oa “The Bear’s Son Tale”: Traces of an ursine genealogy and bear ceremonialism in a pan-European oral tradition

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The most widely disseminated set of European folktales is the “Bear’s Son Tale” (ATU 301), also known as “John the Bear”, whose main character is the offspring of a bear and a human female. The possible implications of the ursine genealogy central to the structure of these stories is explored, starting with a discussion of the way the tales have been treated by folklorists up until now, including how they have been classified in ways that leave aside the ethnographic evidence for real world manifestations of the ursine genealogy. In contrast, I have attempted to identify the intangible remains of this animist ontology and how it is embedded in well-documented beliefs, traditions, rituals and performance art across much of Europe and most particularly in the Pyrenean region. Central to the endeavor has been the work I have carried out for many years on the Basque culture and language which allowed me to discover that the Basques used to believe humans descended from bears, a belief in consonance with the tenets of circumboreal bear ceremonialism. Two aspects of this widely disseminated set of European folktales will be highlighted. The first is how the folktales have acted to transmit the belief in an ursine ancestry across time, while the second is the way the animist relational ontology embedded in the tales can provide a means of accessing the extra-textual imprint of the belief system in the real world.