Week 10 Essay: A Good Set to Read as a Pair

This week I read the Eskimo Folk Tales unit, and it was a lot of fun. Especially since I read the Alaskan Legends unit last week, and so I had a lot to compare and contrast it with. Both units have to deal with Inuit tribes, yet beyond snowy settings and seal hunting the two don’t really have anything in common.

In the Alaskan Legends unit, you see a lot of stories about where man came from, and why the sun goes away for long periods of time. The stories have a few folk tales but mainly fall more in line with themes common to mythology. The Eskimo Folk Tales unit, on the other hand, was more in line with what you’d expect - lots of stories about families in fantastical situations, ghosts and adopted bears, jealousy, love, that sort of thing. Very little to do with gods and large questions about why the world is as it is, and more general stories of ‘such and such happened to a guy named Bob many years ago’.

Perhaps it’s just a culture thing, but here in the south legends tend to be only a little different than folk tales, so the difference between the two units was honestly a little astounding to me. Many people would call something like Paul Bunyon a folk tale, while the whole title is “The Legend of Paul Bunyon”. Legends are the same as folk tales, just generally a smaller story, fewer characters, closer to home, and a much more localized thing than folktales are. So going into this pair of units, I thought I’d see very similar stories. I was entirely wrong, and pleasantly so. This enabled me a larger bit of the literature pie, so to speak. It wasn’t a few stories told different ways, but a large collection of many different stories. I highly recommend reading this as a pair - it was entirely worth it.

(Korra of the Southern Water Tribe - gif by Viraru)

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