Week Ten Reading Notes Part A - "Eskimo"

Source Story: "Eskimo Folktales" by Knud Rasmussen with illustrations by native Eskimo artists (1921).

• "The Coming of Men"
• The earth was created by falling from the sky, and then men crawled up out of the earth as little children. Eventually a man and a woman were there, and man grew to be many on the earth, and man got dogs and did not know how to die. There was no light or day, other than the light in man's homes. The earth was too crowded, so a great flood came and drowned many. Then two old women talked about whether it was better to have death and light, or no light and no death. The former was chosen, and light came about because, when man dies, he becomes a star in the sky.
• "Nukúnguasik, who Escaped from the Tupilak"
• Nukúnguasik lived among a set of many brothers who would bring him food since he had no wife. One day he discovered one of them creating a Tupilak (a magical creature created with the intent to harm someone) and telling it to kill Nukúnguasik. Nukúnguasik startles the brother to death, then returns home. He goes out with the other brothers looking for the dead man, and leads them to him, where the Tupilak is now eating his body. They bury him and go on with their lives.
• "The Woman Who Had a Bear as a Foster-Son"
• An old woman is taken care of by her village, and one day they give her the cub of a bear they killed. She raises it as her son and it grows up well-loved by the whole village. When it is older, it begins hunting with the men of the village to find food, but the men from a faraway village want to kill it, despite the old lady making a collar to mark it as friendly. One day the bear kills a man in self-defense, so the old woman tells it that it must leave her, so that nobody will be able to kill it. They both weep, and the woman marks the bear with oil before he goes. From then on, it was said that sometimes people would see a bear as big as an iceberg, marked with oil.
• "Qalagánguasê, Who Passed to the Land of Ghosts"
• A boy's whole family dies and leaves him a paralyzed orphan. He begins to see ghosts, and one day he sees several ghosts, including his sister. They tell him that if he doesn't tell anyone about them, he will stop being paralyzed, but as soon as he starts to feel stronger, he tells everyone and is immediately paralyzed again. The village ties him up and leaves to go to a singing contest, and the ghosts of his parents show up to take him to become a ghost with them. He goes willingly and becomes a woman ghost.
• "Isigâligârssik"
• A bad wizard steals Isigâligârssik's wife, so Isigâligârssik challenges him. The wizard stabs him, but Isigâligârssik goes home and puts on his childhood dress, which has healing powers and heals him. Then he takes a tiny bow and arrow and has a shootout with the wizard, who he kills. He gains his wife back and they live happily ever after.
• "The Insects that Wooed a Wifeless Man"
• A wifeless man is detested by all the women because he always sleeps in too late to go hunting. One day he goes out in the evening anyway, and helps a Noseless One whose kayak was overturned. After that, he does not struggle with his old sleepiness and becomes the best hunter around, and he gets the best wife. But she nags him until he tells her what happened, and then his sleepiness returns. His wife runs away and he chases her, and she sends a bunch of insects to try and seduce him. When this doesn't work, he crawls into the cave she is hiding in and she combs his hair and tells him to sleep until spring. When he wakes up, she's gone and so is the winter, and his kayak has rotted from old age.
• "Makíte"
• A man named Makíte is bad at hunting and hears that his wife is going to leave him, so he runs away to live along in the mountains. He meets a lone-dweller there who has floating lights in his house, and he threatens to kill the lone-dweller if he doesn't say where he got them. He tells Makíte that they are on top of a faraway hill. They get into a fight and Makíte kills the man, then goes on and meets some dwarves. He witnesses a fight between the dwarves and the inland-dwellers, who fight by sending waves of water towards each other. The dwarves win, and Makíte builds a house with them, and gets some of the floating lights from the hill, and lives there forever.
• "Atungait, Who Went A-Wandering"
• A man named Atungait leaves his wife to find a strong woman to go on a trip with. He finds one, and they travel around on his sledge, meeting several strange groups of people. They meet one group who is all lame, and he steals their copper plaything. They use magic to send an avalanche of stones after him, but his strong woman ties leather to the back of their sledge which stops the stones. After this, he tells the woman to stay there while he flies to see which way home is. When he arrives home, he sees his wife with another man. She says she hasn't kissed anyone, so he kills her, but the man she was with admits to kissing her, so he lets the man live. Then he marries the strong woman.
• "The Giant Dog"
• A man had a giant dog, who could catch whales and narwhals and on whom he and his wife could ride. He gave the dog an amulet that made it hard for the dog to die. After the dog killed and ate someone in their village, the man had to move somewhere else with the dog. A stranger came with three dogs as big as bears to kill it, but the dog killed all of them, and the dog also often killed inland-dwellers and brought their legs back to his master, which is why inland-dwellers are so afraid of dogs.
  

Image of a dog sled from Wikimedia Commons