with a community of men called the Beornings who, in battle, tended to go berserk, and fought with the unrelenting ferocity we attribute to wild beasts.

Anyway, that’s just my thought. Anybody got a better one?

2

I disagree. Gandalf is a Maia who helped create Middle-Earth. He only appears to be less powerful in comparison to Beorn because Gandalf tends not to use his power overtly.

I’m not sure what Beorn is, but I think it unlikely that he a Maia. If he were vastly more powerful than Gandalf, he certainly would have been discussed at Elrond’s Council (as Tom Bombadil was). I don’t think that Beorn is even as powerful as Gandalf, and certainly not “mightier by far than Gandalf.” Gandalf (the Grey) was comparable in power to the Balrog, and the Balrog is another Maia. I don’t think that Beorn is in the same category.

3

“The Shire” is not mentioned in The Hobbit, either. And Beorn was not in Gandalf’s league by any means.

I otherwise like your explanation, Skald, but am inclined to just take the Professor at his word: Beorn was alive at the time of Thorin & Co.'s adventures and is part of the Middle-earth legendarium, and was either alive and unmentioned, or dead and unmentioned, in LOTR. By analogy, John Updike didn’t necessarily drop the name of whoever was then living in the White House into his stories, but that didn’t make contemporary American society any less of a backdrop.

As other, wiser folk have noted, the early chapters of LOTR read much more like The Hobbit than do the later chapters. Tolkien wove virtually everything together, but the transition from children’s story to adult epic is clear.

4

Didn’t I say that?

Well, I certainly meant to. I’d check but I don’t know how to scroll upwards. Odd, that.

He’s not in the league of Gandalf the White of LotR. But neither is Gandalf of There & Back Again. He’s afraid of the goblins when he and Thorin’s company are treed by them, for instance. When he prepares to leap down among them, he’s not planning on surviving; he just would rather go out in a blaze of glory than trembling in (visible fear).

Now you may say that this is just Bilbo’s conception of events, but that is rather my point. According to the Great Game, Bilbo began There & Back Again before we ever hear of Frodo, and finishes it sometime in the seventeen years after leaving the Shire.* I think it’s safe to say that the narrator of T&BA (who is not identical to the character of Bilbo) does not know what Gandalf truly is, and misinterprets or misunderstands not a few things that happened during the Company’s quest. Moreover, a good number of events in T&BH are jokes, exaggerations, & outright lies**. The most notable example is the original account of the acquisiiton of the One Ring–but I don’t think Bullroarer Took invented the game of golf, either.

*Why, yes, I AM ignoring the movie! In other news, Rush Limbaugh is a Republican and Ted Kennedy is dead.

For purposes of this discussion, I am assuming that LotR–at least the parts that Frodo, Sam, & Merry wrote–is the basis of the canon, and where the other two parts of the legendarium deviate from it, they are in by definition in the wrong. In other word, the narrator of T&BH is unreliable.*

As as the Gondorian scribes who interpolated songs & poetry into LotR, even though those are the best parts.*

****Yes, I AM putting footnotes in my footnotes. I’m an odd duck. Deal with it.

5

Regardless of what you think, there’s no erasonf ro Beorn to have appeared in LotR, so why are you even asking. I don’t think Bard was mentioned, either.

6

I’m stepping out of the Game here. I think the awkward transition is intentional, because the Perfesser was deliberately showing the difference between Frodo & Bilbo’s writing style, which is part of a key to their characters. Frodo is more honest than Bilbo.

7

Well, that’s not really the case.

If you read HOTH (History of The Hobbit), you can see the earliest drafts of The Hobbit reference Beren and Luthien, along with Gondolin.

More later…

8

I am not quite asking what the plot reason for Beorn’s absence is. I am speculating that, like the story about the invention of golf and the talking troll-purse, the character of Beorn is a bit of apocrypha invented by Bilbo to to make the story more palatable for the Hobbit children he saw as his audience.*

Also, Bard is structurally prohibited from appearing in LoTR because of the gulf of time between the two stories. He is not a Dunadan and thus will not be alive and vigorous after 60+ years. Had Bard appeared in the later book, he would have undercut the notion of Bilbo’s unusual longevity.

Doc, you are correct, but I spoke imprecisely. I don’t mean that the published Hobbit (even the first edition, with Bilbo’s lie about the ring) was not meant to take place in Middle-earth. I mean that when the Perfesser scribbled In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit, he was not conceiving of the tale as a part of that legendarium. As he composed it, he began to think of it that way, as the inclusion of Master Elrond indicates; but the matter is left ambiguous. And rightfully so, as T&BA is even less like TS than it is the latter five books of LoTR.

*This is why I shouldn’t ask rhetorical questions. I’m no good at them. But at least this one gave me another opportunity for a pointless footnote.

9

His grandson is, at least in the “Tale of Years” where the other events going on at the time are listed. King Brand son of Bain son of Bard is KIA shortly before the end of the war in battle at the gates of the Lonely Mountain, and Dain the dwarven king dies over his body later that day.

