|
Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:43:33 GMT -5
Continued.... In Germanic languages, the word for bear ( Bar in German, long written Beer ) has a sound suggesting strength and violence. It should be compared with the word for boar ( Eber ), its cousin and rival in the realm of animal symbolism, and with the word designating the lord or war leader, Baro or Bero, which gave to Old French ber, preserved in modern French in the accusative baron. These various words probably have a common etymology, to be found in the neighborhood of the root ghwer or bher, which in proto-Germanic means "the strong," "the violent," "one who strikes and kills."
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:44:15 GMT -5
Continued from post #59... But some philologists have suggested another track, simpler and just as interesting: the Germanic bear derives its name from its dark fur, der Bar meaning "the brown," "the dark," "one who glows with a dark light"; the word would then be connected to the large family of Indo-European terms constructed from the Sanskrit root par or bar, that means both "brown" and "brilliant." In the same family is the adjective barun ( braun ), attested in several old Germanic languages, also meaning both "brown" and "brilliant."
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:45:02 GMT -5
Continued.... Whatever one makes of these etymological hypotheses, they do have the virtue of drawing attention to an essential problem, the name of the bear. This problem shows the special status of the bear in the cultures of northern Europe, where pronouncing its name could not be done lightly, negligently, or indifferently, as for any other species. Rather, the name had to be used with the greatest caution, spoken with respect or even, where possible, avoided and replaced with metaphors or periphrastic expressions. For hunting peoples, as I have repeatedly noted, the bear was in no way an animal like the others. It was not only the king of the forest but also an intermediate creature between the worlds of beasts, men, and gods. For that very reason, its name was early on surrounded by certain taboos, which led to the creation of various nominative formulations to designate it.
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:45:33 GMT -5
Continued.... In Germanic as well as in Baltic and Slavic languages, the bear is designated by a word that does not belong to the large Indo-European family of words for bear. This family is based on the root rks-, arks-, or orks-, which may suggest onomatopoetically the sound of the bear grunting, but also refers to the idea of light, since the bear is associated with the moon and with the constellation that bears its name. In many languages, from northern India to the Atlantic, terms designating the bear come in a variety of forms derived from the root. In ancient languages, they include: Sanskrit rksah, Persia khers, Armenian ardch, Ossetian ars, Greek arktos, Latin ursus, Old Irish art, and middle Welsh arth; and for modern languages: Italian orso, French ours, Castilian oso, Portuguese urso, Catalan os, Modern Greek arkouda, and Breton arzh.
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:46:15 GMT -5
Continued.... The Germans, as I have noted, chose to bring out the animal's fur and to give it the name "brown": bher or berun in proto-Germanic, bero in Middle High German, bera in Anglo-Saxon, bjorn in Old Norse and Icelandic, Bar in Modern German, bear in English, beer in Dutch, bjorn on Swedish, and so on. The term sometimes even became a proper name, as in the oldest branches and versions of the Roman de Renart, in which the bear is named Brun.
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:47:02 GMT -5
Continued.... The bear occupied a symbolic position of the first rank among the ancient Celts, comparable to the one it held for the Germans and the Slavs. For the Celts, however, it seemed to have been less frequently associated with the idea of strength, war, or violence, and more with the idea of power and sovereignty. Celtic warriors, to be sure, sometimes carried bear teeth and claws into battle as amulets, as well as weapons and shields decorated with the image of the animal. But while they sometimes adopted the name of the bear - less often than the Germans or Scandinavians - they lacked the capacity to transform themselves into a furious and indomitable beast, as the Berserkers did in dreams, accesses of fury, or trance states. As fiery as they might be, Celtic warriors never attained the intermediate state between human and ursine nature, a state that several German researchers have designated by two highly unusual and practically untranslatable words: Barenhaftigkeit, "bearhood," and Barenfahigkeit, "capacity to become a bear."
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:47:45 GMT -5
Continued.... Some prohibitions and circumlocutions in ancient Celtic languages nonetheless give a sense of how special an animal the bear was for the Celts, simultaneously feared, admired, and respected. Instead of speaking or writing its name, they chose to use its nickname: math or matu, which in Irish and Welsh means "male," "virile," and "kindly." In this instance, as in other cultures, the bear is the quintessentially virile animal, the masle beste as it was later known in Middle French. It was better to win its favor by calling it "kindly" than to incur its anger by calling it by a name it did not want to hear.
