"'Well, mind and hold tight by my shagyy coat, and then there's nothing to fear,' said the Bear, so she rode a long, long way.", words and illustration from page 10, *East of the Sun and West of the Moon: Old Tales from the North* illustrated by Danish artist Kay Neilson. Photo credit: available on Wikimedia Commons.

“East of the Sun and West of the Moon” is a beloved Norwegian fairytale featuring a heroine who marries a bear prince who takes on human form at night and her courageous quest to save him from an evil spell. It is filled with classic fairytale magic and enchantment, villainous trolls, wicked witches, and mischievious giants and was originally published in Old Tales from the North - a collection of legends and stories written by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe in 1840.

Although these two folklorists collected these oral stories from ordinary Norwegian country folk, fairytales like this one featuring a romantic relationship between a bear and human, or bears as kings, shapeshifters and supernatural beings exist in many cultures circling the northern boreal circumpolar regions of the globe.

Part way through carving this handmade linocut inspired by *East of the Sun West of the Moon*.

Archeological evidence supports the idea that throughout these boreal circumpolar regions of the world* humans looked to bears for practical survival for millennia, but even more significant was the bear’s mythical role in the human psyche. Archeologists have found bear bones ceremonially and intentionally buried with preservation in mind which is very different from how other animal bones were disposed of suggesting a reverential role for bears in many human societies in these northern boreal regions. Many folktales, fairytales and myths from these landscapes further suggest a human kinship with bears and the sacred role of bears. There are stories of bears being raised by humans as their own children (Inuit of Greenland and Canada and Ainu of Japan), bears as dieties (Sami of Sweden, Finland, Russia and Norway, and Amur Ghilyak of Manchuria and Russia, Celts of Ireland and Great Britain), bears as mythological kings and/or progenitors of a people (Great Britain and Korea), and bears as shamans (Ainu of Japan), all of which serve to connect these peoples and landscapes together through their shared bear mythology and kinship with bears**. How might we think of our relationship to people from other cultures differently if we were to recognize the profound way this shared boreal bear mythology connects people and places that our modern minds assume are “different” or “foreign” from each other?

The Norwegian folktale “East of the Sun West of the Moon” and the Japanese (indigenous Ainu) folktale entitled “Crescent Moon Bear” are two folktales that are so strikingly similar, giving voice to their parallel nature has far reaching significance for deepening our sense of interconnected history, identity and belonging to a shared boreal landscape, not to mention a shared kinship with bears across national and contemporary ethnic borderlines.

So let’s compare these two beloved tales and see what we discover (or perhaps I should more aptly use the word ‘recover’).

In “East of the Sun” a poor young woman falls in love with a giant white bear who promises her family riches only to discover after her wedding he is actually a prince held captive and disguised as a bear by a wicked spell. She resolves to undertake the extraordinary journey traversing formidable landscapes and braving the North, South, East and West winds to rescue him from clutches of this spell. On her journey three elder women assist her each gifting her a golden apple, golden carding comb and golden spinning wheel which help her outsmart an evil troll sorceress who guards and keep her husband spellbound. Although she undergoes the challenges to keep her prince along with the protection and power that a relationship with royalty would offer her, in the end she discovers her own bravery, courage and inner power. . . truly a transformative journey of self-discovery.

“Crescent Moon Bear” (referring to the crescent moon design on the chests of many Asiatic black bears) appears in Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ renowned book Women Who Run With the Wolves. In the version Dr Estes tells, a soldier has returned from war to his wife a traumatized and angry man refusing to enter his home preferring to sleep outdoors like a wild animal. Nothing the young wife does can coax him back into his home. He even refuses to eat his favorite foods which she lovingly cooks for him. So in desperation she seeks the wisdom of a shaman. The shaman tells the young wife she must bring back the white whisker of a crescent moon bear and only then would the shaman offer the young wife a solution to her problem. The young wife bravely undertakes the challenge, climbs a dangerous mountain and manages to coax the bear with food and plucks his whisker which she carefully brings back to the shaman only to see the shaman toss it carelessly into a fire. When the young wife asks with surprise why the shaman did this, the shaman responds that the courage, the patience, the resilience she needed to pluck the bear’s whisker was precisely the qualities she needed to cultivate inside herself to relate to a husband like hers . . .a similarly transformative journey of self-discovery.

Both folktales show it is women - fearless young women - who are the ones doing the saving, daring to engage in greater intimacy with a bear whether it is marrying the bear, or having the courage to pluck the whisker of a bear, and both involve traversing a a formidable boreal forest landscape as a pathway to greater self-discovery. Both these folktales involve female elders, or female shamans, who offer guidance, support, tools and resources for young women to succeed in their quest. Both folktales are exteriorizing an inner journey, showing us how to function within the discomfort of growth by overcoming our inner landscape of fear and doubt which can feel as dangerous and formidable as a literal landscape, or like confronting an actual bear in real life.

Dr Estes describes this journey of transformation beautifully in her audiorecording Dangerous Old Woman. Dr Estes says, “When the wind blows, don’t go into your house, instead ride the wind”. I love this phrase “ride the wind” so much because it is a metaphor that connects Estes’ wisdom and the elements of “East of the Sun” folktale (where the heroine rides the winds) so harmoniously here. What she’s referring to is how we don’t get initiated from hiding safely and timidly in a sheltered place, we grow when we brave the world and give ourselves permission to transgress our own limited expectations of ourselves.

A crescent moon bear showing the white crescent moon shape on her chest. Photo credit: Guerlin Nicolas Wikimedia Commons.

