Paper short abstract:

Exploring the relations, visitations and transformations within folk narratives of polar bear arrivals, traditional and recently collected legends in Iceland, as well as media representations, will be discussed in light of narrative traditions, imaginaries of the north and the anthropocene.

Paper long abstract:

The polar bear, an icon of the Arctic, has on occasion come ashore in Iceland. While not considered a natural habitat of bears, the country’s human inhabitants’ limited knowledge of them in part springs from cultural origins in Scandinavia and the British Isles, as well as from Norse settlements in Greenland. Accounts of these arrivals can be found in sources of varying reliability, but numerous narratives have been told and recorded of the Icelanders’ interaction, or conflict, with the white bear (In Icelandic: hvítabjörn / plural: hvítabirnir). In tracing the polar bear’s fleeting presence on Iceland’s shores and cultural imagination these narratives not only call into question the boundaries of the human and the animal but also the storytellers’ place in a precarious world. These projections of human aspiration and trepidation perhaps do not leave the polar bear, in itself, with much agency or room for representation. Yet, both traditional and recently collected narratives are open for analysis in relation to narrative techniques applied to describe the physicality, thought and emotions of both bear and human. Tropes and motifs describing natural and supernatural features will be discussed in light of narrative traditions and imaginaries of the north. Performative and methodological issues of gender, periphery and cultural background will be dealt with as well how the significance of the polar bear has developed through the centuries. In their contemporary context this presentation will highlight how climate crisis, morality and arcticification or borealism appear in folk narrative, material culture and media.