If a Balrog begins running on a treadmill, can it become airborne (with or without wings)? 
More seriously, Beorn and the Beornings were Berserkers in the literal sense of the word: shape-shifters who spent most of their time human but could turn into bears/bear-dogs in battle.
Well of course, it would just use magic.
Reasonably fair, but where did you come up with the bear-dog part?
Turns out the whole “three-headed dog” thing was a mistranslation. The ancient Greeks actually believed that the Gates to the Underworld were guarded by Care Bears.
And Celeborn’s name in JRRT’s earlier writings was Teleporno.
Anticipating the internet, perhaps?
Well, I know what I would find more terrifying … 
But I don’t believe it was well-known until much later. My mother was a well-read elementary school teacher with a passion for books and she started her career in the 20’s. Not much escaped her notice, yet she never knew (or chose to ignore?) The Hobbit until a friendly bookstore owner and distant relative of ours handed it to me saying, “I think you’d like this.” That would have been ca. 1955. Things didn’t move as fast in those days.
I don’t know the publication date of LOTR, but after reading The Hobbit, I searched for sequels and found only Silmarian and Worm Oroboros. Of course, searching for a book in those days didn’t involve Google, so I might have missed it. It was 20 years later that I ran across LOTR.
Not quite. But you’re only as old as you act or feel, right? 
And get off my lawn!
Musicat writes:
> That would have been ca. 1955.
So you read The Hobbit the same year as The Lord of the Rings was first printed. (The three volumes were printed separately in 1954 and 1955 with six months between each volume.) And, for what it’s worth, The Hobbit was modestly well known in the 1950’s.
> It was 20 years later that I ran across LOTR.
If you first read The Lord of the Rings in 1975, you were reading well after the initial burst of popularity of it. The initial burst of popularity was in the mid-1960’s through the late 1960’s. It’s a little odd that you wouldn’t have heard of it mentioned during the 1960’s, given that you had read The Hobbit in the 1950’s. I recall there being articles about Tolkien all over the place in the 1960’s.
Wikipedia backs you up (not the most reliable of sources, but I’m too lazy to find a better one.)
I don’t feel terribly guilty. In the 60’s I was worried about keeping my ass from being shot off in Vietnam, or getting thru college, or getting the latest Miles Davis or Beatles LP, or scoring with the hot chick in class, or playing the latest jazz. It’s not surprising I wasn’t looking actively for children’s books! Besides, things simply didn’t get distributed as widely or as fast in those days. If the Internet wasn’t plugged into your brain from birth, it may be hard to understand how things worked before it.
By modestly well known, I meant well known among children’s book librarians and such. It was a cult popularity, not any sort of mass popularity.
Musicat writes:
> It’s not surprising I wasn’t looking actively for children’s books!
But that’s not how Tolkien was sold in the mid-1960’s through the late 1960’s. The Lord of the Rings was sold as being the ultimate hippie Bible. It was the book that every hip person was supposed to read at the time. (I was there and I remember this quite well.) It was not sold as being a children’s book. It was also not sold as being the best fantasy book, since fantasy essentially didn’t exist as a genre until after Tolkien became popular.
I have a sneaking suspicion, but no hard proof, that my religious mother may have felt that Tolkien had a streak of the satanic in him and didn’t appreciate his writings. Not far-fetched at all for extreme fundamentalists, who tend to see Satan in most everything. That’s why it’s possible she kept the knowledge from me at that tender age.
She also didn’t appreciate Mad magazine, which was several levels beneath contempt. The same bookstore owner/relative that introduced me to The Hobbit also fed me Mad. Is there any wonder I hung around her bookstore, buying stuff on Mom’s unlimited charge account?
No argument there, but: YMMV.
I’m am a Tolkien fanatic, but I am not so sure of the “ultimate hippie Bible”. It had much competition from a diverse number of books.
I am going to forget some, but I think these would have competed for the title in the sixties.
“Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert Heinlein
“The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” by Tom Wolf (dig the groovy cover, man)
“On the Road” by Jack Kerouac
Maybe “Cat’s Cradle” by Kurt Vonnegut
“Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson
Maybe “Been Down so Long, it looks like up to me” by Richard Fariña
"The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell " by Aldous Huxley from which Jim Morrison named the Doors.
" The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead." by Timothy Leary
Jim
Where does The Prophet fit in this? I thought it was the book that pretentious college boys gave to pretentious college girls to get them naked in the mid 60’s.
Good question, I don’t know.
Rod McKuen was good for that, too. 
What Exit? writes:
> It had much competition from a diverse number of books.
I admit it had competition, but The Lord of the Rings was somewhat more popular than each of those you list. That’s why it’s now the best-selling novel of all time. In any case, my point was simply that it wasn’t sold as being a children’s novel.
The thing about LOTR and Hobbit is that almost nobody reads them just once. I’ve actually worn out one set of the books, badly worn a second, and now have a hardback “special edition” I’m going to read again.
OK, Qadgop, this is your fault for bringing up the non-canonical Valar. I’m certain that I read of one who came from Outside, but who stayed only long enough to bind the Days and Years, to bring order to their passing. But I can’t find him anywhere in the Lost Tales. Whom am I remembering?