Your Daily Tolkien Ping! Coming from many sources, these articles cover many aspects of Tolkien and his literary works. If anyone would like for me to ping them directly when I post articles such as this let me know. Enjoy!
Posted on 02/18/2003 4:05:48 AM PST by JameRetief
Beorning questions...
One of the most fascinating characters of The Hobbit is Beorn, the grim woodsman who lives alone except for his enchanted animal companions. Beorn was a man, though a bit of a magician according to Tolkien because he could change his skin (become a huge bear). Beorn's origins are clouded in mystery. Gandalf tells Thorin and Company more than one account of Beorn's ancestry, and he is none too clear on which is true.
When Gandalf and Thorin's company are brought safely to the Carrock by the Great Eagles of the Misty Mountains, the wizard tells his companions that there are few people living in the district. There are villages of men farther south (probably beyond the Old Forest Road) in the valleys of the mountains and along the river shores. These people are referred to as "Woodmen" in The Hobbit who have been gradually returning north. They are related to the Woodmen of Mirkwood according to Tolkien in the appendix to The Lord of the Rings, but many people wonder if these are the people whom Beorn one day comes to rule.
It's anyone's guess, really, where the Beornings came from or what they were like. They were all men, though perhaps a few were skin-changers like Beorn. Tolkien doesn't say whether Beorn was born with the ability to speak with animals and change his skin, but he does say that many of Beorn's descendants possessed the skin-changing ability. So at some point skin-changing either became hereditary or else the secret was passed on from generation to generation.
The Hobbit mentions that dragons chased most men away from the northern lands, and it implies that the great bears of the northern mountains vanished when the giants appeared some time before the story unfolds. Beorn is associated with both the bears and the northern men. If the skin-changers did not originate with Beorn then they must have lived in the mountains, and Gandalf does reveal he once overheard Beorn express the hope he would one day return to the mountains.
Bilbo actually meets few men in The Hobbit. His first connection with men once he is across the Misty Mountains is the intended raid by the goblins and Wargs. Gandalf overhears the Wargs discussing an intended raid on villages to the south of the Goblin stronghold near the High Pass. Bilbo's next connection with men is Beorn himself, who befriends and assists Thorin and Company on their expedition. Though Gandalf says few people live near the Carrock he does seem to imply that Beorn is not the only local inhabitant, and when Gandalf and Bilbo return with Beorn the next year he summons many men to a feast at his house. So Beorn's people exist at the time of the story, though they may have been strengthened by the woodmen who have been migrating northward.
It is not until Bilbo and the Dwarves reach Laketown upon Esgaroth, the Long Lake, that they encounter more men. These men, related to the ancient men of Dale (now long destroyed by Smaug), are brave and hardy. They still live relatively close to the desolation of the dragon and to eastern Mirkwood. The men of Laketown are on friendly terms with the Elves of northern Mirkwood (the people of Thranduil and Legolas) and they engage in trade with men who live further down the River Running. In fact trade extends as far as the distant land of Dorwinion, located on the northwestern shores of the Sea of Rhun.
Although we never hear more of the men living south of Laketown, when Bard re-establishes the kingdom of Dale he recruits men from both the west and south. But Mirkwood lies to the west of Dale and the Lonely Mountain, and beyond Mirkwood are the Beornings, who seem to be too few in number to help populate a city. Did Bard perhaps recruit men from the Vales of Anduin, or were there woodmen living north of Thranduil's cavern in the eastern eaves of the Forest?
When Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings he fleshed out the history of these northmen from Wilderland. The Rohirrim became a southern faction of the northmen, who were all associated with the House of Hador, the Third House of the Edain in Beleriand, by Faramir when he gave Frodo and Sam a brief history lesson about Gondor. Much more material than was published in the book was actually prepared for publication by J.R.R. Tolkien, who had to cut a great deal from the appendices to save space. Christopher Tolkien published part of the "lost" material in Unfinished Tales, along with some later essays and stories written by his father. The remainder of the "lost" material was finally published in The Peoples of Middle-earth, volume XII of The History of Middle-earth. It is therefore now possible to trace the history of the northern peoples all the way back to the First Age.
The northmen, often referred to as the Men of the Vales of Anduin, apparently fell into two groups. Let us call them the eastern group and the western group. Originally, the Beorians (the First House of the Edain) and the Marachians (the Third House) migrated eastward along the inland sea. The Marachians were the northernmost group and they apparently settled in the lands between the Carnen and Celduin rivers. After re-establishing contact with the Beorians, some of the Marachians continued to migrate west. Most of the Beorians followed them.
