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Ice Bear: The Cultural History of an Arctic Icon
Prime Arctic predator and nomad of the sea ice and tundra, the polar bear endures as a source of wonder, terror, and fascination. Humans have seen it as spirit guide and fanged enemy, as trade good and moral metaphor, as food source and symbol of ecological crisis. Eight thousand years of artifacts attest to its charisma, and to the fraught relationships between our two species. In the White Bear, we acknowledge the magic of it is both genuinely itself and a screen for our imagination.
Ice Bear traces and illuminates this intertwined history. From Inuit shamans to Jean Harlow lounging on a bearskin rug, from the cubs trained to pull sleds toward the North Pole to cuddly superstar Knut, it all comes to life in these pages. With meticulous research and more than 160 illustrations, the author brings into focus this powerful and elusive animal. Doing so, he delves into the stories we tell about Nature―and about ourselves―hoping for a future in which such tales still matter.
Ice Bear traces and illuminates this intertwined history. From Inuit shamans to Jean Harlow lounging on a bearskin rug, from the cubs trained to pull sleds toward the North Pole to cuddly superstar Knut, it all comes to life in these pages. With meticulous research and more than 160 illustrations, the author brings into focus this powerful and elusive animal. Doing so, he delves into the stories we tell about Nature―and about ourselves―hoping for a future in which such tales still matter.
304 pages, Paperback
Published November 1, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 15, 2016
During the mid-70s I lived for a year in Northern Michigan, and that’s where I faced my first polar bear. Of course it was taxidermied and on display with many other animals in the Fred Bear Museum. Grayling was the home of Bear Archery which popularized compound bows. Fred spent his life traveling the world, killing large animals with a bow and arrow, and bringing them back for display in his hometown. Since then, I’ve seen live specimens in zoos and just a few weeks ago Portland’s famed resident Tasul died of cancer, at 32 years old. Tasul was reportedly the third oldest polar bear in North America, as most rarely make it to 18 years in the wild. One of her keepers is quoted on the Zoo’s website as saying “She’s contributed so much to her species.” Tasul had lived at the Oregon Zoo since 1986 along with her twin brother Conrad who died last summer. Taking care of large wild animals is challenging and the twin bears are credited with several husbandry breakthroughs as their keepers were able to teach them to cooperate in drawing blood, brushing teeth and accepting eye drops without anesthesia, greatly simplifying routine medical care. The Zoo’s website went on to say, “Tasul touched a lot of people’s hearts…Wild polar bears are in trouble, and their future depends on all of us working together to combat climate change.” Good luck to the ice bear.
It is in the setting of concern about global warming that Michael Engelhard has provided us with a wonderful book that uses a charismatic carnivore to help us explore the place of humans on this planet. Engelhard has no illusions about the natural world and makes it clear that polar bears are not cuddly and will eat anything, although they prefer seals which they kill by first crushing their skulls. While not very social, the ice bear will occasionally share a kill with others of their kind and have been seen to feed in large numbers on dead whales. They are also known to eat each other and their young. Although uncommon, polar bears have eaten a few humans, while on the other hand, Engelhard includes a chapter entitled “Taste of the Wild” which provides culinary reviews, both good and bad, of different cuts of the bear, and warns that the liver is toxic.
Beyond these brutal facts, Engelhard’s book concentrates on how humans perceive polar bears and how they have affected human cultures. Like humans it is a plantigrade walker, placing its entire sole on the ground, so that its footprints resemble barefoot human tracks. Native peoples have feared and revered polar bears, mythologizing the bear, and casting human qualities onto the animal, including the widespread belief that they are left-handed. Like wolves, polar bears are seen by native peoples as shapeshifters, at times turning into humans and at times mating with humans. Native people’s respect of the polar bear extends to the afterlife and includes feeding reindeer meat to the dead head of a bear and smearing blubber inside its mouth to please the bear’s spirit. Gifts are offered to dead bears so that when other bears hear of the good treatment they might return to the hunter. In Greenland, polar bears populate the night sky, the Pleiades are a pack of dogs which have cornered a polar bear, while the belt of Orion is seen as three hunters pursuing a polar bear.
Engelhard chronicles modern culture’s fascination with polar bears including a chapter on the cult of Knut, born in 2006, who lived in the Berlin Zoo for only five years but experienced widespread fame. Polar bears have historically been featured in circus acts trained to perform tricks and presented in culturally insensitive exhibits with “Laplanders”, “Eskimos” and other denizens of the far north. Hollywood famously displayed platinum blonds on polar bear rugs while Coca Cola has used the white bear as a marketing tool since the 1920s. Engelhard draws his narrative from a wide range of sources including well known naturalists, obscure Nordic historians, newspapers and magazines, as well as a slew of writers from Herman Melville to Shel Silverstein.
