What Were the Beornings Like?

Q: What Were the Beornings Like?

ANSWER: The Beornings are about as non-descript a tribe in Middle-earth as any, receiving even less attention than the Southrons whom Faramir’s company attacked in Ithilien. Virtually all that we know about the Beornings is derived from less than five sentences in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Everything else that has been written about them (including my own essay “Beorning Questions”) relies on extrapolation and conjecture.

Tolkien clearly identifies the Beornings as Northmen and he indicates they are close relatives of or somehow a sub-group of the Woodmen of Mirkwood. He does not, however, explain how the Beornings fit into the culture of the Woodmen or how closely they may be related to the Éothéod and their descendants the Rohirrim.

Although Tolkien mentions some villages of Men in The Hobbit that are located on the western side of Anduin and apparently south of the Old Forest Road (named Men-i-Naugrim in Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth) he does not clearly indicate that any of the men who gathered under Beorn’s leadership came from those villages. Nor does he say that those men came from the villages depicted in Mirkwood in the map of Wilderland.

One is equally free to assume there were a small number of men dwelling between the Old Forest Road and the former lands of Éothéod as that Beorn recruited followers from among the villages mentioned in the text or denoted on the map.

We must therefore use Beorn himself as the archetypal Beorning; however, Beorn’s special skin-changing ability is not associated with the men who follow him (although Tolkien says that many of his descendants had the skin-changing ability). Tolkien also describes Beorn as “a bit of a magician”, implying that his command over animals and/or his skin-changing power are not natural but rather are acquired through a use of magic.

Hence, if we strip the skin-changing and animal mastery from what we know of Beorn we are left with a man who lives on a fortified farm (The Hobbit says it was surrounded by a hedge). Tolkien often used farms in his stories because farms are such a commonplace home throughout prehistory, history, and literature. Farming is ubiquitous to sedentary human culture and therefore we can conclude that the Beornings probably had many farms.

Since they were somehow related to the Woodmen of Mirkwood (and probably were merely a sub-group of the Woodmen), the Beornings must have included forest-dwellers as well as plains-dwellers. Beorn’s wooden hall suggests he had access to plenty of trees for timber — and The Hobbit says that the lands west of the Carrock have plenty of elms and oaks. When Gandalf first tells Thorin and Company about Beorn as they gather in a small cave at the base of the Carrock he says, “…Very few people live in these parts, unless they have come here since I was last down this way, which is some years ago. But there is somebody that I know of, who lives not far away.”

So we know that Beorn is not really the only inhabitant in the area. Gandalf knows there are at least a few other people in the region. And as far as trees are concerned, apparently the grasslands on the eastern side of the river were not entirely treeless, for after Gandalf leads the company across the ford they marched “through the long green grass and down the lines of the wide-armed oaks and the tall elms.”

Of Beorn’s home and livestock Gandalf says: “He lives in an oak-wood and has a great wooden house; and as a man he keeps cattle and horses which are nearly is marvellous as himself. They work for him and talk to him. He does not eat them; neither does he hunt or eat wild animals. He keeps hives and hives of great fierce bees, and lives most on cream and honey.”

So we can say for sure that Beorn lives in a small wood and that therefore the grasslands of the Beornings must have had plenty of trees. It’s just that the trees were spread out far enough that plenty of grass could grow between the small woods. It is a common misinterpretation among Tolkien readers that lands depicted as blank or “empty” on Tolkien’s maps are mistaken for deserts or relatively barren lands. The forests shown on the Tolkien maps should be viewed as particularly dense woodlands differentiated from tree-strewn grasslands.

The lands leading from the Carrock to Beorn’s house consisted of rolling hills, woods, open grass, and meadows filled with flowers (the flowers grew more densely near his home):

Bilbo and the dwarves had now plenty to think about, and they asked no more questions. They still had a long way to walk before them. Up slope and down dale they plodded. It grew very hot. Sometimes they rested under the trees, and then Bilbo felt so hungry that he would have eaten acorns, if any had been ripe enough yet to have fallen to the ground.

It was the middle of the afternoon before they noticed that great patches of flowers had begun to spring up, all the same kinds growing together as if they had been planted. Especially there was clover, waving patches of cockscomb clover, and purple clover, and wide stretches of short white sweet honey-smelling clover. There was a buzzing and a whirring and a droning in the air. Bees were busy everywhere. And such bees! Bilbo had never seen anything like them.

…

“We are getting near,” said Gandalf. “We are on the edge of his bee-pastures.”

After a while they came to a belt of tall and very ancient oaks, and beyond these to a high thorn-hedge through which you could neither see nor scramble.

Beorn clearly managed a large area around his homestead, since he held “bee-pastures” (the meadows filled with flowers). The “belt of tall and very ancient oaks” sounds like a wind-break — a row of trees deliberately planted in a line to demarcate a boundary and/or to protect the land just behind them from strong winds.

It sounds like Gandalf, the Dwarves, and Bilbo had been walking for at least 6 hours, maybe 8. Beorn’s house may therefore have been located within 20 miles of Anduin — something you would not be likely to infer from the Wilderland map. I am guessing that without a road they would have made about 2 miles per hour walking up and down gently rolling hills and through densely packed meadows. Perhaps I am assuming too much.

