The most interesting thing to stand out when I was reading the Alaskan Legends Unit was the duality of Raven. For the first several stories Raven is your normal head-god-type character. He shapes, he teaches, he guides humanity through the first stages of civilization. He fulfills the role of the main god perfectly, giving humanity laws to follow and punishing them when they disobey with things like taking the sun away and flooding the world.
Then abruptly, it shifts. Somewhere between “Raven’s Marriage” and “Raven and the Seals” Raven seems to depart almost entirely from his role as head deity and takes on the role of the trickster instead. He holds a large feast with the intention of seeing a hat and blanket. He finds himself a wife through braggings and showing off, ultimately being unable to keep it up. He finds the seals just so he can eat mass quantities of them daily. He tricks Pitch into fishing past sunrise so he can use the melted substance to repair his boat and keep the fish they caught for himself.
In “How Raven Stole the Lake” things change once more, but to a combination of his previous roles. Raven steals an entire lake from where it laid, but he does it to fly it home to a human tribe and place it near them so they are able to live better, aided by his teachings about the new feature of their landscape.
In some stories Raven is just the head deity, in others he is a trickster little better than Anansi, in still others Raven is an odd combination of the two archetypes. One thing that can be said for this is the fact that the Alaskan natives all lived in different tribes stretched out over a wide expanse of land. The note under the title states which tribe the legend comes from, and it has a direct correlation with how Raven is seen. Those in the Bering Straits view Raven more as a head god. The Tsimshian hold the legends of Raven as a trickster. It’s a very interesting look at how location oftentimes decides the structure and fate of a story.
(Raven - web source)
No comments:
Post a Comment