Like Fred Bear, generations of hunters sought out polar bears as prized trophies until the 1970s when international law largely prohibited that practice. In 1961 Arthur Dubs, from Medford, Oregon, is credited with killing one of the largest polar bears, which stood to a height of eleven feet. It was all about bragging rights as Engelhard reports: “True or not, the narrative accompanying any trophy is appropriately heroic. A Life magazine article described how Dubs spotted the bear while flying out of the Chukchi Sea village Kotzebue and “bagged it” just inside the Russian line between Big and Little Diomede Islands, “under the nose of Russian jet fighter patrols”.” Today, bagging bears has been replaced by a tourist industry intent upon getting close enough to photograph the animals but as Engelhard quotes Barry Lopez about his experience approaching a bear in Arctic Dreams, “Our presence was interference”. Today, humans overwhelm the Earth and are driving many other species towards extinction, especially those meat eating mammals with which we most closely identify. Engelhard’s book is a fun read but makes us acutely aware that there are only 20,000 polar bears remaining on this Earth and unlike coyotes and crows the ice bear cannot adapt to urban areas and is dependent on a unique environment that is quickly melting.
Casey Bush, Senior Editor, The Bear Deluxe Magazine
https://orlo.org/
240 N Broadway, #112; Portland, OR 97227
beardeluxe@orlo.org
It is in the setting of concern about global warming that Michael Engelhard has provided us with a wonderful book that uses a charismatic carnivore to help us explore the place of humans on this planet. Engelhard has no illusions about the natural world and makes it clear that polar bears are not cuddly and will eat anything, although they prefer seals which they kill by first crushing their skulls. While not very social, the ice bear will occasionally share a kill with others of their kind and have been seen to feed in large numbers on dead whales. They are also known to eat each other and their young. Although uncommon, polar bears have eaten a few humans, while on the other hand, Engelhard includes a chapter entitled “Taste of the Wild” which provides culinary reviews, both good and bad, of different cuts of the bear, and warns that the liver is toxic.
Beyond these brutal facts, Engelhard’s book concentrates on how humans perceive polar bears and how they have affected human cultures. Like humans it is a plantigrade walker, placing its entire sole on the ground, so that its footprints resemble barefoot human tracks. Native peoples have feared and revered polar bears, mythologizing the bear, and casting human qualities onto the animal, including the widespread belief that they are left-handed. Like wolves, polar bears are seen by native peoples as shapeshifters, at times turning into humans and at times mating with humans. Native people’s respect of the polar bear extends to the afterlife and includes feeding reindeer meat to the dead head of a bear and smearing blubber inside its mouth to please the bear’s spirit. Gifts are offered to dead bears so that when other bears hear of the good treatment they might return to the hunter. In Greenland, polar bears populate the night sky, the Pleiades are a pack of dogs which have cornered a polar bear, while the belt of Orion is seen as three hunters pursuing a polar bear.
Engelhard chronicles modern culture’s fascination with polar bears including a chapter on the cult of Knut, born in 2006, who lived in the Berlin Zoo for only five years but experienced widespread fame. Polar bears have historically been featured in circus acts trained to perform tricks and presented in culturally insensitive exhibits with “Laplanders”, “Eskimos” and other denizens of the far north. Hollywood famously displayed platinum blonds on polar bear rugs while Coca Cola has used the white bear as a marketing tool since the 1920s. Engelhard draws his narrative from a wide range of sources including well known naturalists, obscure Nordic historians, newspapers and magazines, as well as a slew of writers from Herman Melville to Shel Silverstein.
Like Fred Bear, generations of hunters sought out polar bears as prized trophies until the 1970s when international law largely prohibited that practice. In 1961 Arthur Dubs, from Medford, Oregon, is credited with killing one of the largest polar bears, which stood to a height of eleven feet. It was all about bragging rights as Engelhard reports: “True or not, the narrative accompanying any trophy is appropriately heroic. A Life magazine article described how Dubs spotted the bear while flying out of the Chukchi Sea village Kotzebue and “bagged it” just inside the Russian line between Big and Little Diomede Islands, “under the nose of Russian jet fighter patrols”.” Today, bagging bears has been replaced by a tourist industry intent upon getting close enough to photograph the animals but as Engelhard quotes Barry Lopez about his experience approaching a bear in Arctic Dreams, “Our presence was interference”. Today, humans overwhelm the Earth and are driving many other species towards extinction, especially those meat eating mammals with which we most closely identify. Engelhard’s book is a fun read but makes us acutely aware that there are only 20,000 polar bears remaining on this Earth and unlike coyotes and crows the ice bear cannot adapt to urban areas and is dependent on a unique environment that is quickly melting.