In Eriador the Beorians overtook the Marachians and settled throughout the wide lands. The majority of the Marachians continued the westward journey, accompanied by a small part of the Beorians. Under their leaders Beor and Marach, only a smal portion of either people actually entered Beleriand. The rest stayed back east in Eriador and throughout Wilderland.
The Edain of Wilderland eventually formed an alliance with the Longbeard Dwarves, Durin's Folk. This alliance, formed early in the Second Age to help drive off the Orcs and other creatures which fled the destruction of Angband into eastern lands, flourished for more than a thousand years until the War of the Elves and Sauron. In that war the Edainic peoples were nearly destroyed, and only a few small enclaves survived in Wilderland either in Greenwood the Great (later named Mirkwood) or in the mountains.
Those men who fled to the mountains appear to be the ancestors of the Beornings and the eastern northmen. The eastern group settled near the northern areas of Greenwood, and early in the Third Age they began migrating south along the edge of the Forest. It was from these men that the peoples of Dale, Laketown, and the kingdom of Rhovanion were descended. It seems from The Hobbit that Bard's western recruits may have come from communities of woodmen living north of Thranduil's realm. There is no indication that men stopped living in the northeastern forest.
The Beornings and Woodmen, however, are not necessarily a "pure" people. In "The Disaster of the Gladden Fields" (published in Unfinished Tales), the lone survivor of Isildur's company was helped by woodmen living in the western eaves of Greenwood, near Amon Lanc (later Dol Guldur). These woodmen appear to have been some of those Edainic peoples who fled in the Forest during the War of the Elves and Sauron.
In "Cirion and Eorl" (also published in Unfinished Tales) Tolkien relates the later part of the history of the Kingdom of Rhovanion. This kingdom, situated to the east of southern Mirkwood, was destroyed by the Wainriders in the 1800s of the Third Age. The army of Rhovanion was destroyed, but some of its cavalry escaped and fled to the Vales of Anduin. They were later joined by outlaws coming through the Forest. These were the ancestors of the Eotheod. Although it's possible the outlaws included many women and children, it seems highly probable the cavalrymen had to marry women from local villages -- they mingled with the woodmen living in Mirkwood or along the river.
About 100 years later, soon after the northern realm of Angmar was destroyed, the Eotheod migrated north to the valleys where the source rivers of the Anduin rose up. There they settled for several hundred years. They did this, Tolkien tells us in the appendix to The Lord of the Rings, because men were increasing in the Vales of Anduin. Not all of these men were Northmen. Some were men loyal to Sauron, Easterlings, related to the Wainriders. The other men would have been the woodmen and possibly the ancestors of the Beornings.
When Eorl the Young led the Eotheod south five hundred years later, some of his people stayed in the north. Were these horsemen who chose -- for whatever reasons -- not to follow Eorl? Possibly, but if so they did not give rise to a great nation of mounted warriors. Instead, they faded into history and were forgotten. What became of them?
Returning to The Hobbit, we may recall that Gandalf mentioned the dragons having driven men from the north. As with Smaug and Dale, the dragons could easily have destroyed many towns and villages. The earliest known dragon in the north was Scatha the Worm, but this dragon was slain by Fram, son of Frumgar, the chieftain who led the Eotheod north around the year 1977. According to the Tale of Year in The Lord of the Rings, the dragons didn't begin to multiply again until around the year 2570. The entry states specifically that the dragons began to afflict the Dwarves. Eorl had led his people south 60 years previously, so there couldn't have been many men left in the far north. Yet there were some, and these must have been the men driven south by the dragons.
We must also consider that one of the chief reasons Gondor called upon Eorl and the Eotheod in 2509/10 was that the southern Vales of Anduin were becoming dangerous for Gondor and its allies. The Balchoth, an Easterling people related to the Wainriders, were then living along the Forest's southern edge. They had therefore destroyed or driven off many of the remaining northmen, so that perhaps only the woodmen remained.
With the dragons coming out of the north and the Balchoth holding the south, the northmen of the Vales of Anduin were hard pressed to find a safe place to live. They must have entered into a lengthy period of decline at this time, and it would not be until the 30th century when they would begin to recover their lost lands. The Orcs began colonizing the Misty Mountains in the late 25th century, and they were a significant menace until the War of the Dwarves and Orcs (2793-99).
