Mythology and Folklore

A long time ago, in a village by a great river, there lived a family of twelve brothers and one beautiful sister. There was also a young boy who was good friends with these siblings. Now this was a time when the earth was still waking up and the stars were just beginning to bleed into the sky. Between the twelve brothers, there was a master in nearly every skill needed by the villagers. Some were phenomenal hunters who often went to the mountains to hunt deer. Some were skilled craftsmen who made houses and canoes. Some were blacksmiths, others were scientists and mathematicians. But the boy was very lazy. While the brothers worked, he often hung around their house with the sister. She was very hard working, just like her brothers. She spent her days gathering berries and preparing the meat her brothers would bring back. Before, the boy was quite frail and nothing but bones, but thanks to the sister's kindness, he got rounder and rounder. He filled himself on the dishes of ber...

Part B of the Alaskan unit was so much more fun and interesting to read! Perhaps the creation stories from the trickster Raven were tiresome to follow, but these stories involved a lot more different animals and humans as well. They were also more romantic in nature. Many of them involved a husband trying to find a wife or other animals and men trying to satisfy their loneliness. These did not have as much of an Alaskan or winter vibe to them as the first part of the reading, but definitely felt more folklorey, in the sense that many of them worked to explain natural occurences in nature. I particularly liked the one about a boy who fell in love with a girl and tried to chase her to heaven, but is always falling behind. They became the sun and the moon, and the moon will chase the sun forever, but can never overtake her. I also like the one about the trickster fox (because who doesn't like tricksters? Or foxes?).  There was also a similar one I read in another unit about a blade ...

This week, I am reading tales of the Eskimos of the Bering Straight. At first, it told stories about the creation of man, and I was struck how similar it was to the biblical tales of creation. In this case, God was a Raven which created all the living things out of clay, but took man up to the Skyland (heaven) while the rest of men stayed on the earth. I was a bit dumbfounded how Raven was quite selfish and childish to the things he had created; he stole the sun away because he wanted men to die since there were too many, he often cheated other animals for food, gradually the Raven degraded from omnipotence to foolish carion eaters. What I enjoyed most were the descriptions of why certain animals live the way they do now. It was almost like explanations for different traits and characteristics of animals. For example, the goats live in the mountains so men do not over-hunt them, reindeers have dull teeth because originally, they had wolf-like teeth to eat men but men were able to pro...