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:48:34 GMT -5
Continued.... The same is true for Matugenos, the god of the Gauls whose name was based on the same root ( literally "born of a bear" ) and who was a warrior god as strong as a bear; it was better to have him with you than against you. In addition to the terms math and matu, Old Irish and Old Welsh also use metaphoric expressions to designate the animal indirectly: for example, the compound word melfochyn ( literally, "honey pig" ), that brings out both the bear's inordinate love of honey and, as in Germanic traditions, its close relationship to the pig.
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:49:01 GMT -5
Continued.... But unlike the bear of the Germans and Vikings, the Celtic bear is more of a lord than a warrior. It is often a king and sometimes even a god. In the last chapter, I referred to several Celtic goddesses related to the Greek Artemis who had names directly linked to the bear: Artio, Arduina, and Andarta. They were very ancient Celtic divinities whose worship had followed the migrations of the Celts from Central Europe to the far West; in various forms, traces of them can be found in Bohemia and Switzerland, as well as in Ireland and Wales.
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:49:58 GMT -5
Continued.... But the legendary King Arthur, along with Charlemagne, was the major royal figure in medieval literature. His origins were unquestionably Celtic and his name was identical to that of the bear, art in Irish, artos in Gaulish, arth in Welsh, and arza in Breton. In Welsh and Irish, mythology, the original Arthur seems to have been a bear-king, perhaps even, like the goddess Artio, an ursine divinity who was later transformed into a legendary monarch and then gradually lost most of his original nature. In Latin narrative texts of the Christian High Middle Ages, this animal nature has almost ceased to surface. It was still more discreet in the courtly romances written in vernacular languages in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Most writers no longer understand the mythological patterns and themes around which the story of Arthur and his knights had once been constructed. In their novelistic writing and rewriting, they reduced the mythology components and changed them into mere literary motifs. Indeed, the major classic Arthurian romances never present Arthur as a bear-king, not to mention a bear-god.
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:50:37 GMT -5
Continued.... Ancient divinity, venerated creature, invincible beast, master of the forest, embodiment of strength and courage, the bear was not only the king of the beasts, but also the animal symbol of all kings. Although the case of Arthur, in whom bear and king were one, was unique among northern Europe societies - Celtic, Germanic, Scandinavian, Baltic, or Slav - the northern bear was everywhere an emblem of the chief, a symbol of authority, an image of sovereignty. Long after the Christianization of all these populations, vestiges of this phenomenon could be found in most of the kingdoms of the West. For instance, at Aix-la-Chapelle, among various antique objects related to authority was a large bronze she-bear, probably brought from Gaul during the reign of Charles the Bald. The bear remained a royal animal in the ninth century, despite the war that Charlemagne and the Church had waged against it. And it remained royal for more than three centuries.
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:53:05 GMT -5
Continued.... I have already noted that, among the Germans, victory over a bear made a young man into an adult warrior, often a chief, and sometimes a king. Still in the late eleventh century, in the Holy Land itself, combat with a bear helped Godfrey of Bouillon to mount the throne of Jerusalem. Elsewhere during the same period, hunting practices continued these rituals in less pagan but just as perilous forms: the bear remained, along with the boar, the quintessenctially noble game animal.
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:54:09 GMT -5
continued.... What animal is the one that most resembles man? The answers to this question have varied widely according to time and place, since every society had its own bestiary, taxonomies, and conceptions of the relationship between men and beasts. In Europe, however, in historic times, only three animals have been really considered to be bound by ties of resemblance, proximity, or kinship to human beings: the bear, the pig, and the monkey. In the Middle Ages imitation was considered a sin, a great sin, because it struck a blow against the order established by the Creator. Jongleurs, actors, and the like, who used imitation or disguise, were morally reprehensible and socially marginalized. In iconography, the monkey gradually became their emblem, as it did from the mid-sixteenth century on for other imitators - now a bit more tolerated - such as painters and sculptors. The case of the pig was more ambiguous than that of the monkey. Greek medicine considered the pig the animal closest to man because of its internal organization, notably with regard to the anatomy of the major organs and the functioning of the digestive system. This was fully confirmed by contemporary medicine, which took much more from pigs than from monkeys ( organ and skin grafts, tissue, dressings for wounds, and essential products such as insulin and anticoagulants. This is why, although doctors knew that the pig was anatomically a cousin to man, they did not declare that fact too openly and allowed clerics to assert that the animal that most resembled humans was neither the pig nor the monkey, but the bear.
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:54:49 GMT -5
Continued.... Indeed, at first glance, no other animal has such a distinctly anthropomorphic appearance. Although more massive, the bear is built like a man: it has the same stature and the same silhouette, sice, unlike most quadrupeds, it can remain vertical; moreover, when it walks, it places the entire foot on the ground, including the heel. The same writers also remarked that once stripped of its fur, a bear's body was identical to a man's body. This made rituals of disguise all the easier.
