In the real Middle-earth, it was believed that certain people could alter their shape and spirit from human to animal form. So that they appeared, sounded and behaved like animals. Some of these people were wizards and witches, who shapeshifted to acquire the knowledge, wisdom and guile of animals – as well as the ability to fly. Also, great warriors took on the shape of impressive animals in order to explode into combat with their fighting power. Manannan, a Celtic night-visiting god, is described in the Book of Fernay to have come to Middle-earth to claim his son, Mongan, and teach him the magic of the spirit-world. Mongan goes to the Otherworld, stays there until he is sixteen, learning the secrets of shapeshifting. Eventually he returns to his earthly family as a wizard. Manannan prophesies of his son:
He will be a dragon before the host at the onset,
He will be a wolf of every great forest.
He will be a stag with horns of silver …
He will be a speckled salmon in a full pool,
He will be a seal, he will be a fair-white swan.
He will be throughout long ages
An hundred years in fair kingship …
Mongan transforms variously into animals of water, land and air, learning the qualities of each element – although he is destined to die in human form.
Such an attitude – that animals were possessed of such power that humans could seek to become like them, was very different from the Christian perspective being preached ever more frequently in ancient Europe. It was a distinctive tenet of the new religion that man (with a soul) was a creature quite separate and superior to animals:
And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. And the dear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every morning thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.
The animals were provided merely for people to exploit. But the indigenous people of Middle-earth had a more intimate perspective on animals. They hunted them for food, skins, bone handles for tools, and so on. But as we shall see they were seen as, in some respects, superior to humans.
Although the ability to transform into animals was accepted as possible, it was exceptional. Even so, 2,000 years ago, all people were naturally closer to, and more familiar with, wild animals. The Celts, Anglo-Saxons and Norse shared their lands with wild creatures of all shapes and sizes: brown bears; packs of silver-grey wolves; honey-hued deer on delicate, springy legs; mighty stags with rutting, raking antlers; scurrying hares; silent snakes, from harmless slow worms to adders with fangs which could deliver a bite so poisonous a person could die from it; rivers and streams crammed with fish; shrubs rustling with songbirds, skies dotted with eagles and smaller birds of prey like the silvery fast sparrowhawks; shuffling creatures of the undergrowth such as the hedgehog; scurrying spiders with their webbed world shimmering in the dewy morning sunlight. People worked outdoors, farming, collecting firewood, hunting, maintaining buildings and fences – and thousands of species of wild animal were their everyday companions.
We can understand that in an environment in which wild animals were ever-present, special relationships might develop between people and certain species of animal. The bear was one of the most special. It was the largest and probably supreme fighting animal of those times. But just as important were more subtle qualities which insinuated this impressive animal into the lives of humans.
Spirit of the Bear
In northern and western Europe, no other wild animal was so anthropomorphic. The bear rears up and walks like a human on two legs, with an erect gait and swinging arms. It sits down squarely on its haunches with its back resting against a tree. It eats omnivorously, as do humans. And it has a range of facial expressions which seem to express its emotions more than most animals. Also, unlike other animals, it walks on the soles of its feet with the heels touching the ground, leaving a footprint of a heel, toe and arch like that of a human being. Its head and ears – more rounded than those of most other animals – resemble human features. The mewling of cubs sounds remarkably like the crying of human infants; and the grown bear has an unusually wide range of vocalization, including a human-sounding high-pitched whine.
It had other qualities which were not human-like, but made it appear so special that it acquired a sacred status. Bears seem to live inside the earth. Their subterranean den is like an entrance to the Underworld; as if the bear is able to make a shaman-like passage from Middle-earth and down into the the realm of the dead. And its long winter hibernation suggests that the bear has died, but knows how to come back to life in the spring, when the green shoots lure it back from the womb of Mother Earth. To the people of ancient England, the bear seemed half human, and very spiritual.
The most widely admired warriors certainly found as many ways as possible to maximize their fighting powers. Tacitus, writing of the warriors of the Harii tribe, states that:
not only are they superior in strength … but they minister to their savage instincts by trickery and timing. They blacken their shields and paint their bodies, and choose pitch dark nights for their battles. The shadowy, awe-inspiring appearance of such a ghoulish army inspires mortal panic. No enemy can endure a vision so strange and ghastly. Defeat in battle always begins with what the eyes see.
