Where did Beorn Ever Meet 🧙Radagast?

[1stvermont]

Beorn said radagast was not bad for a wizard, so they must have met, but where?

 

[Alcuin]

I don’t know exactly where Rhosgobel is.

This map is from Encyclopedia of Arda’s entry on Rhosgobel. The Carrock is circled. The little X near it is about where Beorn’s house is. Dol Guldur is near the bottom. That’s the Old Forest Road heading off to the east through Mirkwood. The River Gladden enters the Anduin from the west about halfway down the map, and the East Bight of Mirkwood (the “Narrows of the Forest”) is just across from it and the Gladden Fields, where Gollum found the Ring.

You can see that Encyclopedia of Arda has marked two positions. Most everyone else has only the northern position B marked.

Now if position B is Rhosgobel, then Beorn and Radagast are neighbors, perhaps 30 miles apart – not so far in the perspective of the Vales of Anduin, and Beorn himself can travel fast and far. If position A is Rhosgobel, several hundred miles to the south of Beorn’s homestead, then I suppose one of them must have met the other while travelling. Radagast might have been “never a traveler, unless driven by great need,” as Gandalf said in “The Council of Elrond”, but perhaps he travelled far enough to meet Beorn, who was a chieftain of some importance in the northern half of the Vales of Anduin, besides commanding the approach to the Forest Road from Anduin (part of the Great East Road originally built in the First Age by the Dwarves, later improved and at least for a while maintained by the Númenórean Exiles at the end of the Second Age).

 

[1stvermont]

I don’t know exactly where Rhosgobel is.

This map is from Encyclopedia of Arda’s entry on Rhosgobel. The Carrock is circled. The little X near it is about where Beorn’s house is. Dol Guldur is near the bottom. That’s the Old Forest Road heading off to the east through Mirkwood. The River Gladden enters the Anduin from the west about halfway down the map, and the East Bight of Mirkwood (the “Narrows of the Forest”) is just across from it and the Gladden Fields, where Gollum found the Ring.

You can see that Encyclopedia of Arda has marked two positions. Most everyone else has only the northern position B marked.

View attachment 8878

Now if position B is Rhosgobel, then Beorn and Radagast are neighbors, perhaps 30 miles apart – not so far in the perspective of the Vales of Anduin, and Beorn himself can travel fast and far. If position A is Rhosgobel, several hundred miles to the south of Beorn’s homestead, then I suppose one of them must have met the other while travelling. Radagast might have been “never a traveler, unless driven by great need,” as Gandalf said in “The Council of Elrond”, but perhaps he travelled far enough to meet Beorn, who was a chieftain of some importance in the northern half of the Vales of Anduin, besides commanding the approach to the Forest Road from Anduin (part of the Great East Road originally built in the First Age by the Dwarves, later improved and at least for a while maintained by the Númenórean Exiles at the end of the Second Age).

Great response. Gives some thinking to be done. If B is his location then they could have easily met at either home location. Even if A is it still could be the case. Thanks.

 

[Olorgando]

Well, we could compare Radagast's mobility to the other two Istari mentioned by name in LoTR.
To become a friend of the birds and beasts, Radagast at some time must certainly have traveled extensively to study them.
While I doubt that he racked up nearly as much "mileage" as the Grey Pilgrim, I think he was still far more mobile than Saruman, especially after the latter "holed up" in Isengard in 2953 Third Age. Dol Guldur had become a worrisome place since 1100 TA at the latest, and Greenwood became called Mirkwood (by men at least) even 50 years earlier. So Radagast moving about to somehow protect those he had chosen to take as wards against the evil things multiplying in Mirkwood makes sense to me. And he would see Beorn as a natural ally. But the 1937 (and later editions of) The Hobbit simply is not LoTR, so pressing it too hard for "canon insights" into Middle-earth remains iffy.

 

[Alcuin]

[T]he 1937 (and later editions of) The Hobbit simply is not LoTR, so pressing it too hard for "canon insights" into Middle-earth remains iffy.

