From January 12th to 17th, the project’s postdoctoral researcher, Dr Timothy Bourns, was in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, for a conference on Dreams. It was organised by Island Dynamics – an island studies research group – and this particular conference focused on the concept of dreams (both literal and metaphorical) across cultures.
Timothy’s presentation was titled ‘Dream-Animals in Medieval Iceland’. Dreams are common and important elements in the medieval Icelandic sagas: they foretell future events, act as plot devices, and reveal ideas and beliefs held in medieval Iceland. Different animal species consistently inhabit these saga-dreams as fylgjur (‘fetches’), which act as symbolic images that figuratively point towards someone’s inner qualities and defining characteristics.
Animal fylgjur reflect how different animal species were viewed in medieval Iceland. For example, bear fylgjur are repeatedly shown to follow people that are particularly strong and powerful; wolves, however, are linked with a person’s enemies, and foxes follow characters that are particularly sly, cunning, and associated with magic. Swans are the fylgjur of especially beautiful women, but eagles follow male heroes. The identity and fate of a person and their animal fylgja (‘fetch’) are interlinked: what animal fylgjur do in dreams, their human counterparts do later in the saga’s reality; and the death of someone’s animal fylgja in a dream implies that person’s impending demise. Animal fylgjur thus express a worldview in which humans and animals are both metaphorically and metaphysically interconnected.
Timothy focused on examples of polar bear fylgjur in particular, given the location, and incorporated discussion of when and where polar bears figure in Old Norse-Icelandic literary narratives: upon discovery in the settlement period; captured and transported from Greenland to Scandinavian courts to be gifted to kings; and, of course, as fylgjur in dreams. There is even legal evidence to suggest that polar bears could be tamed in medieval Iceland, an idea supported by some saga narratives. While there are more polar bears than people resident in Svalbard, none were encountered during the conference itself; but they always remained on the periphery of town, and tales of close encounters were always being told…