But berserker warriors went a stage further. They were reputed to literally have the spirit of bears. Sometimes they could even project that spirit out into the world as a fighting force. In ancient Denmark, Bothvar Bjarki, the celebrated champion warrior of King Hrolf Kraki, was famed for fighting in the form of a great bear in the ranks of the king’s army, while his human form lay at home asleep. In one story, Bjarki (little bear) was ‘sleeping’ inside the hall while King Hrolf made his last, desperate stand against his enemies outside. But Bjarki was in a trance. And during his altered state of consciousness, outside a huge bear suddenly appeared in the front of Hrolf’s army, devastating the Dane’s enemies. But soon after, when Bjarki was forcibly awakened, the bear ally outside disappeared at once, and the Danes soon lost the battle.
This strange and marvellous feat of acquiring an animal spirit and projecting it was considered to be a gift, and a sacred one at that, but still within the ‘natural order of things’.
Bear-warriors were legendary in ancient England, too. The most famous Anglo-Saxon poem of all is named after its hero, a warrior called Beowulf. Scholars have done much work on the historical figures and other legends which might have been related to this poem, or even served as precursers to it. So far they have not identified a historical character on whom Beowulf himself is based – although as with all fiction, real people are often the inspiration for the spinning of a story about a fictional character, no matter how remarkable his qualities.
Beowulf’s name means ‘the wolf of bees’ which, in turn, means ‘that which attacks what belongs to the bees’ – in other words, a ‘honey-eater’. Bears love to eat honey and were a nuisance for the bee-keepers of ancient times. In the poem, Beowulf fought with bear-like power, snapping swords, tearing off the arms of his enemies, and in particular, killing with a bear hug. That is how he crushed the monster Grendel, and how he burst the heart and bones of Daeghrefn, the champion of the Frisians. Although Beowulf is not described as ‘skin-changing’ his appearance into a bear, he is a great warrior with the nature and strength of a bear.
In the historical Middle-earth, warriors like the legendary Bjarki and Beowulf who became bear-like and went into battle with heightened ferocity, were called ‘berserkers’. The original meaning of the word berserk was ‘bear shirt’, indicating not that they wore bearskins, but rather that they were ‘clothed’ with the ‘spirit-skin’ of the animal who inspired and protected them. It is also the forerunner of the modern phrase ‘to go berserk’, meaning to go ‘out of control’. But the berserkers were ‘controllably out of control’. They were ‘shapechangers’ who went a stage further, and purportedly took on animal form in order to acquire a more aggressive nature and physical strength.
Snorri Sturluson, in the Ynglinga Saga, one of the ancient stories from the historical Middle-earth, described how the berserkers ‘… fight without a mail shirt in battle and made it that they raged … They would bite into their shields, and they were as strong as bears; they killed the men, but neither fire nor iron could injure them; this is what people called the berserker rage.’
It could go badly wrong, too. Saxo gives a vivid description of a person changing into a berserker. Unfortunately, he has been taunted about his chances of success in battle: ‘Harthebn, processed by immediate transports of rage, took hard bites out of the rim of his shield, gulped down fiery coals into his entrails without a qualm, ran the gauntlet of crackling flames and finally went completely and savagely berserk…’ – and apparently attacked both friends and foes!
It would certainly have been daunting to have been caught in battle in those times facing a veteran warrior made huge and powerful by his animal spirit, convinced of his invulnerability, wild-eyed and unable to feel pain or fear, and wielding a magical sword and spear. He would be terrifyingly ferocious and reckless in combat, this berserker.
Tolkien used this belief in men who could shapeshift into bears in The Hobbit. By day, his character called Beorn is a strong man with big arms, black hair and enormous beard. But by night he transforms into a huge black bear, and roams out of the oak wood and into the distant mountains, growling bear-language, afraid of no one or anything. The wizard Gandalf calls him a ‘skin-changer’. In his skin-changed shape, Beorn is a ferocious warrior. He is in his element, fighting wildly as a bear alongside the dwarves in the Battle of The Five Armies. In a great roaring rage, he hurls wolves and goblins aside, immune to cuts and bites from them. A consummate user of language, Tolkien chose the perfect name for Beorn. In Old English, it means a ‘heroic man’. It is also related to the name Bjorn, which in Danish, Swedish and Icelandic means ‘bear’.
