Alaskan brown bear in a river with a fish in its mouth
22 December 2020
Bears are large, carnivorous quadrupeds of the family Ursidae. There are eight extant species of bear (unfortunately, soon to be seven as climate change is killing off the polar bears) found across the northern hemisphere and in South America. The brown and polar bears are the largest terrestrial carnivores currently existing.
The English word bear has cognates throughout the Germanic languages: Frisian bear; Dutch beer; German Bär; Icelandic bera; Norwegian Bjørn; Swedish Björn; and Danish bjørn. The Proto-Indo-European root is *bher-2, which is associated with the color brown.
The word goes back to the Old English bera, an example of which can be found in a late tenth-century sermon taken from the biblical book of Kings by Ælfric of Eynsham:
Þa forseah se ælmihtiga God þone Saul æt nextan and hine of his rice awearp be his agenum gewyrhtum and ceas to cynincge þone cenan Dauid, se ðe butan wæpnum gewylde ða leon and þæs beran ceaflas tobræc mid his handum and ahredde þæt gelæhte scep of his scearpum toðum.
(Then the almighty God finally spurned Saul and cast him out of his kingdom because of his deeds and chose the brave David as king, he who without weapons overpowered the lion and shattered the jaws of the bear with his hands and delivered the captured sheep from his sharp teeth.)
The word bruin, which also means bear, is a fifteenth-century borrowing from the Dutch. Bruin in Dutch means brown. Bruin makes its way into English in William Caxton’s 1481 translation and printing of the tales of Reynard the fox:
the kynge thouught that alle this was good and saide to brune the bere syr brune I wyl that ye doo this message / but see wel to for your self / ffor reynart is a shrewe / and felle & knoweth so many wyles that he shal lye and flatre / and shal thynke how he may begyle deceyue and brynge yow to some mockerye
The use of words meaning brown to name the creature is probably some form of taboo avoidance, out of fear that mentioning its name will make the bear appear. In other words, the bear is, like Voldemort, “one who must not be named” and thus was referred to as “the brown one.”
xkcd cartoon featuring four people discussing the etymology of the word bear
All this is a rather straightforward and obvious etymology, except there is a belief afoot, as evidenced by the Randall Munroe xkcd cartoon pictured here, that the “true name” of the bear has been lost. This idea is wrong on several levels. First, there is no such thing as a “true name” of something. Names are arbitrary (usually, echoic ones aren’t arbitrary) combinations of sounds used as commonly understood labels. There is nothing magical or special about older names. Second, the older root has not been lost.
As Munroe’s cartoon points out, the Proto-Indo-European root meaning bear is *rkto-, and that root survives in the Greek άρκτος (arktos) and the Latin ursis. The latter can be seen in the Linnaean nomenclature of Ursidae for bears. The name Orca for killer whales is from the same root and comes from earlier use to mean sea monsters. The root is also the source of J.R.R. Tolkien’s monstrous orcs, which he took from the Old English orcneas, meaning some kind of demon or evil spirit. These uses of the Proto-Indo-European root to mean monstrous creatures supports the idea of taboo avoidance in bear, but they disprove the idea that the older name has been lost. It hasn’t; the Germanic languages just no longer use it to refer to bears.
Sources:
Ælfric. “Sermo excerptus de Libro regum” (“A Sermon Excerpted from the Book of Kings”). Old English Lives of Saints, vol. 2 of 3, Mary Clayton and Janet Mullins, eds. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 59. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019, lines 12–17, 140.
American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2020 s.v. bear2, n. and bher-2 in Appendix of Indo-European Roots.
Caxton, William, trans. This is the Table of the Historye of Reynart the Foxe. London: Caxton, 1481. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. bera.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2020, s.v. bear, n.1.; December 2016, s.v. bruin, n.
Image credits: Chapman, Carl, 24 June 2006, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license; Randall Munroe. “The True Name of the Bear,” xkcd.com, 2020.