The Bears and the Bees

“He is not the sort of person to ask questions of.”

Despite his impressive strength and imposing physique, Beorn doesn’t eat animals.  Instead, “He keeps hives and hives of great fierce bees, and lives most on cream and honey.”  It’s a wonderful portrayal of a powerful vegetarian and brings to mind Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.  In that book, Thoreau challenges a farmer who mocked the viability of vegetarianism by noting that the man relied upon “his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle.”

 

In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan describes Johnny Appleseed as a liminal figure, crossing the boundaries of civilization and wilderness.  Beorn is that and more, shifting as he does between the form of a human and the form of a bear.

Gandalf speaks of bears “dancing outside from dark to nearly dawn.”  Maybe they had drunk some wild, magic honey – the sweet witchcraft of sharp-bodied bees.

Image: adapted from a photograph by AnnaLee Pauls.