Relationships between humans and bears are well attested in the archaeological record of northern Europe. Viewed as a whole, the physical evidence for the hunting of brown bear, long-distance trade in bear pelts, the use of bearskins in burials (see Figure 1), and bear sacrifice – including bear graves in the Sami lands of northern Scandinavia – are testaments to the importance of this species to pre-Viking-age and Viking-age economies and beliefs.
Bears in Old Norse-Icelandic literature primarily feature as fylgjur (personal spirits) in dreams, or as stock figures against which a would-be hero should measure themselves.[1] In archaeological sources, the bear is often associated with a warrior, hunter or merchant status, based on the inclusion of their skins in male graves, and various iconographical representations on helmet-plates (or their dies), with the martial bear having been associated with Odin and devotees of this deity.[2] However, bearskins are not exclusively part of wealthy, male burials, and there are many different aspects to the human-bear relationship that need to be investigated to best understand the appearance of these animals in medieval literature, place names, and archaeological sources.
Bearskins would have been a valued commodity in the extensive Viking-Age trade networks across northern Europe. In the ninth-century account of a visitor from Hålogaland to the court of Alfred the Great, the goods that Ohthere is listed as receiving from the Sami include bear pelts and bearskin clothes.[3] In the twelfth-century Egils saga, we find bearskins repeatedly emphasised as trade or tribute items gained from the communities in northern Norway (chs 13–17). But bearskins pose problems in the archaeological record, often surviving only as claws, and sometimes fibres caught in metal fittings.[4] Bear pelts are largely detected in burials, and therefore it can be difficult to get a sense of how bearskins were used by the living in contexts divorced from the processes of funerary rites.[5] It is also possible that the expression of relationships with bears changed in increasingly Christian communities, as bearskins in burials seem to have been a feature of the early Viking age more so than the later, and burials in northern Sweden and Finland continue to show evidence for bearskins in burials for longer than elsewhere in Scandinavia.[6] However, the meaning of bears and the value of bearskins would have varied across regions. A belief in the bear as human clad in bearskin seems to have developed among both Eurasian and circumpolar peoples, and likewise an ability of the bearskin to impart bear-ness to the human (separate from the bear-body).[7] Recalled explicitly in one medieval Icelandic saga is the idea of ‘bear-warmth’ (ON bjarnylr) used to describe people who do not feel the cold, in later folklore attributed to having been born on a bearskin.[8]
Furthermore, medieval poetic sources from Iceland suggest bear-as-hibernator to be an enduring feature of Norse understanding of bears. Poetic language referring to bears associate them with sleep, hunger, and seasonal activity. Likewise, a metaphorical name for winter in Old Norse is ‘hverja nótt húns’ (‘the night of every bear’).[9] Such language, while preserved in medieval Icelandic texts, seems to show a keen recognition of bear habits. The hibernation of the bear is often a meaningful event in the circumpolar bear cults, with the journeying to the place of hibernation and the rousing of the bear from its den key moments in the ceremonial bear hunt traditionally practiced by Finno-Ugric communities. While we cannot project these early modern and modern traditions into the Viking age, a hint of similar traditions may be reflected in saga accounts of the preparation for and practice of journeys to the bear’s den before the bear is killed (e.g. Grettis saga ch. 21, Finnboga saga ch. 11).[10] Given the longstanding cultural contacts and exchange between the Sami and the Norse as co-inhibitors of northern Scandinavia, it is likely that Sami traditions influenced the Norse attitudes and beliefs towards the bear, yet much of the scholarship on bears in Norse contexts seems primarily focussed on their predatory nature, and their apparent association with violence and warrior status.[11] Including both Norse burials and Sami sites in the survey of archaeological sites and drawing much more on Sami ethnographic accounts concerning their relationships with bears than has hitherto been done will enable me to further ask whether Sami perspectives on bears can enable more nuanced interpretations of Norse-bear relations.
The places of human interactions with bears are also vital to understanding their relationships. Place names with animal elements are an underutilised resource in studies of historic animal-human relations that act as citations for animal-human encounters and hold great potential for investigating environmental aspects of these relationships, and their places in working landscapes.[12]This project would aim to build on the limited research I have done so far on animal place names in my current project to see whether patterns emerge in medieval Swedish place names, for example, a specific terrain type or natural feature associated with bears, or a practice, such as hunting perhaps indicated by names indicating the den of a bear (björnebol). (Polar) bear place names in the Sagas of Icelanders are heavily biased toward waterscapes, and it might be presumed that forests would be more often associated with bears in the Swedish names.
I am super excited to explore the ways in which bears and their skins may be used in other ways and spheres of meaning than the expression of martial, hunting or merchant identities that are often proposed for the use of bearskins in burials, based on a re-evaluation of relationships between bears, humans, and their places.
[1] Lotte Hedeager, ‘Split Bodies in the Late Iron Age/Viking Age of Scandinavia’, in Body Parts and Bodies Whole – Changing Relations and Meaning., ed. K. Rebay-Salisbury, M. L. Stig Sørensen, and J. Hughes (Oxford: Oxbow, 2010), 111–18, pp. 82–85; for examples of bear fylgja see, Gunnarr of Hlíðarendi in Njáls saga ch. 23, and Oddr Grímsson in Örvar-Odds saga ch. 4.