Though “East of the Sun” and “Crescent Moon Bear” are different tales, they are essentially gifting us with the same wisdom: one from the East the other from the West. The phrase “east of the sun and west of the moon” actually refers to the space/time where the sun is sinking in the west, and the moon is rising in the east - that magical liminal moment between darkness and light. Though one story is Norwegian and the other Ainu, I like to think that both heroines are climbing up either side of the same mountain - one from the East the other from the West - and when they reach the top, that liminal place east of the sun west of the moon, that is where they meet their twin: the other Self they are turning into. Like Alice in Through the Looking Glass, she sees through the mirror an image of a different world with herself in it, yet in an enchanted way, it is also the same world reflected back. It could be the heroine discovering a braver version of herself, or the Norwegian and Ainu heroines discovering they are in each other’s worlds, valuing the same values, traversing the same formidable mountain, braving the same bear, saving the same husband. Either way, seeing the folktales as mirror images of each other weaves the stories back into belonging with each other, while at the same time, weaves those on either side of this mountain back into kinship with each other through a shared timeless folktale about a bear, a wife, and her quest to save her husband and an inner journey of transformation.

A handmade linocut print inspired by Crescent Moon Bear. . . .a Japanese folktale about cultivating the courage to confront a bear, an internal journey of self-discovery.

Martin Shaw, esteemed Mythologist & Director of the Westcountry School of Myth in the UK, talks about this twin concept in mythology and folklore in his audiobook Courting The Wild Twin where he recounts a folktale about two twins, one estranged and exiled into the wilderness and forgotten while the other twin is nurtured by his parents and how the story’s wisdom is about finding and welcoming home that wild twin from his/her place of exile. The story’s lesson is that whatever you choose to exile will grow hostile towards you, but if you court it, it may come to enlarge and deepen your sense of Self. We see this wild twin story manifesting in our lives when we witness the dehumanization or devaluation of people or cultures that seem “foreign” or “strange” along with the systemic forgetting of any shared similarities. This comes at a great cost to everyone, and today’s world filled with polarization, extremism and divisiveness is proof that we are living in its consequence.

Even the concept of the nation state has overwhelmed our sense of identity, reinforcing loyalty to national boundaries at the expense of many of these cultural and folkloric connections that transcend national borderlines - many of which run deeper, and have existed for a much longer duration of time than the recent concept of “nationality”. We can see this in the way a story of a fearless young woman who is attempting to save a husband, braves the wild, and dares to engage more intimately with a bear has been used to uphold loyalty to national identity rather than question it, in the same way East of the Sun West of the Moon is regarded and treated as a classic Norwegian story rather than a variation of one story that winds its way through the northern boreal region of the world uniting various cultures and peoples. The truth is this is a deeply familiar story to people from both these landscapes, yet the honoring of this connection has been forgotten, marginalized in favor of a more divisive rhetoric. For this reason I strongly believe rediscovering synchronicities in folktales that originate from distant landscapes may be just the medicine this world needs.

Shaw says, “The business of story is not enchantment. The business of story is not escape. The business of stories is waking up” and I agree wholeheartedly with him. He asks us “How do we wake up?” and his answer is: “the secret is relatedness. Relatedness. Relatedness breeds love and love can excavate conscience, conscience changes the way we behave. Relatedness is how we wake up”. I love this. Although Shaw is referring to our human relatedness to the earth and all wild things, I am extending it here to also include each other, human-to-human. Exploring synchronicities in folktales like “East of the Sun” and “Crescent Moon Bear” we discover our relatedness and shared mythology centered around an ancestral kinship with boreal bears and fearless females that transcends contemporary borders, circling the entire northern boreal regions of the globe. The two stories show us ourselves in others. This is what folktales are ingeniously designed to do: through their gnarly meandering roots that extend into the timeless past they voice what is deeply ancient, while their winding skyward branches offer medicine for the contemporary moment. . .

Afterward:

I find it encouraging to witness how we still are mystified and intrigued by shapeshifting werebears and bear kings in popular culture today. . . whether it is Bjorn in Lord of the Rings, or Borek Byrnison in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials which was transformed into a major motion picture The Golden Compass, or Kenai in Disney’s Brother Bear to name a few (all of which I love!). Moreover, I am also heartened to learn of environmental movements that are recognizing migratory paths of species like the bear that transcend national borderlines, further supporting a reorientation towards a different sense of belonging and place that might serve to connect us more too. Fantasy and reality always work in tandem for the storytelling creatures that we are. . .

NOTES:

*Note that historically during the last glacial period the boreal forest extended much further south than it does today which is why you may find similar ancient bear folktales in places where there may not be boreal forests today.

**There are so many more cultures that feature bears as Kings, grooms, brides, parents, children, and shamans - I cannot list them all!

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References:

Blog Cover photo credit: background landscape by Donnie Rosie on Unsplash & polar bear by Alan Wilson available on Wikimedia Commons. I have altered both these images by combining them into one image.

Asbjørnsen, Peter Christen, and Moe, Jørgen. (2019) The Complete and Original Norwegian Folktales of Asbjørnsen and Moe. University of Minnesota Press.

Nielsen, Kay (illustrator). (1922). East of the Sun and West of the Moon: Old Tales from the North. New York: G.H. Doran.

Estes, Clarissa Pinkola (1996). Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Ballantine Books.

Janhunen, Juha (2003). “Tracing the Bear Myth in Northern Asia”. Acta Slavica Iaponica 20. The Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University, pp. 1-24.

Pastoureau, Michel (2007). The Bear: History of a Fallen King. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Shaw, Martin (2020) Courting the Wild Twin. Chelsea Green Publishing. (audiobook)

Shaw, Martin (March 27. 2023). “Valemon the Bear: Myth in the Age of the Anthropocene”. Emergence Magazine (Podcast interview).

Storl, Wolf D. (2018). Bear: Animal, Myth, Icon. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.