Gandalf and Bilbo enter Beorn’s compound first:

They soon came to a wooden gate, high and broad, beyond which they could see gardens and a cluster of low wooden buildings, some thatched and made of unshaped logs; barns, stables, sheds, and a long low wooden house.

Inside on the southward side of the great hedge were rows and rows of hives with bell-shaped tops made of straw. The noise of the giant bees flying to and fro and crawling in and out filled all the air.

The wizard and the hobbit pushed open the heavy creaking gate and went down a wide track towards the house. Some horses, very sleek and well-groomed, trotted up across the grass and looked at them intently with very intelligent faces; then off they galloped to the buildings.

“They have gone to tell him of the arrival of strangers,” said Gandalf.

Soon they reached a courtyard, three walls of which were formed by the wooden house and its two long wings. In the middle there was lying a great oak-trunk with many lopped branches beside it. Standing near was a huge man with a thick black beard and’ hair, and great bare arms and legs with knotted muscles. He was clothed in a tunic of wool down to his knees, and was leaning on a large axe.

At this point I think we have to ask if this is not the large house and homestead of a great chieftain rather than some mere isolated farm. How many barns did Beorn possess? At least 2, one should think; as well as at least 2 stables, 2 sheds, and 2 gardens. In fact, Beorn’s compound is large enough to require a “wide track” leading from the “high and broad” heavy wooden gate; and some of his horses come trotting across the grass inside the enclosure to inspect Gandalf and Bilbo.

Beorn’s enclosure thus seems to be pretty large and except for the fact it only contains a single “long low wooden house” it sounds as if it could be large enough to hold a small village. So the compound is probably larger than an acre. In fact, many commentators through the years have compared Beorn’s hall to a typical Anglo-Saxon hall (which is in fact a typical “northern” hall). Longhouses were used throughout prehistoric Europe for thousands of years but Tolkien’s illustrations and descriptions very closely fit what we know about Anglo-Saxon farms and even royal Anglo-Saxon halls.

Beorn’s farm seems to be more than just an isolated residence. It appears to be a chieftain’s hall used for periodic gatherings. Of course, Bilbo dreams of a great circle of dancing bears and the next morning he sees evidence to support the imagery of his dream in the great mass of footprints. So clearly Beorn was gathering bears in the night but the fact he summons men to his farm at the end of the story for a great feast shows that he was really already a chieftain among Men.

So what we can infer about the Beornings from The Hobbit is that there were enough of them in Third Age year 2941 to help build Beorn’s substantial farm and to use it as an assembly area. Tolkien wrote about a similar complex in “The Wanderings of Hurin” many years later. I think it likely he had Beorn’s farm in mind — or perhaps the same source — for describing “the Hall of the Chieftains in Obel Halad” (Obel Halad had by this time replaced the Ephel Brandir of the older stories).

Although I have visited England twice I have not spent any time in the countryside. Nonetheless, Beorn’s land sounds very much like English countryside to me. I think there must have been a very specific place in Tolkien’s mind when he first described Beorn’s farm and that Obel Halad is based on something similar. The Folk of Haleth (Brethil) in some way remind me of the ancient Celtic peoples of Britain from the Iron Age (pre-Roman) period. And, of course, Tolkien ultimately connected them with the Gwathuirim of Eriador and Enedhwaith, from whom came the Dunlendings of the Third Age — a Middle-earth culture many readers view as “Celtic”.

Thus I want to say that Beorn and his people sound like Iron Age barbarians, but without any clear description of Beorn’s followers or their homes that is purely speculative. The early Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Britain were themselves Late Iron Age (post-Roman) people; not really tribes, they were warbands and perhaps a few clans who had left their tribes and homelands in search of adventure and maybe a better life.

Beorn’s people grew numerous and strong enough to ward the High Pass over the Misty Mountains — such that by the Third Age year 3018 they were able to hold off the growing numbers of Orcs sufficiently to provide safe passage for many Dwarves traveling across Middle-earth (and presumably men as well, like Aragorn). Bilbo, too, had passed that way some years previously when he visited Dale (for a second time). This growth in numbers and strength mirrors the constant growth of Iron Age peoples, who occasionally divided their communities due to overpopulation.

If Beorn commanded no more than 100 followers, his son Grimbeorn could have ruled over several hundred followers 60 years later. But we don’t need to plug numbers into the formulae to picture the Beornings. They built no cities and no great fortresses (so far as we know — but since Tolkien mentioned none it is the safer assumption to accept there were none). They were farmers and maybe villagers, and that is about it. However, they seem to have been on friendly or non-hostile terms with the Dwarves and Elves; and maybe also with the Woodmen still living inside Mirkwood itself, given that Thranduil and Celeborn ceded the middle third of the great forest (after it had been cleansed) to the Beornings and the Woodmen.

Beyond this, we really don’t know anything more about the Beornings. They are an open book, ready for anyone to write upon, if you want to include the Beornings in fan fiction, role-playing games, or even movies.

See also:

• How did the Éothéod differ from the Rohirrim?
• How Much Land did the Beornings Control?
• Who Were Beorn’s Followers?
• Did Grimbeorn the Old Have any Sons?
• What Does Beorn Mean?
• What Were the Honey-cakes of the Beornings?
• Was Beorn in the Hobbit a Were-bear?
• Beorning Questions

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