[2] G. Arwidsson, Valsgärde 7. Die Gräberfunde von Valsgärde 3., Acta Musei Antiqitatum Septentrionalium Regiae Universitatis Upsaliensis 5 (Uppsala: Uppsala universitets museum för nordiska fornsaker, 1977), p. 116). Anne-Sofie Gräslund, ‘Wolves, Serpents, and Birds. Their Symbolic Meaning in Old Norse Belief’, in Old Norse Religion in Long-Term Perspectives: Origins, Changes, and Interactions., ed. Anders Andrén, Kristina Jennbert, and Catharina Raudvere (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2006), 124–29. Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology (D.S. Brewer, 1993), pp. 338. Ben Raffield et al., ‘Ingroup Identification, Identity Fusion and the Formation of Viking War Bands’, World Archaeology 48, no. 1 (1 January 2016): 35–50. Price 2019. Jens Peter Schjødt, ‘The Warrior in Old Norse Religion’, in Ideology and Power in the Viking and Middle Ages, The Northern World 52 (Brill, 2011), 269–95.
[3] Janet Bately, ‘Text and Translation: The Three Parts of the Known World and the Geography of Europe North of the Danube According to Orosius’ Historiae and Its Old English Version.’, in Othere’s Voyages: A Late 9th-Century Account of Voyages along the Coasts of Norway and Denmark and Its Cultural Context, ed. Janet Bately and Anton Englert (Roskilde: Viking Ship Museum, 2007), 40–50, p. 46.
[4] Grimm 2013; Tuija Kirkinen et al., ‘The Identification and Use of Fur and Feathers Excavated from the Late Iron Age and Early Medieval (12th–13th Centuries) Ravattula Ristimäki Cemetery in Kaarina, Southwest Finland’, Fennoscandia Archaeologica, no. XXXVII (2020): 45–59.
[5] Sebastian Beermann, ‘Bear Phalanges and Bearskins in Graves of the First Millennium AD. Cultural Developments and Characteristics of a Unique Burial Custom in Central and Northern Europe’, in Animals and Animated Objects in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Leszek Gardela and Kamil Kajkowski (Turnhout: Brepols, 2023); Sebastian Beermann, Bärenkrallen und Bärenfelle in Brand- und Körpergräbern der vorrömischen Eisenzeit bis Völkerwanderungszeit in Mittel- und Nordeuropa, Universitätsforschungen zur prähistorischen Archäologie (Bonn: Verlag Dr. Rudolf Habelt GmbH, 2016). Oliver Grimm, ‘Bear-Skins in Northern European Burials (First Millenium AD)’, in Hunting in Northern Europe, ed. Ulrich Schmölcke and Oliver Grimm (Schleswig, 2013), 277–96.
[6] Anna Wessman, Death, Destruction and Commemoration. Tracing Ritual Activities in Finnish Late Iron Age Cemeteries (AD 550-1150) (Helsinki: The Finnish Antiquarian Society, 2010), p. 55. Aleksander Pluskowski, ‘Harnessing the Hunger: Religious Appropriations of Animal Predation in Early Medieval Scandinavia’, in Old Norse Religion in Long-Term Perspectives: Origins, Changes, and Interactions, ed. Anders Andrén, Kristina Jennbert, and Catharina Raudvere, Vägar Til Midgård 8 (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2006), 119–23, p. 119. T Kirkinen, ‘“Burning pelts” – Brown bear skins in the Iron Age and early medieval (1–1300 AD) burials in south-eastern Fennoscandia’, Estonian Journal of Archaeology 21, no. 1 (2017): 3.
[7] Juha Janhunen, ‘Tracing the Bear Myth in Northeast Asia’, Acta Slavica Iaponica 20 (2003): 1–24. Lotte Hedeager, Iron Age Myth and Materiality: An Archaeology of Scandinavia AD 400-1000 (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 91–95.
[8] Jón Árnason, Islenzkar Þjoðsögur og Æfintýri (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1862), pp. 608–611. Bear as protector is proposed in Howard Williams, ‘Citations in Stone: The Material World of Hogbacks’, European Journal of Archaeology 19, no. 3 (2016): 497–518.
[9] Rolf Staynem, ‘Hallar-Steinn, Rekstefja’, in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 1: From Mythical Times to c. 1035, ed. Diana Whaley, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 893.
[10] Deborah J. Shepherd, ‘Bear, Elk, and Fish Symbolism in Finnish Contexts’, in The Symbolic Role of Animals in Archaeology, ed. Kathleen Ryan and Pam J. Crabtree (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 27–38. Andrew Wiget and Olga Balalaeva, Khanty, People of the Taiga: Surviving the 20th Century (University of Alaska Press, 2011), p. 136.
[11] Frog, ‘From mythology to identity and imaginal experience: An exploratory approach to the symbolic matrix in Viking Age Åland’, in The Viking Age in Åland. Insights into Identity and Remnants of Culture., ed. J. Ahola, Frog, and J. Lucenius (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2014), 349–414. Hedeager 2011, pp. 93–95. Pluskowski 2006. Price 2019.
[12] Harriet Jean Evans Tang, Animal-Human Relationships in Medieval Iceland: From Farm-Settlement to Sagas (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer Ltd, 2022), pp. 38–9.
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