Hobbit2 - Chapter 07 - Queer Lodgings

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by jallanite

Beorn’s animal servants have always seemed very fitting to me, like something I have encountered in a genuine folktale. Yet I have not discovered any such folktale.

There are a variety of folktales that have animal servants as a motif, Jailinite, and certainly ones that Tolkien would be aware of. The famous Slavic folktale "Baba Yaga", comes to mind, or, more importantly, "The Grateful Beasts" which Andrew Lang included in his The Yellow Fairy Book (in which bees figure prominently). Tolkien most certainly had read Lang, noting him as an influence, and Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories" was given in 1939 as part of the Andrew Lang Lecture Series. You could also throw in "The Two Brothers" collected by the Brothers Grimm as well.

I do think you are correct regarding the Björn/Beorn analogy, and Tolkien, as he had done countless times in his corpus, grafts motifs from several tales into a synthesis which seems both old and refreshingly new. Another consideration might be the anthropomorphism found in the medieval Reynard the Fox and in the Greek Aesop's Fables.