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Originally Posted by Nogrod
But to follow your lead. Why do we speculate this much of a character Tolkien himself clearly abandoned in his later years? It's easy to me to see that he was not happy with Beorn (and his capabilities) and thence intentionally forgot him - left him with no mention or not building up anything with the shape-changer-beornings... Had he lived two hundred years he might have come back to Beorn again and tried to solve the problem of his generation or origins which he had brought to life in the Hobbit but it seems he never did it..
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I think Tolkien found himself stuck with a lot of things once he decided to link the sequel to TH into The Silmarillion. Some things he could work with, others he couldn't. He obviously had a free hand with TH, as it was written as entertainment for his children (& for himself of course). Once the sequel became part of the Legendarium the problems arose. It would have been interesting to see how the 'adult' re-write of TH would have dealt with Beorn, but apparently Tolkien only got a couple of chapters in (Part two of Rateliff's History of the Hobbit has been put back to the end of July/beginning of August apparently). Perhaps one reason he gave up on that project was the difficulty of assimilating characters like Beorn into the Legendarium proper. The thing that makes Tolkien's works so affecting & believable is that he could offer an explanation for the things in his secondary world, but I don't think there is an explanation for Beorn - like Tom he simply 'is'. We simply have to accept his existence in TH, just as we have to accept Tom in LotR. My feeling is that even if he'd lived to be five hundred Beorn would have remained inexplicable in terms of the laws of M-e.
Beorn is necessary in terms of TH, & couldn't be written out - neither could the three 'cockerney' Trolls, but the idea that they could ever have been made to work in a rewrite of TH in the style of LotR is laughable. Its odd how TH is actually closer to Norse myth than LotR - even the Trolls being turned to stone can be traced back to Grettir's Saga, where a Troll actually suffers that very fate:
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According to Grettir the trollwoman plunged into the chasm when she received her wound but the people of Bardardal claim she turned to stone at daybreak while they were wrestling & died when he chopped off her arm - & is still standing there on the cliff, as a rock in the shape of a woman.
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Another interesting point brought up in an essay on the similarities between Gandalf & Odin (by Marjorie Burns???) is the presence of ravens in TH at The Lonely Mountain, & their complete absence anywhere else in the Legendarium - ravens being the bird most strongly associated with Odin. And Gandalf (to my mind) is far more of the Odinic wanderer in TH than he is in LotR. TH is more purely 'northern' in mood & atmosphere - not to mention in the characters that appear - than LotR or The Sil.