Place names are another source of evidence for human-bear relationships.
One of the chapters in Bear and Human: Facets of a Multi-Layered Relationship from Past to Recent Times, with Emphasis on Northern Europe, is a piece by Inge Særheim on "Bjornestad, Bjornbasen, and Godfardalen: Bear/human relations as referred to in place names from southwestern Norway". It's a fabulous article, and really brings home the value of looking at this evidence base for investigations into animal-human relationships.
When I was putting my proposal together for this project, I knew that I wanted to do the same.
I started by looking at our evidence from Iceland, and very initially the Sagas of Icelanders and other Old Norse-Icelandic texts.
Well, I found only a handful of names that were not farm names (I excluded these on the basis of Björn being a popular male personal name in Iceland and assuming these were named after men with that name - although after reading Inge's chapter, I now realise that might not always be the best practice).
I was left with the following:
Bjarney/Bjarneyjar (Bear island/s)
Bjarneyjaflói (Bear island bay)
Bjarnarfjörðr (Bear fjord)
Bjarnarnes (Bear headland)
Húnavatn (Bear cub lake)
Húnavatnsós (Bear cub lake river estuary)
The places named after bears in this medieval source material are coastal places, in the north and west of Iceland (and two locations en route to Greenland and North America, not shown on the maps below). These are very likely places associated with polar bear incursions.
What I can't wait to find out is what the patterns look like elsewhere (forests? mountains? coastal regions?) in areas of Scandinavia that experienced perhaps closer, more consistent relationships with bears.
For the next stage of this project, I'll be focussing on Swedish place names, with the medieval place-names in the TORA database to form the initial area of study).[1] However, a further avenue of research would be to use the data from the Nafnið.is website to investigate a much more extensive list of bear local names, and map these alongside the saga data - watch this space!
[1] Olof Karsvall and L. Borin, ‘SDHK Meets NER: Linking Place Names with Medieval Charters and Historical Maps’, in Proceedings of the Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 3rd Conference, ed. Eetu Mäkelä, Mikko Tolonen, and Jouni Tuominen (Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 3rd Conference, Helsinki, 2018), 38−50. See also: https://toramaptest.riksarkivet.se/
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