I have had my particular favorite "heroes" in my study of Tolkien's work and without a doubt Aragorn has always been an inspiration to me. I was ever a Ranger at heart and even as a young child before reading any of the Professor's works, when we all picked heroes, I was Robinhood.
Yet as I look at myself and my life, I do not see the noble Arthedain Cheiftain, member of a proud race of higher, more cultured men, I see my place with the lesser of the Edain as perhaps one of the kin of another hero and favorite archtype of mine within the books: Beorn.
Lately I have been trying to move forward in creation of a Ranger kit being challenged by our new full kit section. But I find myself trapped in the whole fantastic nature of a race that is not human and enjoys a very different technological level from that of the Rangers. (so easy to use modern advancements and just say..."it's Dwarven!"). While I will continue to strive for a better rendition of that, as I feel it a challenge and that it is do-able with great effort and attention to the details of the culture, BUT...I am NOT realy a Dwarf!...yes it pains me sometimes to admit that, but well there it is.
Being six foot tall and mostly human all my life, I think that it is high time for me to take my place among men and figure out with whom I would best fit in if I were placed into Middle Earth.
I have always been very close to nature. I grew up with a Grandpa and Grandma who were naturalists and artists and who taught me so much about the outdoors. We had woods we rambled in and Grandmother's gardens (both vegitable and ornamental, with our back yard neighbor who tended bees). These were my playgrounds as well as a lake and salt marshes, a large Salt water bay and barrier beaches. it was an outdoorsman's paradise of variety and abundance.
Swimming, fishing, boating, hunting, archery birdwatching and animal rehabilitation (we always had several animals around we were taking care of as my Grandparents were known by the entire community as the Go to's for any wounded or stray wildlife that was found. Nowadays you can be jailed for that, but back then you were considered a St. Francis or Radagast if you cared enough to take in the many wild creatures that were negatively affected by man's depridations.)
Now let us add to this my current crafting skill set, that of woodcarving and leatherwork, sculpting clay and such and my current hobbies like Archery, Axe throwing, weapon making, hunting, fishing and boating, and still working with some animal rehabilitators and demonstrators on occasion, and all you need is a big guy with a beard and you have Beorn (or Dan Haggerty), or as I now propose, one of his lesser kin.
So it is that I will introduce to you a boiled down and more realistic version of an ancestrial Kinsman of Beorn (a great leader and chieftan of his people, who in later years became the patron and namesake of the people that were known as the "Beornings".) They were not always called such. Originally one of the five distinct Edain groups the Beijabar(Atliduk) as they called themselves or the Bejaegahar (Rhovanian) as they were called by other Northman groups, were racially similar to the other groups but evolved culturally to be considered a distinctly different people.
I have collected a good amount of information about the Beijabar through several secondary sources, one of the most complete and well thought out in my opinion (as well as what I hope to be well researched) is the information brought forth by Iron Crown Enterprises for the role play game originally released in the early 1980's Called MERP (Middle Earth Role Play) and though I do not believe every bit of the information came right from the pen of the professor himself, I think the standards of authenticity and reliance on primary data and language are much greater than any movie or cartoon thus created.
I shall attempt to use this information very much like frog DNA (as was mentioned in a post not to long ago) to splice in the strands of Tolkiens history while I use a form of experimental or recreational archeology to form my interpretation of what a Northman of the Beijabar group would be like in approximately 1640 of the Third Age.
The fact that the portrayal of Beorn from the new Peter Jackson Trilogy was so disapointing for me and the brand new release of the playable character class of Beorning is now active on LOTRO (and I have very much enjoyed playing it) I have been motivated to delve into this, one of my favorite characters, in a more vital way.
I will continue on this thread to share some of the collected information and graphics and how I am using these to construct my persona and his kit.
Please feel welcome to interject and discuss as well as perhaps even participate in a similar path on this thread
![Mr. Green :mrgreen:](./images/smilies/icon_mrgreen.gif)