The day I gave in and created a Beorning

At first I wasn't all that enthusiastic about the Beorning, the newest class and race added to Lord of the Rings Online. You see, I thought that there was no such thing as a Beorning in Tolkien's work; I only knew the Beorning from the character Beorn in The Hobbit.

In The Hobbit, Gandalf describes Beorn as follows:

"He is a skin-changer. He changes his skin: sometimes he is a huge black bear, sometimes he is a great strong black-haired man with huge arms and a great beard. (...) Some say that he is a bear descended from the great and ancient bears of the mountains that lived there before the giants came. Others say that he is a man descended from the first men who lived before Smaug or the other dragons came into this part of the world, and before the goblins came into the hills out of the North. I cannot say, though I fancy the last is the true tale. He is not the sort of person to ask questions of."

"At any rate he is under no enchantment but his own. He lives in an oak-wood and has a great wooden house; and as a man he keeps cattle and horses which are nearly as marvellous as himself. They work for him and talk to him. He does not eat them; neither does he hunt or eat wild animals. He keeps hives and hives of great fierce bees, and lives most on cream and honey. As a bear he ranges far and wide. I once saw him sitting all alone on the top of the Carrock at night watching the moon sinking towards the Misty Mountains, and I heard him growl in the tongue of bears: 'The day will come when they will perish and I shall go back!' That is why I believe he once came from the mountains himself."

J.R.R. Tolkien in Queer Lodgings, The Hobbit (p.110-111)

Beorn is the only one of his kind known and even Gandalf, who has seen so many things, does not know about his heritage. It seems a little absurd to have lots of Beorning characters running around in the normal inhabited world. Luckily, it turns out it's not as immersion-breaking as I thought, as they look like normal humans (just with less well-tended hair). Since you need to have fury to change to bear-form (which drops down to zero after combat), there are no floods of bears running around in towns.

Edit: And then it turns out the Beorning are real after all! Faith Stahl told me about the following mention of them in the comments:

In "Many Meetings", Chapter 1 of Book 2 in the "Fellowship of the Ring", we read... "Frodo learned that Grimbeorn the Old, the son of Beorn, was now the lord of many sturdy men, and that to their land between the Mountains and Mirkwood neither orc nor wolf dared go. 'Indeed,' said Gloin, 'if it were not for the Beornings, the passage from Dale to Rivendell would long ago have become impossible. They are valiant men and keep open the High Pass and the Ford of Carrock. But their tolls are high,' he added with a shake of his head; 'and like Beorn of old they are not over fond of dwarves."

So I guess the Beorning as a race are not as far-fetched as I thought - although it is strange they are not mentioned in Lord of the Rings Online before. I'm pretty sure there's a High Pass in the Misty Mountains, but I've never run into a Beorning there.

Also, Beornings get cool tattoos! So when I logged in and found I had miraculously gained two character slots (I'm still not sure where they came from), I finally gave in and created a Beorning, Ravarun.

Starter story

Grimbeorn's valley, the Beorning starting area, is absolutely gorgeous! It is in my opinion the best looking starter area, to such an extent that I almost didn't want to finish the story, just so I could stay for a bit longer. I can't imagine anything coming closer to my dream house.

It's clear that the developers read The Hobbit intensively. A lot of details of the book are found in the starter world, for instance the abundance of wild flowers, the thorny hedge surrounding the house (see the picture above) and the Carrock afar.

I enjoyed the starter story, although I wouldn't have minded it being a bit longer. Spoiler: you live in this valley with your Beorning family, isolated from the rest of the world. Radagast visits to warn for dark forces emerging. The secluded valley will no longer be safe. 

The dialogue of your character with your sister and brother was cute and funny. The only downside of the story was that you get sent out to warn Aragorn of the danger. This seems a bit far-fetched. Why a Beorning of all possible people? Beornings don't want to be among people. Then again, having this race in the game is illogical within the context of the game in the first place, so I guess this was as good of a way as any to introduce players to the multiplayer world. /spoiler

I would have loved for Grimbeorn's valley to be larger and getting to spend more time there. After wandering around in a place so good-looking, getting ported to Archet was kinda bummer.

Appearance

Since I was prepared for the fact that the bear form animations are the same as those of bear NPCs and thus very plain, I was surprised to find out that they did at least work a bit on the characters themselves - for as far the old engine allowed, that is. I could be mistaken, but it looks as if my Beorning has just a bit more detail in her face, although the character selection screen has about the same amount of options compared to other classes and races. My Beorning's bear-form looks slightly different from the usual bear NPCs as well. I discovered that your bear's fur colour is the same as your character's hair colour, and that you keep your face paint in bear form. You can see Ravarun's green stripes around her right eye, if you look at the picture above carefully. Pretty cool, if you ask me. The nose of the bear-form looks a bit weird, though: it reminds me of a pig's nose.

Outfits

Playing a recently-ish developed class turned out to have its advantages. The starter gear of new characters in Lord of the Rings Online simply looks atrocious... but not for the Beorning! Throughout the game (and in my opinion especially after the Mirkwood-era) the quality of outfit design has significantly improved and Beornings get rewarded with armour especially designed for them. And thus my character got to wear LOTRO's first skirt (and man, does it look good!) and a circlet when running through Archet. I don't even want to think about how hard I had to grind festival tokens on lore-master Ravanel (my first character) to get a circlet - those were very rare back in the day - she certainly didn't get it at level 1!

Some things, however, never change...

To compensate for all that good-looking fashion, I also got a newly-designed hat in the category "as ugly as only LOTRO can make them". The game is infamous for its ugly hats by now. I'm suspecting the developers of supplying us with new ones just to keep the tradition going.

I'm looking forward to what other Beorning-specific armour they have designed. If they keep it up, there might be some gems out there for fashionistas.