Week 9 Reading Diary A: Eskimo Folk Tales

These stories are from the Eskimo Folk Tales Unit.

The Coming of Men, A Long, Long While Ago: This is an interesting creation story. I have to admit that I could not stop cracking up when the dead body didn’t know how to be dead and an old woman had to force it back into the ground. It’s interesting how this story says that when men die they become stars and other shining things in the sky. It is similar to the idea of Heaven. I wonder why so many cultures believe that people go to the sky when they die, especially since the bodies are buried in the ground. It’s cool to see cross-cultural themes like that.

The Woman Who Had a Bear as a Foster-Son: Aw, this story reminds me of The Fox and the Hound! A human woman (I don’t remember her name) adopts little Todd, an adorable fox, but eventually has to release him back into the wild because wild animals are not meant to live in houses. It was very sad, but Todd finds a beautiful lady fox and has a family, so I think that’s what happened with this polar bear.

Makite: This story seemed like a long, confusing dream sequence. There were so many different parts to the story and none of them really seemed to fit together except that Makite was in all of them. First he was a bad hunter with in-laws that were good at hunting. Then he left them and was chased by them before coming to a house with a man living alone. Then he had to kill the man. Then he found dwarves and watched them fight island-dwellers. And finally he built a house for himself and got the things that looked like candles that he had seen in the first man’s house. Maybe there’s a significance for all these things, but I’m not seeing it right now.

(polar bear cub)