A database, with every mention of bears in Old Norse textual sources. This is the aim.
Indeed, as part of the project, I have already completed reviews of the Sagas of Icelanders, legendary sagas, eddic poetry, historical texts, Prose Edda, Icelandic laws and provincial laws of Scandinavia, tagging every reference to a bear, bearskin, or bear place-name.
Such an approach has proved invaluable in the previous project of which I was a part: Cohabiting with Vikings (with PI Prof. Karen Milek at Durham University), with reference to domestic animals. It allowed us to ask questions of this vast range of textual data: in what contexts to specific animals appear? Where are the places named for them? Are there trends across time and text?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, references to bears in our texts are few - much fewer than the references to domestic animals such as cattle that number in the hundreds. Nonetheless, their appearances are just as meaningful, and can give us glimpses into the beliefs around, attitudes towards, and experiences of living in areas with these animals. And it is important to remember the two different types of bear we find in the northern world: the European Brown Bear, and the Polar Bear, or "white bear" in Old Norse.
An overview of medieval provincial laws shows that the Old Swedish laws contain more regulations about human-bear interactions than those of Denmark (unsurprisingly) and Norway - but the Icelandic Grágás law contains by itself more than half the number of references found from the Östgötalagen, Hälsingelagen, Older and Younger Westgötalagen, Upplandslagen and Younger Westmannalagen put together. Bears were clearly of some concern in Iceland.
For Grágás, minus two references to the brown bear, these references are either explicitly or implicitly to do with the polar bear that would occasionally appear in Iceland in winters with extensive sea ice.
When exploring "bears" in Old Icelandic texts, then, we must bear in mind (pardon the pun) that we may see a mixing of two different sets of beliefs and experiences: the brown bear as experienced in Scandinavian forests, and the polar bear experienced on the ice and headlands of the coastal far north, and especially in Iceland. Which of these is more dominant in the representations of bears in sagas and poetry? We shall see.
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