Q: What Were the Differences Between the Folk of Bor and the Folk of Ulfang?
ANSWER: Bor and Ulfang were leaders of Easterling tribes or clans that entered Beleriand late in the First Age after the Edain and many of the Eldar had been defeated or weakened by Morgoth’s attacks.
According to J.R.R. Tolkien the Folk of Ulfang were hunters and wanderers. They crossed the Ered Luin and passed into Thargelion, where they swore allegiance to Maedhros and his brothers.
The Folk of Bor were farmers. They were, in fact, an easternmost sub-group of a larger group of sedentary Easterlings who settled in northern Eriador and gradually spread north around the Ered Luin.
The Folk of Bor and the Folk of Ulfang were thus never closely associated with each other. In one note published in The History of Middle-earth Tolkien implies that the Folk of Bor had a long trading relationship with the Dwarves and that their relatives who remained in Eriador were among the earliest peoples to live in that region during the Second Age.
The Folk of Bor and the Folk of Ulfang both fought in the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, the devastating battle in which Morgoth’s forces finally destroyed the Elven realms of Hithlum, the March of Maedhros, and the Falas. The Folk of Ulfang were instrumental in the Elves’ defeat, at first misleading Maedhros with false reports and then turning upon Maedhros’ army in the midst of battle.
The Folk of Bor remained faithful to the Noldor but they perished. New Easterlings came up and wiped out the homes of the Folk of Bor, apparently slaughtering all the women and children. Tolkien does not say specifically if any of the Folk of Ulfang survived the battle but the reader can easily infer that they would have been absorbed into the much stronger Easterlings whom Morgoth sent to occupy Hithlum.
There is no further reference to either the Folk of Bor or the Folk of Ulfang in any of Tolkien’s published writings. It is interesting, however, that he uses them to represent the classic struggle between farmers and hunter-gatherers — an aspect of Neolithic history that has drawn far more attention in the decades after Tolkien’s death.
That is not to suggest that Tolkien was very far-sighted in his symbology; there are certainly many historical examples of sedentary peoples coming into conflict with nomadic peoples. But I think it’s interesting that Tolkien wrote about such a primitive contrast in his Elvish histories. He never developed the history and cultures of these two tribes but I suspect that, had he devoted more time to writing about them he would have drawn upon whatever linguistic evidence had been developed in his time to document the clashes between ancient farmers and hunter-gatherers.
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