Beorn
His descendants or kinsmen, a group of Men known as the Beornings, dwell in the upper Vales of Anduin, between Mirkwood and the Misty Mountains, and are counted among the Free Peoples of Middle-earth who oppose Sauron's forces during the War of the Ring.
Like the powerful medieval heroes Beowulf and Bödvar Bjarki, whose names both mean "bear", he exemplifies the Northern courage that Tolkien made a central virtue in The Lord of the Rings.
[T 1] Beorn receives Gandalf, Bilbo Baggins and thirteen Dwarves and aids them in their quest to reclaim their kingdom beneath the Lonely Mountain.
[T 1] Later, hearing of a vast host of Goblins on the move, Beorn arrives at the Lonely Mountain in time to strike the decisive blow in the Battle of Five Armies.
[7] Paul W. Lewis, writing in Mythlore, calls Beorn "essentially a berserker in battle", alluding to the Old Norse warriors who fought in a trance-like state of fury.
[1] Beorn's name for the large rock in the River Anduin, the Carrock, on the other hand, is not Germanic – whether Norse or English – but Brittonic, related to Welsh carreg, "a stone".
Burns comments that Beorn's story and character embody tensions "between forest and garden, home and wayside, comradeship and solitude, risk and security" and in her view most strongly between "freedom and obligation", not to mention bear and man.
[9]The Tolkien scholar Justin Noetzel compares Beorn to Tom Bombadil in The Lord of the Rings, another one-of-a-kind figure strongly attached to the place where he lives.
As a skin-changer he is evidently pagan and Norse; but his vegetarianism, reluctance to use metal, home-loving nature and flower garden all look more compatible with Christianity and Englishness, without being those things specifically.
Gawain meets a big rugged Beorn-like shape-changer, Bertilak (the Green Knight), who lives in a castle in an oak forest, and speaks with Christian courtesy.
[9] The Swedish actor Mikael Persbrandt portrays Beorn in Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and in its sequel The Battle of the Five Armies.
