The shape filed here is the marriage of a woman to a bear — the beast that carries a girl into its den, and the child, half wild, born of that union to found a line. No served witness on our shelf tells that story. The label points to its near neighbours, the animal-groom and animal-paramour motifs it sits among (with cross-references to B611.1, B631, and B635.1), but the candidate texts gathered here keep their bears at the level of speech, not marriage. In The First Nine Books of the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus (a Latin chronicle of about 1200 CE), the one bear on offer is a proverb: the counsellor Erik, stiffening a wavering king for battle, says a “valiant dog must attack the bear”, for “we want wolf-hounds” and not unwarlike little birds. It is a figure of courage, not a bridegroom.

The rest of the shelf holds only the verb, not the animal — Homeric warriors who “bear them home” the woman and the wealth they have won, a Sanskrit episode of a curse between a preceptor’s kin, a woman who cannot “bear children” in a West African survey — none of them the she-bear or bear-husband of the motif. The substance of this marriage lives entirely in the authorities Thompson filed: the Scandinavian and Icelandic records of the bear-bridegroom, and the Indian and Chinese traditions, none of them wired to a served tale here. Given how readily myth weds women to swans and serpents and bulls, what is it about the bear — upright, man-shaped when it stands — that made so many peoples imagine it a husband?