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:55:23 GMT -5
Continue.... But the bear did not appear only as a man in disguise; it also behaved physically like a man. It could stand, sit, lie on its side or stomach, run, swim, dive, roll, climb, jump, and even dance. An anonymous twelfth-century writer notes the contrast between the apparent heaviness of the animal and its agility, its speed, and its ability to bob and weave and avoid obstacles. Another observes with admiration that the bear is the only animal that frequently lifts its head to contemplate the sky and the stars. Still another draws the reader's attention to the diversity of the colors of its fur and makes a comparison with the diversity of shades of men's beards and hair: black, brown, tawny, red, blond, gray. Most important, everyone remarked on how the bear used its front paws to grasp, hold, or throw an object, delicately pick berries, skillfully catch fish in flowing water, or, in contrast, savagely massacre hives to gather honey.
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:56:10 GMT -5
Continued.... Diet was another area that established a kinship between bears and humans. Medieval writers said little about it, although there was one who claimed that bear meat had the same taste as human flesh, but modern scholarship has given it detailed attention. There are indeed very few truly omnivorous animals, and they include bears and men. With respect to the animal, however, certain qualifications are necessary. Not only does its diet vary according to season and location, but also and above all, it has evolved over the centuries: the prehistoric brown bear was clearly carnivorous; the present-day brown bear is largely vegetarian. The long war that men conducted against bears drove it out of many regions, made it a creature of the mountains, and gradually changed its diet, forcing it to replace the flesh of wild or domestic animals with increasingly varied plants.
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:57:04 GMT -5
Continued.... Today the bear is no longer considered to be the animal closest to man; the monkey and the pig have clearly overtaken it in that role, and they have become of constantly growing interest for medical experimentation and research. Incidentally, this is truer of the pig than of the monkey, not only because it is an abundant species, not costly to use, and not at all threatened with extinction, but also because contemporary science recognizes that it is more biologically and pharmaceutically useful, even though the percentage of DNA shared by man and monkey ( specifically the chimpanzee ) is slightly higher than that shared by man and pig.
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:57:54 GMT -5
Continued.... But medieval bestiaries added a remarkable particularity that modern zoology has not preserved: bears did not mate like other quadrupeds but like men and women, lying down and embracing, face-to-face, stomach-to-stomach; they were the only animals to do so. Zoologists later definitively rejected the idea of coitus ad modum hominem and ended the reputation for debauchery and lewdness that surrounded the sexuality of she-bears. Celtic and Germanic mythologies were less discreet. They did not hesitate to give prominence to stories of bears raping women and to the exploits of heroes or misdeeds of monsters born from those unnatural unions. Women were always the victims, real or symbolic, of these masquerades that featured strongly sexed animals. Hence, attempts had to be made to keep women away, exactly as they were to be kept away from hunts, where large game was not only a mortal danger to them but also a sexual danger. Many priests and monks of the High Middle Ages believed that one had to go further and simply prohibit all these pagan rituals inherited from barbaric societies and contrary to all Christian values. The Church tried to do this beginning in the Carolingian period, and it attacked first the animal that was considered most dangerous because it was closest to the human species; the bear.
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:58:24 GMT -5
Continued.... King of the beasts, present in every land, dreadful and dreaded, emblem of chiefs and warriors, symbol of extreme savagery and heightened sexuality, presumed cousin or ancestor of man, an object of veneration and pagan ceremonies throughout northern Europe, lover of girls and young women with whom it was thought he mated, the bear necessarily terrified the Church of the High Middle Ages. The Church saw the bear as the most dangerous of all indigenous animals and even as a creature of the Devil. This was not because it was endowed with such prodigious strength that no other animal could defeat it but primarily because it strangely resembled man, so much so that human conduct was attributed to it. It was also the animal around which clustered oral traditions, uncontrollable beliefs, and the superstitions that were the most difficult to eradicate.
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:59:06 GMT -5
Continued.... The Church therefore went to war early against this creature, striving to remove it from its throne and replace it with another wild animal, more distant and hence more subject to control: the lion, king of the bestiary of the East and the central figure of all written traditions - biblical, Greek, and Roman. This war against the bear, which ended with a new king of beasts in all European societies, lasted not for a few decades but for several centuries, almost a millennium. To bring it to a successful conclusion, priests and theologians had recourse to various methods. Some were employed sequentially, some simultaneously.
|
|