For the blog this week I decided to take a look at different types of writing about bears in northern contexts.
What I absolutely love about this project is the liberty I have given myself to read absolutely everything I can get my hands on involving bears in search of a broad cultural context. Reading ethnographic accounts has been a special pleasure, and an exercise in thinking about how living with or near bears works., and how stories about these animals evolve (or not) as the storytelling communities change.
A didactic text: Konungs skuggsjá
First, the information in Konungs skuggsjá, or The King's Mirror. This thirteenth-century didactic text is set up as a father teaching a son about the world and was supposedly intended for the son of King Håkon Håkonsson of Norway (Magnus the Law-maker).
In response to the son in the text asking about the size and fauna of Greenland (Ch. 17), the Father in KS explains:
There are bears, too, in that region; they are white, and people think they are native to the country, for they differ very much in their habits from the black bears that roam the forests. These kill horses, cattle, and other beasts to feed upon; but the white bear of Greenland wanders most of the time about on the ice in the sea, hunting seals and whales and feeding upon them. It is also as skilful a swimmer as any seal or whale.
When talking of the products of Greenland in Chapter 18, the Father refers also to the eating of bears (along with reindeer, whales, and seals) - although in his view the majority of settlers subsisted on butter, cheese, and beef: these Greenlanders were known for being prestigious cattle farmers.
There are two things to take from the limited appearance of bears in this text. First, that the differences between polar bears and "svartir birnir, er i skógum ganga" (black bears, which walk in the forest) are worth noting, and these differences are essentially their interaction with the landscape: white bears go on the ice, other bears go in forests; while other bears kill horses, cattle, and other animals, the polar bear hunts seals and whales, and is just as good at swimming as them.
What this passage suggests is that knowledge of the polar bear may have been more keenly known (or considered more relevant or interesting) than of the black/brown bear, whose omnivorous nature is elided in favour of his role as predator on terrestrial mammals.
Sagas of Icelanders
The Icelandic Sagas show a more nuanced interest in bears, perhaps. While references to bears inthe Sagas do sometimes focus on their violence towards animals and humans (e.g. Grettis saga), there are also a fair number of episodes in which the human is the aggressor, and the bear is either a passive victim, or a communicative partner in an encounter.
In Gunnars saga Keldugnúpsfífls (commonly considered a later saga, composed in the 15th or 16th century), we find a man seemingly persuading a bear to wait until he can reach it (ch. 5):
Gunnarr went on alone for a while until he saw a large bear. Gunnarr called out to him and asked him to wait. Then the bear looked at him, and sat down and waited for the man. Gunnarr went over to it quickly; he had a great bear knife in his hand, and he thrust at the bear under the shoulder so that the heart was pierced and the bear died at once. [1]
This episode is an odd one, although mutual understanding between humans and bears is depicted also in Finnboga saga ch. 11), in which Finnbogi negotiates with a brown bear until the bear agrees to fight.
As part of the research on this project, I have explored a wide range of ethnographic sources as well as Old Norse literature, and this story of the bear is reminiscent of more recent ethnographic accounts from reindeer herders in Siberia.
“In the end, the first bear [the wounded one] turned around and slowly started to go away, and I asked him," Why are you going away? Wait up for me?" and the bear stopped for a bit, he was tired, and then he moved on, and there was a forest there, and I lost him.”[2]
Such episodes may draw on a similar recognition of the possibility of human-bear communication. The saga episode especially, which ends in the bear’s death, may recall cultural memories of a bear hunt, of asking the bear to give himself up and offer himself to the hunter. An exchange with a young bear found in Viga-Glúms saga (ch. 3), shows Eyiólfr Ingjaldsson cutting off the snout of the bear: an action that seems perhaps to echo a bear hunt tradition of cutting the lips and nose of the bear for the hunter to wear briefly in a ritual to acquire the bear’s powerful sense of smell.
Later folklore [3]
A mix of attitudes are again seen in later Icelandic folklore collections, in which bears are sometimes violent predators that need to be killed, at other times nuisances that need to be tricked, and sometimes even helpers.
In the Dýrasögur (Stories about animals) section of Jón Árnason's Íslenzkar Þjóðsögur og Æfintýri (pp.607-11, vol. 1), there is a collection of stories about polar bears in Iceland.
Common features of these stories are their association with the north and west of Iceland (Grimsey, the Westfjords), the seeming desire for she-bears to drink cow's milk, and the need for respect between humans and bears, while recognising the violent nature (of male bears) - just like violent human men it could be suggested.
From the Westfjords comes the story of a man tricking a bear into leaving his barrel of fish alone; in this story the man and the bear seem to have a comical relationship, and the bear doesn't mind being tricked into abandoning his raiding. However, the tales also emphasise the human-like feuding nature of bears: if a mortally wounded bear digs up a tree or more before it dies, it calls on its relatives (ættíngja) to avenge (hefna) his death.
In the tales associated with she-bears and cubs we find stories about bear cubs being human babies that are only transformed into their bear form when the mother bear passes her paw over them (of course a man steals one to find this out before the child is reclaimed by the mother), as well as a story of a she-bear saving a man, sustaining him with her milk, and teaching him to ride on her back to return to his island.
Among the more violent encounters is the story of the local name Dýrhóll based on the presence of a bear that leads to a death in the community; but by far the most violent is the story about a young man who goes to a farm to investigate the disappearance of a household, only to find 18 bears in the area. The man kills many of the bears, sells most of the skins to become rich and resettle the land. He keeps one of the bearskins, however, and uses it as the birthing blanket for his children - who, as a result, the tale tells us, have bjarnylur (bear-warmth) and never feel the cold.
Indeed, Jón tells the reader more generally that a bear's nature is so warm that he never feels the cold, and this is known as bjarnylur (Old Norse bjarnyr: the concept we find in Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings that was the spark behind this project) and can be imparted to humans born upon the animal's skin.
Something that is fascinating in this small collection of folkloric information is the note that to attack further a mortally wounded bear is to perform a níðingsverk (an act of cowardice), and become a man without luck (ólansmaður). Níðingsverk is a heavily loaded term in Old Norse contexts, with connotations of effeminacy and unmanliness, and its ascription here may invoke a deep sense of respect due to bears among certain communities on Iceland.
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[1] Gunnarr gekk þá lengi einn samt, þar til er hann sá einn stóran björn. Gunnarr kallaði á hann ok bað hann bíða; þá leit þessi aptr, ok settist niðr ok beið mannsins. Gunnarr bar at skjótt; hann hafði stóra bjarnsviðu í hendi, ok lagði þegar til dýrsins undir bóginn svá at í hjartanu stóð, en dýrit dó þegar.
[2] (Recorded from SVK, in the village of Russkinskiye, Siberia, Russia, 2019: https://eloka-arctic.org/bears/bears-and-humans)
[3] Jón Árnason. Íslenzkar Þjóðsögur og Æfintýri. 2 vols. Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1862, 1864
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