The 1937 telling of “Riddles in the Dark” was rewritten by Tolkien and first published anew in every edition of The Hobbit beginning in 1951. This is alluded to in Fellowship of the Ring in “Shadows of the Past”, when Gandalf asks Frodo what he already knows about the Ring and Frodo replies that he knows what Bilbo told him, and Gandalf muses, “Which story, I wonder.” To which Frodo replies, “Oh, not what he told the dwarves and put in his book. [] He told me the true story soon after I came to live here. He said you had pestered him till he told you, so I had better know too. ‘No secrets between us, Frodo,’ he said…” And again in “Council of Elrond”, when Elrond instructs Bilbo to tell his story of finding the Ring, Bilbo begins by looking at his friend Glóin, a member of Thorin & Company, and says, “I will now tell the true story, and if some here have heard me tell it otherwise, [here he looked at Glóin,] I ask them to forget it and forgive me. I only wished to claim the treasure as my very own …, and to be rid of the name of thief that was put on me.”

The Hobbit was originally a tale Tolkien told to his children, written down because one evening young Christopher Tolkien, then about four or five years old, evinced an obsession with detail:

“Last time, you said Bilbo’s front door was blue, and you said Thorin had a gold tassel on his hood, but you’ve just said that Bilbo’s front door was green, and the tassel on Thorin’s hood was silver;” at which point my father muttered “Damn the boy,” and then strode across the room to his desk to make a note.
​

Tolkien said that the inclusion of Elrond and Gondolin in the story was initially incidental, that they were existing characters and places in histories he constructed of the Elves in Middle-earth to explain the changes he envisioned in Quenya and Sindarin. But the tale grew in the telling, and became the tale of the great events that marked the end of the Elder Days, which was written and published before the tales that comprise The Silmarillion could be published.

We cannot refer to pre-1951 editions of The Hobbit for “canon”: the author rewrote and republished the work during his lifetime to better align it with The Lord of the Rings.

 

[Elthir]

According to my "canon stance" . . .

. . . I think every edition of The Hobbit Tolkien published (three editions) is canon . . . but we readers need to be careful, especially with the First Edition, as Bilbo wasn't wholly truthful with respect to his finding of the One. Also from Fellowship of the Ring:

"This account Bilbo set down in his memoirs, and he seems never to have altered it himself, not even after the Council of Elrond. Evidently it still appeared in the original Red Book, as it did in several of the copies and abstracts."

So Tolkien wisely made things internal. To my mind it's similar to referring to the poems published in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil -- for me they are canon, internal, but you might want to think twice about using Perry-the-Winkle as a source for a chat about trolls . . .

. . . or not. Why can't a troll bake bread

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

As Gandalf says Radagast was "never a traveler", and we see from The Hobbit that Beorn was capable of moving fast and far -- in bear form, at any rate -- I'd come down on the side of his having visited Radagast's vicinity, rather than the other way round. We'll never know, of course.

Slightly off topic, but I'll note that Beorn occupies the same role that Treebeard does, in the larger tale: that of the "Green Man" of Romance, who acts as a mediator between the human and the natural world. These are characters who, in Northop Frye's words, "Elude the moral antithesis of heroism and villainy. . .they represent partly the moral neutrality of the intermediate world of nature and partly a world of mystery which is glimpsed but never seen, and which retreats when approached".

Beorn's relation to Radagast appears to parallel Treebeard's to Gandalf: he doesn't call him "the only wizard that cares about animals", but the attitude seems similar, and is confirmed by what we learn about Radagast in LOTR.

The "moral ambiguity", if it can be called that, of both characters is emphasized: "I don't know about sides", says Treebeard, and Gandalf's warnings to the Dwarves show the same for Beorn; the ultimate alliegance of both characters is to the natural world. This is underscored by their implacable hatred for orcs and wargs, which, in Middle-earth terms, are definitely unnatural.