Casey Bush, Senior Editor, The Bear Deluxe Magazine
https://orlo.org/
240 N Broadway, #112; Portland, OR 97227
beardeluxe@orlo.org
January 23, 2023
Beautifully written book. Amazing collection of photographs supporting the text. Very informative and well structured walk through of the history and economic and even cultural impact of the polar bear.
July 27, 2023
An in depth dive into the complex history of the Polar Bear within the Cultural Zietgeist. Very Well written, full of examples, one of my favourite reads of 2023
December 31, 2025
Interesting.
September 22, 2017
The Bear of a Thousand Faces
The polar bear reigns supreme as the chief predator in the lands where they roam. Across the ages these towering, white bears have been “feared, venerated, locked up, coveted, butchered, sold, pitied and emulated.” They’ve even managed to appear in one local author’s book as spiritual guides she chats with intimately in her dreams and theirs. (see Anchorage Press review of Dreaming with Polar Bears, published November 19, 2014) In other words, these magnificent creatures have played as many roles as an Elizabethan character actor and Engelhard’s delightfully, exhausting analysis, closely scrutinizes the variety of masks worn by this peripatetic, Arctic nomad.
Engelhard’s thought provoking iconography explores in depth this multitude of cultural roles played by the polar bear. He familiarizes us with this incredibly versatile marine mammal, who by way of its sheer enormous presence, conjures up a host of real and imagined realities for the bear’s beholder. In his opening chapter, “A Beast for the Ages,” Engelhard stresses his intent is to present this slew of cultural images without personal bias and he does an admirable job of stripping aside his own predilections, whatever they might be. In doing so, he exposes us to the litany of cultural interpretations that defined polar bears in oh, so many ways.
One prevalent motif that emerges throughout Ice Bear is the polar bear’s whiteness. Engelhard wrote: “The meaning of color, according to anthropologists and literary theorists, can magnify the meaning of an animal, and their combined meanings pack a double punch. Compared with animals of a different color a beast the color of winter is almost always better, stronger, and supernatural.” And, it is this other worldly nature that drove our understanding and relationship to these Arctic wonders. Whether pondering the duality of their nature (epitomized by their whiteness) or exploring our own dark, collective psyche through our projections upon these creatures, we always have found ways to slot them in a variety of disparate categories. They’ve been feared as beasts of brute strength, laughed at as celebrity entertainers within circuses and displayed in zoos as educational ombudsmen from their Arctic homes.
But, more than anything else, what has remained consistent from culture to culture are its supernatural powers. Not that the specific powers themselves are the same; it’s that each unique culture finds within this species its own metaphysical foundation. For example, it was not uncommon at all within Arctic folklore that the polar bear would be called upon by the local shaman to grant him the bear’s special powers – shape shifting being a common manifestation. While today’s rational individual may view it as occultly strange for a shaman to execute his own death only to reappear in the skins of a bear to perform whatever sacred rite was required, the villagers back then accepted it as part of the inherent, shamanic ritual.
We even see this shape shifting mythology belief system stream into our modern culture via pop music. “A music video for Björk’s ‘Hunter’ shows the singer shaking and convulsing and, with the assistance of computer-generated imagery, slowly and unwillingly turning into a polar bear. Such involuntary change or spirit possession is deeply rooted in shamanic tradition.”
It goes without saying that any animal who successfully inhabits as many personae as a polar bear, is bound to be assigned a sexual identity. Whether that image has anything to do with reality or not is another story. And what better place for the sexualized bear to make his tawdry, grand entrance (when it came to sex and the polar bear the object of desire was always the male bear and his appeal and/or lustful nature) then the esteemed world of art. In 1907 the artist Leo Putz immortalized the sexual allure of the polar bear who nuzzled a naked, nubile young woman in his painting the Bacchanal. A. Goldwhite’s Nude on a Bearskin Rug Orientalist painted around 1900 shows a young, naked slave girl on a polar bear rug in a pose suggesting sublime pleasure derived from her sensual bear straddling. Engelhard goes on to describe a number of similar situations scattered throughout literature and the cinema, reinforcing the polar bear’s tendencies, willing or not.
Engelhard sums it up best when finalizing our relationship with the polar bear: “The only thing that can be said with certainty is that the polar bear has been and is many things to many people… Like the blank spots on explorers’ maps, it keeps us forever guessing its true nature.”
The polar bear reigns supreme as the chief predator in the lands where they roam. Across the ages these towering, white bears have been “feared, venerated, locked up, coveted, butchered, sold, pitied and emulated.” They’ve even managed to appear in one local author’s book as spiritual guides she chats with intimately in her dreams and theirs. (see Anchorage Press review of Dreaming with Polar Bears, published November 19, 2014) In other words, these magnificent creatures have played as many roles as an Elizabethan character actor and Engelhard’s delightfully, exhausting analysis, closely scrutinizes the variety of masks worn by this peripatetic, Arctic nomad.
