Reading Notes: Eskimo Folk Tales Unit (Part B)

Continuing the Eskimo Folk Tales Unit, I'm discovering that these people have a very interesting and creative sense of imagination.  My favorite story that I read from this section was The Eagle and the White Whale.  This story tells of a family of brothers and sisters.  The brothers complain that the sisters have not found husbands yet, so one of the brothers sends them off to a white whale and an eagle.  After some time, they all missed each other so the brothers first saved the sister with the eagle.  Then they shot the eagle down when it came to retrieve his bride.  Next, they went for the sister with the white whale.  They made a whale hunting boat and when the sister escapes the white whale and reaches her brothers, they use their boat to out run the whale and reach the land on the other side.  This story really caught my attention, because I kept expecting something to go terribly wrong and one or both sisters would be lost.  I think this story has a lot of potential to work with and make my own.  It would be fun to see how much I could change it, but still keep that suspenseful feeling throughout like the original.

Image: Beluga


The Eagle and the White Whale comes from Eskimo Folk-Tales by Knud Rasmussen with illustrations by native Eskimo artists (1921).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Introduction: Who is Caitlyn?

Image
Picture on the left: This is me at the OKC Zoo.  As you can tell, I'm a super serious person.   Hello world!  My name is Caitlyn and I like to think that I’m a fairly interesting person.  I am studying linguistics with a minor in Spanish.  If you are unfamiliar with linguistics, that’s totally fine.  Most people I encounter outside of my major don’t really know what it is either.  Linguistics is a sub-field of anthropology that focuses on language.  I really like the more technical aspects of my major. For example, I really love phonetics, a sub-field of linguistics.  This field focuses on the sounds of languages and how they are produced.  My favorite class from last semester was my syntax class.  This class was one for my major and it focused on grammar in language.  We started out by making grammar rules for English and then built upon them.  By the end of the semester, our grammar rules could theoretically work for any human language.  I think that is really cool and ex
Read more

Comment Wall

Image
Image by Caitlyn Buckley "Lake Eufala" January 2018 Here you will find my portfolio site, Finding Mythology , to read my stories and such. Feel free to comment below anything you would like to discuss from it.
Read more

Week 7 Story:The Sun-Goddess's Return

Image
An updated version of this story can be found here at my site: Finding Mythology Image: The Golden Girl Amaterasu, the Sun-Goddess, was cherished by everyone. She was the most beautiful goddess and definitely the brightest. One day, she was sitting at the loom of the world, weaving in different pieces of life. She weaved into the pattern patches of joy and love with dismay and slaughter. Her loom was filled with all the parts of life. Suddenly, the demon of fire, Susa-no-wo came down from the peak. He came with wrath and malice, tearing in from the void. Amaterasu was frightened by her brother’s sudden presence and feared his power. She fled to the shadows of night in a cave to hide from the wrath of her brother and would refused to return to the heavens. All the people mourned the disappearance of their beautiful goddess. Their bright star was gone and so the people begged and cried for her return. But, she would not leave her cave and the people became even more upset
Read more