10

My understanding is that while Beorn is not a direct character in LOTR, there are several reasons for that.

First, none of the action in the three sections of LOTR takes place in the middle to northern reaches of either the Anduin or Mirkwood, which is where Beorn’s dwelling was.

Second, am I pulling in extra-textual information (from the RPG or some fanfic I read), or were there not Beornings at the Battle of Dale? The Beornings are obviously connected with Beorn in some way, either his tribe that we never met in the Hobbit or his offspring.

Ergo, since this tribe of people that bears (excuse the pun) his name exists in LOTR (if I’m not conflating two separate things), so Beorn must exist in the continuity of LOTR, even if it is as a deceased progenitor of that tribe.

11

Yes, I do recall a reference to the Beornings at the Battle of Dale.

Also, when the hobbits first taste lembas, one of them claims that it is “better than the honey-cakes of the Beornings”.

12

Hmmm… the writing style of The Hobbit itself changes greatly from the early chapters to the later ones… this is an oversimplification, but it seems that Tolkien tends to drop into a more folksy, modern style in the scenes directly involving hobbits, and uses a more formal, old-fashioned style elsewhere.

13

This is the Beorn reference in Fellowship of the Ring. (Chapter “Many Meetings”)

*Frodo learned that Grimbeorn the Old, son Beorn, was now the lord of many sturdy men and to their land between the Mountains and Mirkwood neither orc nor wolf dared to go.

“Indeed,” said Gloin, “if it were not for the Beornings, the passage from Dale to Rivendell would long ago have become impossible. They are valiant men and keep open the High Pass and the Ford of Carrock. But their tolls are high,” he added with a shake of his head; “and like Beorn of old they are not over fond of dwarves. Still, they are trusty, and that is much in these days.”*

14

The OP is based upon a flawed premise. Beorn was dead at the time of the LotR. There is no indication that the Beornings were shape-changers themselves. The rest of the discussion may not be affected by this.

15

See? THIS is what happens when I try to write brief OPs. (Well, brief by Rhymer standards.)

I am not disputing that, at the time in which Frodo and and his young companions went on their quest, there was a community of Men called Beornings which had been founded (perhaps in historical times, perhaps only in legend) by a fellow named Beorn. (Which, incidentally, is not only an old Norse word meaning bear, but is also a name for a certain redhaired thunder/agriculture deity known for his prowess with carpentry tools.) I’ll even concede that Thorin & Company met the leader (or a prominent representative) of the Beornings during their quest. What I’m postulating is that the Beorn of the hobbit did not possess the superhuman size & strength–much less the shapeshifting abilities–which Bilbo attributed to him; and that the alliance of Men, Elves, & Dwarves were saved at the Battle of the Five Armies not by a solo superhero but by an army of berserkers.

I’ll bet my stolen Arkenstone against your high school class ring that I never claimed that the Beornings were shape-changers.

Of course, since I’m wagering a jewel stolen from the grave of a great Dwarf leader, you might reasonably be suspicious of my motives.

16

Regardless Skald, I cannot possibly think of anything you could possibly use to support your case. Aside form the entire fact that we have the author’s own word, implicit and explicit, dozens of times over, linking the two as much as it possible to link things, tyou have no counterpoint at all.

17

My apologies, I misread your OP in its crucial paragraph. I thought you were claiming he was or should have been alive. It’s what I get for skimming while trying to grade quizzes during lunch. :smack:

Who says Beorn is long-lived at all? And what makes you think he is “vastly powerful?” He’s a shape-changer, that’s all. He’s no where near as powerful as Gandalf can be, so far as we know, since his only powers are to change shape and be a ferocious bear during battle. The fact that he tipped the scales just means that the battle was on a knife’s edge and any advantage to the armies of good would have been enough (even the doughty Vee-Ates :D).

Since he is explicitly referenced by name in the LotR, we can assume he exists. We have no reason to doubt his shape-changing abilities; there are many unexplained aspects of Middle-Earth. Yes, The Hobbit is obviously somewhat fictionalized for the reading of younger hobbits (who ever heard of trolls named Bert and Bill and all? :p). But there is no reason to believe that Beorn is not exactly what he is portrayed to be: a shape-changing bear of a man who was a vegetarian and liked to poke fun at fat hobbits. :wink:

18

I think the better question than Beorn is the Mountain-giants. Gandalf tells us in The Hobbit that at least some of them are decent folks, and they have the kind of strength that makes armies irrelevant. You’d think that both sides would be trying to recruit as many as they could into the War, and that we’d at least get a mention that they’re staying out of it, like the Ents almost did.

The Professor does in fact state in an appendix somewhere that the accents given to Orcs are an editorial discretion, and that in fact the Orcs talked in much the same way that Orc-minded folks still do, but that he saw no need to include such language in a work of literature. Presumably the same is true of the Cockney trolls.