Engelhard’s thought provoking iconography explores in depth this multitude of cultural roles played by the polar bear. He familiarizes us with this incredibly versatile marine mammal, who by way of its sheer enormous presence, conjures up a host of real and imagined realities for the bear’s beholder. In his opening chapter, “A Beast for the Ages,” Engelhard stresses his intent is to present this slew of cultural images without personal bias and he does an admirable job of stripping aside his own predilections, whatever they might be. In doing so, he exposes us to the litany of cultural interpretations that defined polar bears in oh, so many ways.
One prevalent motif that emerges throughout Ice Bear is the polar bear’s whiteness. Engelhard wrote: “The meaning of color, according to anthropologists and literary theorists, can magnify the meaning of an animal, and their combined meanings pack a double punch. Compared with animals of a different color a beast the color of winter is almost always better, stronger, and supernatural.” And, it is this other worldly nature that drove our understanding and relationship to these Arctic wonders. Whether pondering the duality of their nature (epitomized by their whiteness) or exploring our own dark, collective psyche through our projections upon these creatures, we always have found ways to slot them in a variety of disparate categories. They’ve been feared as beasts of brute strength, laughed at as celebrity entertainers within circuses and displayed in zoos as educational ombudsmen from their Arctic homes.
But, more than anything else, what has remained consistent from culture to culture are its supernatural powers. Not that the specific powers themselves are the same; it’s that each unique culture finds within this species its own metaphysical foundation. For example, it was not uncommon at all within Arctic folklore that the polar bear would be called upon by the local shaman to grant him the bear’s special powers – shape shifting being a common manifestation. While today’s rational individual may view it as occultly strange for a shaman to execute his own death only to reappear in the skins of a bear to perform whatever sacred rite was required, the villagers back then accepted it as part of the inherent, shamanic ritual.
We even see this shape shifting mythology belief system stream into our modern culture via pop music. “A music video for Björk’s ‘Hunter’ shows the singer shaking and convulsing and, with the assistance of computer-generated imagery, slowly and unwillingly turning into a polar bear. Such involuntary change or spirit possession is deeply rooted in shamanic tradition.”
It goes without saying that any animal who successfully inhabits as many personae as a polar bear, is bound to be assigned a sexual identity. Whether that image has anything to do with reality or not is another story. And what better place for the sexualized bear to make his tawdry, grand entrance (when it came to sex and the polar bear the object of desire was always the male bear and his appeal and/or lustful nature) then the esteemed world of art. In 1907 the artist Leo Putz immortalized the sexual allure of the polar bear who nuzzled a naked, nubile young woman in his painting the Bacchanal. A. Goldwhite’s Nude on a Bearskin Rug Orientalist painted around 1900 shows a young, naked slave girl on a polar bear rug in a pose suggesting sublime pleasure derived from her sensual bear straddling. Engelhard goes on to describe a number of similar situations scattered throughout literature and the cinema, reinforcing the polar bear’s tendencies, willing or not.
Engelhard sums it up best when finalizing our relationship with the polar bear: “The only thing that can be said with certainty is that the polar bear has been and is many things to many people… Like the blank spots on explorers’ maps, it keeps us forever guessing its true nature.”
October 31, 2025
Oh, I guess I can totally review this part way. I mean, I will augment it once we are done. We are listening to this with my friend in the car. We are going on hikes and he likes polar bears, so I naturally picked this book so we could listen to something together, which overlaps our interests. This one is quite heavy on history, but I don't mind it because it's a history of an animal that I respect. And what's great about this book is that it doesn't try to paint this kind of bear as some cute fluffy animal to keep as a pet or anything like that, but explores their history from all angles. I mean it's a bit hard to listen to when it talks about people hunting and eating the bear, but it is part of its history and humans' approach to this kind of magnificent animal. So it's quite interesting to see or rather hear how or what kind of factors has shaped this bear's fate because there is so little of them left. I mean they are on the brink of extinction or something because of global warming -> "Vulnerable (VU) – High risk of extinction in the wild" officially. So yeah, as the title suggests, this is a history book, but an interesting one, because it doesn't involve lexical things to remember, unlike high school history class.
Upon finishing it I have to add that the problem with this book that it focuses too much on the human and not on the animal. Like it tells the human side of the story and not from the point of view of the animal. So I didn't actually learn about polar bears themselves but more about how humans interact with the species. And for that I have to detract a star because this direction is less interesting and less memorable. (The other way around would be David Attenborough style documentaries.)
Upon finishing it I have to add that the problem with this book that it focuses too much on the human and not on the animal. Like it tells the human side of the story and not from the point of view of the animal. So I didn't actually learn about polar bears themselves but more about how humans interact with the species. And for that I have to detract a star because this direction is less interesting and less memorable. (The other way around would be David Attenborough style documentaries.)
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews