Editing Beorn (section)

=== Distinctive loner ===

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 language|Welsh]] ''[[wikt:carreg|carreg]]'', "a stone".<ref>{{cite book |last1=Erat |first1=Vanessa |last2=Rabitsch |first2=Stefan |chapter="Croeso i Gymru"–where they speak Klingon and Sindarin: An essay in appreciation of conlangs and the land of the red dragon |title=The Polyphony of English Studies: A Festschrift for Allan James |publisher=Narr Francke Attempto Verlag |year=2017 |page=197 |isbn=978-3-8233-9140-1 }}</ref> The medievalist [[Marjorie Burns]] notes the tension between "British" and Norse in Tolkien's handling of his materials. This is one of many instances of what Clyde S. Kilby called "contrasistency" – Tolkien's apparently intentional "doubleness" or switching between opposite viewpoints. 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.<ref name="Burns 1990">{{cite journal |last=Burns |first=Marjorie |author-link=Marjorie Burns |title=J. R. R. Tolkien: The British and the Norse in Tension |journal=Pacific Coast Philology |volume=25 |issue=1/2 (November 1990) |date=1990 |pages=49–59 |doi=10.2307/1316804 |jstor=1316804 }}</ref> Burns calls Beorn one of

{{quote|the most striking of Tolkien's individuals ... his innate, one-of-a-kind loners, the honorable isolationists, who dwell in secluded domains and ... are distinctive, free, self-reliant but respectful of other lives and hostile only to those deserving hostility.<ref name="Burns 1990"/>}}

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. Both have "an intimate connection with the natural world", using this to help their visitors, protecting them from local dangers, whether wolves and goblins, or [[Old Man Willow]] and the [[Barrow-wight]].<ref name="Noetzel 2014">{{cite book |last1=Noetzel |first1=Justin T. |editor1-last=Eden |editor1-first=Bradford Lee |title='The Hobbit' and Tolkien's Mythology |date=2014 |publisher=[[McFarland & Company]] |pages=161–180 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=w3euBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA161 |chapter=Beorn and Bombadil: Mythology, Place and Landscape in Middle-earth|isbn=9781476617954 }}</ref>