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Originally Posted by Raynor
Hammond and Scull offer in their LotR Reader Companion an etimology very similar to that given by Boromir88:
Beorn is an Old English word meaning 'prince, nobleman, warrior' or poetic 'man'.
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Well, sort of...
In later use the word came simply to mean "warrior" or "valiant man" but it was only used poetically and never in everyday discouse. What's more, it was originally used in compound with other words as "valiant or brave..." someone.
And it's closely associated to the Old Norse world "bjorn" which means
bear.
The connection to Beowulf is also compelling. Beowulf means, literally, "bee-wolf" which is (obviously) a poetic word for a bear. The feeling around the literary historian campfire is that the epic of
Beowulf was composed from a body of tales about a popular folk hero who was in actuality a shape-shifter or skin changer himself. So Beowulf could very well have started out as a bear/man creature himself before getting all literary and Christian on us and settling into simple human form.
So was Beorn "just" a man....I'm not sure. His name did come to mean "valiant warrior" but only after some etymological twists and turns; and it echoes the ON word for "bear"
and the close modelling on Beowulf points toward a much less 'human' ancestry than it may at first appear...