The Bear and the Berserker

Shape, in the Norse mind

The Old Norse sagas have a word, hamr, that means both skin and shape. A person's hamr was their outward form, and for most people it was fixed. A few were hamramr, shape-strong, or "not of one skin." Such a person could change form, or could lie as if asleep while their spirit went abroad in the likeness of an animal.

The tradition also speaks of the fylgja, a follower: a spirit double, often in animal form, that goes before a person and reflects their nature. A bold chieftain's might appear as a bear or a bull, a cunning man's as a fox. To see one's own was an omen. These ideas were not theories of magic so much as a way of talking about character, fate and the feeling that a person is more than their body.

Berserkers and wolf-coats

The berserkers are the best-known shape-strong figures of the north. One saga describes the chosen warriors of the god of battle and poetry, who "went without mail and were as mad as dogs or wolves; they bit their shields and were as strong as bears or bulls." The name is usually explained as bear-shirt. Beside them the sources name the ulfhednar, the wolf-coated, and a few surviving pieces of early metalwork show a dancing warrior in a wolf's head and pelt.

What lay behind this is uncertain. It may have been a warrior brotherhood that wore the skins of its patron animals and worked itself into a fighting frenzy; the sagas were written down centuries after the fact, by Christian authors looking back. In those later sagas the berserker has usually declined into a stock villain, a bullying duellist whom the hero must put down, and the fit itself came to be treated as a disorder. An Icelandic law code of the Christian period lists going berserk among the things for which a man could be outlawed.

The bear who fought while a man sat still

The finest bear story in the sagas concerns a champion whose father had been cursed by a witch-queen to be a bear by day and a man by night. The son grows up to serve a famous king. In the king's last battle his men look for their greatest fighter and cannot find him. Instead a huge bear goes before the king's line, striking down more with its paw than any five warriors, and no weapon bites on it. A comrade goes to search and finds the champion sitting motionless in his lodging. He rouses him with reproaches. The champion rises, sighs that this will help the king less than his friend supposes, and goes out to fight. But the bear has vanished from the field, and the battle turns.

The story is a precise picture of the Norse idea: the body stays, and the shape goes forth.

The bear as kin

Around the whole of the northern world, from Scandinavia through Siberia to North America, the bear has been treated as something very close to a person. It walks upright, it uses its paws like hands, and a skinned bear looks disturbingly like a human being. Peoples who hunted it did so with ceremony, apology and feasting, and avoided speaking its true name. The English word bear itself is thought to be such an avoidance, meaning simply "the brown one"; in the Slavic languages it is "the honey-eater."

Out of that respect come stories of descent.

• In Korea, a bear and a tiger pray to become human. They are given garlic and mugwort and told to stay out of the sunlight for a hundred days. The tiger gives up. The bear endures, becomes a woman, and bears the son who founds the first Korean kingdom.
• Peoples of the north Pacific coast of America tell of a young woman who marries a bear and lives among the bear people. Her sons can wear either shape, and from them the people learn how bears are to be respected.
• In Finland the bear is said to have been born in the sky, by the shoulders of the Great Bear, and lowered to earth in a golden cradle.
• In Greek myth a nymph loved by the king of the gods is turned into a bear and then set among the stars, where she still circles the pole. At one sanctuary of the goddess of the wild, young girls served for a season as her "little bears."

The bear's son

One further echo is worth noting. Folktales across Europe and Asia tell of a hero of great strength and slow beginnings who is the son of a bear, or was raised by one. Scholars have long remarked that the hero of the oldest English epic, who fights without weapons and crushes his enemies in his grip, has something of the bear's son about him, and his name has been read as "bee-wolf," a riddling name for the honey-thief.

How to read these stories

The berserker has been taken up with enthusiasm in modern times, and not always wisely. It is worth remembering that the sagas themselves are ambivalent. They admire strength and distrust frenzy. The figure they honor is not the man who loses himself in the bear, but the one who can send the bear out and call it home again.