Somewhere in all these years and wars the Beornings must have branched off from the other northmen. It is conceivable they were descended from both the remaining Eotheod and woodmen who had drifted northward before the dragons began to trouble the lands. Beorn's horses and ponies are not just remarkable (assuming Bilbo's tale was only somewhat embellished for the sake of telling it), he bears a great love for them which foreshadows the Rohirrim's devotion to their horses. It is therefore conceivable that the Beornings maintained a tradition of horseback riding.
Just as the Rohirrim lived in the Ered Nimrais and pastured their herds and flocks in the wide grasslands of Calenardhon, so, too, may the Beornings have dwelt in the mountains and pastured their horses in the lowlands. Hence, it follows that if Beorn wished to return to the mountains, he may have been driven from them by the Orcs, and his people in general may have been destroyed or driven forth by the Orcs. A past war with the Orcs would explain the fewness of the Beornings when Bilbo and Gandalf visited them, but the huge losses suffered by the Orcs of the Misty Mountains in the Battle of Five Armies would have given the men of the Vales of Anduin a well-needed respite.
Beorn could therefore have recruited new followers from among the woodmen migrating northward to swell the numbers of his own people, and since Gloin told Frodo that the Beornings kept the High Pass open at the time of the War of the Ring, the Beornings appear to have become strong enough to have returned to the mountains.
The Beornings' culture may thus resemble that of the Rohirrim but in some ways would be similar to that of the woodmen. For the woodmen, however, we have no direct evidence concernig their lifestyles and customs. But Tolkien did describe another group of woodmen in the First Age, the Folk of Haleth, who lived similarly to the way the Beornings lived. Like Beorn, the Folk of Haleth often lived alone, or with only a few people together. They built high hedges around their homes, and mostly lived deep in the woods, in the forest of Brethil.
Such similarities may only be superficial. Tolkien may not have envisioned any close parallels between the cultures of the Folk of Haleth and Beorn's people. But then, he seems to have emphasized the relationship between the Rohirrim and the other Men of the Vales of Anduin. In doing say, he may have been suggesting that the cultures of Rohan and the Beornings were not all that far apart.
Author: Michael Martinez
Published on: January 14, 2000
Michael Martinez is the author of Visualizing Middle-earth
|
The Daily Tolkien articles |
The Tolkien Virgin articles |
| ARTICLES 01-10 | |
| ARTICLES 11-20 | |
| ARTICLES 21-30 | ARTICLES 01-10 |
| ARTICLES 31-40 | 11) Of the Sindar |
| 41) Love in the Trees | 12) Of the Sun and Moon and the Hiding of Valinor |
| 42) The Philosophical Etymology Of Hobbit | 13) Of Men |
| 43) Exploring Tolkien's Fourth Age | 14) Of the Return of the Noldor |
| 44) Origin and History of the Ents | 15) Of Beleriand and its Realms |
| 45) It's all in the family: The Elweans and Ingweans | |
| 46) It's all in the family: The Finweans | |
| 47) Beorning questions... |
Your Daily Tolkien Ping! Coming from many sources, these articles cover many aspects of Tolkien and his literary works. If anyone would like for me to ping them directly when I post articles such as this let me know. Enjoy!
 Ring Ping!! |
Very much so. What can we help you with?
ha ha- just yanking some chains- I am harmless! I love LOTR, I just get a kick out of some people who are a little too fanatical about it.
It wasn't funny the first time you spammed (identical posts, off topic, cut and paste) the Hobbit Hole threads with your "humor", and it won't be funny the 40th time, either.
People who "get off" on "yanking the chains" of people who they imagine they are superior to (for some reason) are legends in their own minds, and nowhere else.
ummmm... it's all make-believe!
My memory was off; it was about six days ago, not a couple of days ago, but the wording is very similar and the message identical. Whether there were earlier similar attempts at "humor" I do not know; I have not seen them.
Now, I have no problem with people making the occasional lame attempt at humor (we all have been guilty of this), but when the first attempt falls flat, merely repeating the same "joke" over again does not serve any purpose except to make the "humorist" look silly and/or desperate for attention.
You're just a pathetic troll, begging for attention from people who could care less about your opinions. Go find something more useful and educational to do, like pulling the wings off of flies, or making fun of cripples. You should enjoy it.
Can anyone tell me if this is so?
I have seen other shots, particularly riding, where he looks like he is wearing some flat white laced boots. I will keep my eye out!
ecurbh, do you have any of those costume portraits of Gandalf the White that show his feet?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
