Beornings

Origins

The Men of the vale of the Anduin between the Misty Mountains and the western eaves of Mirkwood were Northmen of ancient settlement. Beorn, the greatest of them, claimed to be descended from the first Men who had lived in those valleys before the dragons came down from the north and before the goblins took the mountains, and Gandalf thought it likely. Whether the ability to take the shape of a great bear was a gift of that ancient line or a thing peculiar to Beorn is never explained; he is called a skin-changer, not a magician, and the power ran in his family, for his descendants were said to change also.

In the years before 2941 Beorn lived alone in a great wooden hall between the Carrock and the forest, with beasts that served him and understood his speech, keeping bees in enormous hives and living on cream and honey. He was not one to gather followers. The Beornings as a people came into being after the Battle of Five Armies, when Beorn, who had come to the field in bear-shape and slain Bolg, became a great chief in the vale and Men gathered to him from the surrounding lands.

The land of the Beornings

The Beornings held the country around the Carrock, the great rock in the river with steps cut to its top where Beorn kept watch, and the lands between the river and the mountains. This put them astride two of the most important routes in the north: the ford of the Anduin at the Carrock, and the road from the High Pass over the Misty Mountains down to the Old Forest Road and the forest. Anyone crossing from Eriador to the Woodland Realm or to Dale had to pass through their country, and by the end of the Third Age the Beornings kept those roads open and charged high tolls for the service.

The Orcs of the mountains never forgot the Battle of Five Armies. Under Beorn, and after him under Grimbeorn, the Beornings hunted them without mercy, and for a lifetime no Orc or wolf dared the lands between the mountains and the forest. Beorn's house kept the custom of eating no flesh, and the honey-cakes of the Beornings, baked to keep for long journeys, were known as far as Rivendell.

The War of the Ring

Grimbeorn the Old was lord of many Men when Glóin spoke of him at the Council of Elrond in 3018, and the Beornings were counted with the Men of Dale and the Elves of the Wood among the free peoples of the north who would stand against Sauron. They were on the road that Frodo had to avoid and that the Nazgûl had to watch; the messengers of Sauron to Erebor travelled it. When the war broke on the north in March 3019, the Beornings and Woodmen faced the servants of Dol Guldur on their side of the forest while Thranduil fought them in the Woodland Realm. After Sauron's fall, Thranduil and Celeborn met in the cleansed forest, renamed it Eryn Lasgalen, and gave its wide middle, between the Mountains of Mirkwood and the Narrows, to the Beornings and the Woodmen.

Relations with other peoples

The Beornings kept to themselves. Beorn did not love Dwarves and had no dealings with the Elves of the Wood, though he sent them warnings; he was a friend of Gandalf and of Radagast, whose dwelling at Rhosgobel lay near. With the Woodmen of the forest eaves they were near kin and neighbours, and with the Men of Dale allies in the north. Their hatred of the Orcs of the Misty Mountains and the Wargs that ran with them defined them as much as anything: they were the mountains' gate-wardens, and they never let it be forgotten.

Beorn was a huge man with a black beard and thick black hair, bare arms and legs knotted with muscle, and a bear's strength even in his own shape; in bear-form he was vast and black and very terrible. The Men who gathered to him were Northmen of the ordinary kind, tall and hardy, and it was said that some of his descendants shared his gift of changing skin. They dressed in wool and leather, fought with axes and bows, and lived as woodcutters, hunters of Orcs, and keepers of bees and cattle.

The Beornings were a simple and fierce folk. Their lord's hall was a great wooden house with a central hearth, thatched and pillared, and their beasts were treated as household members. They kept bees in numbers that astonished visitors and ate honey, cream, bread and fruit, taking no meat; Beorn extended this rule to his guests. They were not traders but guardians of roads, taking tolls for safe passage over the High Pass and the ford, and their wealth was in cattle, horses and bees rather than gold. Their tongue was a Northern speech of Men related to that of Dale and Rohan. Their loyalty was to their chief and their land, and they had little interest in the affairs of kingdoms.

The Beornings took their name and their being from Beorn, the skin-changer of the Carrock, who by the strength of his arm and his bear-shape gathered the Men of the vale under him after the Battle of Five Armies in 2941. Their deeper ancestry was that of the Northmen who had lived in the Anduin vale from the earliest days of the Third Age and before.

At the end of the Third Age the Beornings under Grimbeorn were the wardens of the passes of the north, and after the war they received a share of the cleansed forest of Eryn Lasgalen. They remained a free people through the Fourth Age, allied with Dale, the Woodland Realm and the Reunited Kingdom, and the gift of changing skin was said to persist in the line of Beorn.