10 Kroner Bear Island

Bjørnøen A/S was a Norwegian mining company that briefly held a concession to exploit coal on Bear Island — the remote Norwegian possession roughly halfway between Spitsbergen and the North Cape. During the early 1920s, before Svalbard's international status was settled under the 1920 Paris Treaty, the company issued its own scrip for use among its workforce. These notes functioned as a closed internal currency, redeemable only at the company store, with no standing outside the island's operations.

The mining venture failed quickly. Notes from this issue survived in tiny numbers, mostly because the workforce itself was tiny and the scrip's circulation period extremely short.