Shapeshifting
Today we assume that it is impossible to ‘become an animal’. Rationally, we know that our material form is not subject to such radical, literal transformation. But in Middle-earth people believed differently. The Old Norse phrase ‘eigi einhamr’ means ‘not having only one shape’. Concealed within our appearance were other possibilities, aspects of ourselves that if expressed physically, would look very different. So how can we understand the ways by which they transformed themselves into animal form?
The ingredients which made up the Middle-earth perspective on animal transformation include concepts to which we no longer subscribe. One was their notion of the ‘hamr’ or ‘spirit skin’, which determined a creature’s shape and form in this life. Another was their emphasis on the importance of protecting the soul, as distinct from the physical body; and finally the idea of the guardian spirit, or ‘fetch’, a kind of shadow-self which looked after each person.
We can glimpse early forms of this constellation of beliefs and behaviours from the continental Germanic peoples documented by Tacitus. He reports that people often wore animal skins. This sounds unsurprising – for warmth and protection, skins were a common clothing material. But then Tacitus adds that these skins were often decorated with those of ‘sea creatures’; and on the garments made from whole pelts, people sewed small fragments of other animal skins. This was almost certainly more than a Dark Ages fashion statement. Indigenous cultures which have survived until more recent times have strong connections with wild animals. And if their shamanic practices are similar to those of Middle-earth – an earlier indigenous people – these sewn decorations would have been like badges of identification between the human wearer and the animals whose skin was being added to their clothing.
We can imagine that wrapping themselves with the skins of animals and adding small pieces of pelts of other animals, literally placed the people of Middle-earth inside the animal’s world, physically and symbolically. They believed that such close contact with those animals enabled them to share their knowledge, their power, and their spirit. The animals became their guardians, and people wore the talismanic symbols of their animal guardians. The spirits of these animals were believed to accompany the person throughout life, and could be called on for help.
Today we can empathize with this process on a symbolic level. But in Middle-earth, connecting with the powers of animal spirits went beyond the metaphor. It was an exchange of energies with the animal which transformed the person. We can see how this worked with the boar, or wild pig.
The boar was one of the most widely regarded wild creatures among the tribespeople of early Europe because it was so ferocious and fertile. The wild boar was a short and densely muscled beast. The weight of a slaughtered animal needed several of men to move it. Hunters trying to kill a boar for its meat knew how much injury it could inflict. A trapped boar would charge its tormenter – a quarter ton of fury which, at a spear’s length distance away, could maim or kill.
Tacitus reports that among the tribes who wore it, the boar emblem was considered the best possible defence in battle. Helmets collected at various archaeological excavations show that in the period of the first millennium, many of them have images of boars attached. The magnificent helmet found at the Sutton Hoo treasure hoard had boars placed above the cheekguard. In battle, warriors slashed at the boar on the helmet, as in these poetic lines describing combat: ‘When the hilt-bound blade, hammer-forged – the sword blood-shining, doughty of edge – shears away the swine from the opponent’s helmet.’
Not only was the helmet attacked to injure the warrior physically – separating him from his boar emblem neutralized his defensive magic, and made him more vulnerable – but the boar emblem on the helmet was also an enemy in its own right. People believed that an animal which had lent its power to a warrior in this way could attack directly by launching itself as a spirit in battle, and savage the enemies of the wearer.
In the Norse story Hrolf’s Saga, the boar spirit of Athils does just that: it suddenly materializes in the hall, a fierce opponent for Hrolf and his men. Significantly, Athils is not present when his boar appears. Hrolf’s hound Gram subdues the boar in a dreamlike scene suggesting the battle of rival animal spirits. The moment the boar disappears, Athils returns to the hall – he has shapeshifted. He had sent his animal spirit out as a battle demon in its own right.
Protecting The Soul
The people of Middle-earth believed that the soul could travel outside the body. This was not a rare occurrence. For them, dreams came from outside the sleeper rather than being conjured in the brain – the concept of boundaries of the mind were far extended beyond our own. The Old Norse language uses a structure which translates as ‘a dream came to me’, rather than ‘I dreamt’, and also in Old English the phrase was ‘to me came a dream’. Conversely, while sleeping, the person’s soul was imagined to extend beyond the body and travel. When King Alfred translated into Anglo-Saxon the classical text of Boethius, De consolatione Philosophiae he edited some of the text, but retained the section on which he wrote of the ‘soul’ ranging away from the body while we slept: ‘so also our spirit is faring very widely without our intention … while we sleep’.
A soul travelling away from its physical body was apparently considered to be vulnerable. It could be lost (causing illness or death), stolen, or separated from the body for an extended time in spite of the efforts of the spirit skin. This is why it needed to be guarded by animal spirits. The material helmet protected the warrior against physical blows to the head, and the boar crest performed the equally important task of warding off assaults upon the warrior’s soul.
This guardian spirit was also known as the ‘fylgia’ in Old Norse, and the ‘fetch’ in ancient English. The term has its origins in the ancient word fulga, which meant a skin of an animal, like the totemic pieces sewn on to the clothing. The fetch was an aspect of our soul which could detach from the body, and travel vast distances like a shadow self. This could happen to any of us. Awakening at night with a start, and a falling sensation, was put down to our making a rapid re-entry into the physical body.
The soul travelling sometimes looked like the fetch protecting it – as in The Hobbit, in which Beorn looks like a bear. Sometimes these fetches could speak directly to people in visions or dreams, and manifest themselves physically. In an ancient Icelandic saga, for example, a man called Njal had the ability to receive communications from the fetch-world. One night he could not sleep because his mind was being ‘visited’ by visions of menacing shapes. They were the fetches of enemies who had massed in a nearby wood on their way to murder him. His visions were confirmed the next morning in the ‘real’ world, when a shepherd arrived who reported seeing men lurking in the wood.
The ‘hamr’ is a Norse word referring to a kind of ‘spirit skin’ for the soul when it was outside the body. In Old English ‘hama’ means ‘home’. So when journeying from the body, the soul apparently was believed to keep its shape through this energy presence of the hamr. As a spirit skin it seems to have kept the soul’s energies from being dispersed, much as the skin does the physical body. If the spirit skin or hamr maintained the travelling soul in the shape of the physical body, perhaps this is why in popular tradition ghosts look like the person who emanated them. However, just as each of us has a face unique to us, perhaps in Middle-earth the shape of each soul was different. Perhaps the spirit skin of one person could never fit the soul of another.
Soul Journeying
When wizards journeyed from Middle-earth to the Otherworld, in search of knowledge, they were helped in these journeys by their particularly powerful fetch, who ‘lent’ them their animal form. ‘Odin could change himself,’ wrote Snorri Sturluson of the god of the wizards. ‘His body then lay as if sleeping or dead, but he became a bird or wild beast, a fish or a dragon, and he journeyed in the twinkling of an eye to far-off lands, on his own errands or those of other men.’
Today and in the recent past, indigenous cultures all over the world still believe that shamans can leave their physical body. Their ‘soul’ becomes at one with an animal ‘fetch’ or guardian, and in this form journeys to the Lowerworld or Upperworld, in search of wisdom and healing spells to bring back to their community. The process by which a shaman takes on the attributes of his spirit animal often begins with a ritual in which the shaman dresses in the skins of the animal whose spirit he wishes to contact, as for example when he puts on the hide and horns of a stag. The skins of the animal guardian are seen as agents of transformation.
The shaman then enters a entranced state of mind, often with the help of such techniques as fasting, going without sleep, rhythmic drumming and dancing, until the animal spirit becomes one with the shaman. It is not an act of ‘possession’, in which a person is controlled by a spirit, but rather a ‘taking possession’ of the helping spirits by the wizard. So it was with Beorn in The Hobbit, for Gandalf explained that his changing into bear-form was not the result of any enchantment or bewitchment except what he chose to exercise upon himself.
Of course, in Middle-earth, taking on the skins of an animal to acquire its power needed the animal’s sanction. In the saga of the Volsungs, written in Iceland in the fourteenth century and telling stories placed several hundred years earlier, two men called Sigmund and Sinfjoth put on wolfskins, unaware that these were enchanted. The skins transformed the men into wolves, and they were trapped in that lupine state, unable to escape, until the tenth day when the spell was temporarily lifted. Greatly relieved, they hurriedly burned the skins and broke the spell. Shapeshifting was believed to be real and dangerous. To behave like a beast of prey was to cease to be merely a man, even when he was in his human form. To become an animal was a step into a special category of being.
The essence of the Middle-earth view is that the physical shape of a creature is only an aspect of it, and not its defining feature. Soul has fluency and energy which can be expressed in other forms. And there was an interflow between the soul forms of people and of other animals. This is the source of the intimate connections people felt with animals in Middle-earth.