Causing a Bear, Scandinavian style

In my courses on healing through Active Dreaming and imagination, we call on Great Mother Bear as healer and protector. The Bear is the great medicine animal of North America and in Native tradition, the most powerful healers are those called by the Bear in dreams and visions. In ancient Europe, the Bear was the king of beasts, and there was a sacred kinship between bears and humans that we can trace from Paleolithic times. The Bear was a form of the Goddess and Athenian maidens danced in bearskins for Artemis, as She Bear, in the festival of Brauronia. Here, drawing on the Icelandic sagas, we recollect something of the warrior history of the Bear, and a shaman warrior of the North who could do much more than put on a bearskin and go wild.


His name is Bödvar Bjarki, which means "Warlike Little-Bear". He has a typical Scandinavian genealogy: his father Bjorn was a were-bear (as a result of a witch's curse); his mother's name, Bera, means "She-Bear". He casts a long shadow through the sagas of the North. He is the perfect warrior, stronger and fiercer than the berserkers ("bear-shirts") who are the champions and bodyguards of kings but must yield pride of place to Bodvar at the royal tables when he makes his entrance, often by knocking the door or wall down.
    While berserkers whip themselves into the fighting frenzy of an angry bear, Bodvar causes a bear. While his father was condemned by sorcery to turn into a bear of uncontrollable appetites in in the daytime, Bodvar is free from the curse of the were-bear; he chooses when to project a second body, in the shape of a warrior bear. This recalls the practice of Northern sorcerers who project fylgjur, "fetches" or shadow selves. The fylgjur are sometimes phantom figures, used to spy on adversaries or confuse their minds, but Bodvar's bear is entirely physical to those who meet it, and invincible among men in battle.   
     Bodvar is the hero of the last chapters of the Icelandic Saga of Hrólf Kraki. He is now the champion of King Hrólf of Denmark. who is leading a tiny force into battle against a vastly larger army that has invaded his lands. As the battle rages, a great bear advances in front of Hrólf's men. Always standing next to the king, the bear kills more of the enemy with a single sweep of its paw than five of the king's best warriors can despatch with swords and axes. The bear seems impervious to blows and missiles. It crushes men and horses with its weight, and rips enemies apart with its teeth.
     Against the odds, things are going well for King Hrólf until Hjalti - a boon companion of Bodvar - notices that his friend is missing from the field. He protests to the king that Bodvar should not be looking to his own safety in the midst of the fray. King Hrólf counsels that "Bodvar will be where he serves us best."
     Not grasping what this means, Hjalti runs back to the king's chamber, where he finds Bodvar apparently "sitting idle", or perhaps asleep. [1] Bodvar is in a state of shamanic trance. Not understanding, Hjalti seeks to rouse him, protesting that it is a disgrace that he is not fighting. "You should be using the strength of your arms, which are as strong as a bear's." In his outrage, Hjalti threatens to burn down the house, and Bodvar in it, unless his friend goes into battle.-
     With a deep sigh, Bodvar rises from his place and complies. After affirming that he is a stranger to fear, and fully aware of his obligations to the king, Bodvar cautions his friend that"By disturbing me here, you have not been as helpful to the king as you intended. The outcome of the battle was almost decided. You have acted out of ignorance...Now events will run their course, and nothing we can do will change the outcome. I can now offer the king far less help than before you woke me." [2]
     When Bodvar goes into battle, the giant bear disappears. Now King Hrólf's army is exposed to psychic as well as physical attack. When the bear was present, the dark arts of the invader's witchy wife Skuld were useless. Now she is able to project her own monstrous animal, a hideous boar that shoots arrows from its bristles. Bodvar Bjarki fights furiously, mowing down enemy warriors like grass. Yet their numbers do not diminish, and he begins to suspect that ghost warriors are fighting among the living. The champions fall, and after them King Hrolf. Because the bear shaman was torn from his trance when the bear was most needed.

[1] In a paraphrase of the famous (but otherwise lost) poem "Bjarkamal" appended by Saxo Grammaticus to his Gesta Danorum. Bodvar Bjarki (here called "Biarco") is in a deep "sleep" from which Hjalti has great difficulty in rousing him.
[2] Quotations are loosely based on Jesse L. Byock's translation of The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki (New York and London: Penguin Books, 1998).

Graphic: Bodvar's fetch on the field of battle in the shape of a bear, in "Hrolf Kraki's Last Stand" by Louis M. Moe (d.1945).

The complete guide to Loki

Once again, my dreams are setting me research assignments.
   Last night I dreamed I was shown a series of images of Loki, the Norse trickster god. A voice-over explained his many attributes and gave a fresh version of his role in the affairs of the Aesir and their rivals, and the perennial contest between order and chaos. My tutorial seemed to be taking place in Ireland, which confused me a little when I woke until I reflected on the Viking history of that island, and started researching symbol stones.
   In the dream, I was fascinated by the images. They looked nothing like the Loki portrayed in the movie Thor. They were abstract in style, only vaguely humanoid. The figures seemed composed of oblong segments that could move separately. The images were essentially two-dimensional, yet through their portals it seemed possible to see into a stir of action taking place within a larger reality, beyond 4D. I was reminded of how other 2D images - like mandalas - can also give access to multidimensional reality, sometimes more easily than 3D representations.
   I did not retain much of the commentary on Loki in the dream, but I know that it presented a Loki who is much more complex and less dark than the "devil god" versions. I suspect there is also interweaving of Norse and Celtic traditions, given the Irish setting.
   I am prompted now to press forward with an assignment given to me many years ago by Tolkien, no less. I was leading a group shamanic journey to a locale in the imaginal realm that I sometimes call the Magic Library. I met C.S. Lewis and Tolkien - or their semblances - and they offered me some advice on writing. Tolkien said, "You must study Scandinavian mythology."
    A few years later, while I was working on The Dreamer's Book of the Dead, C.S. Lewis turned up again, in a spontaneous night vision in the liminal space between sleep and awake. I asked him, "Where's Tolkien?" He replied, "Tolkien isn't talking to you because you didn't do what he told you to do."
   So: this morning I found relief carvings of a being that is believed to be Loki on symbol stones from both Ireland and Scotland. The one above is Pictish. It is from the Meigle museum of sculpted stone in eastern Scotland and shows a horned god in chains. The abstract style somewhat resembles the figures in my dream, who are less clearly humanoid. The stone below is at Carndonagh in Donegal, a guardian pillar with a monastic figure on the left and a possible Loki on the right.
    I shall try to draw the series of Loki images that were shown to me in the dream. I shall continue my researches, which have already turned up an interesting possible meaning for Loki's name. In Geirr Bassi Haraldsson's The Old Norse Name, "Loki" is a "loop in a thread", in other words, a loophole. One aspect of the Trickster leaps out; he can find or make loopholes in the weave of fate.
    For now, my catch phrase is: I got Loki.