Extra Reading Diary: Eskimo Folk Tales

My favorite story from the second half of the Eskimo Folk Tales was The Eagle and the Whale. It's the story of an Eskimo family with two daughters and a bunch of sons. The daughters are married off to a whale and an eagle, and live with them for a long time. They sons begin to miss the daughters, so they work on a plan to break them out. The first daughter escapes from the eagle using a rope, and then the brother shoot it with an arrow and kill it. The second daughter escapes from the whale using a boat, and the brother row away fast enough to escape. Ultimately the whale dies after beaching itself. I enjoyed these stories because they involved animals as well as creativity for the daughters to escape. Humans marrying animals is still a tad odd to me but I think I'm slowly adapting.

An Eskimo whaling ship

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Eskimo Folk Tales

Reading Diary A: Eskimo Folk Tales

My favorite story in this unit was The Woman Who had a Bear as a Foster Son. I've always enjoyed stories about animals that get integrated into human life, which is essentially what this story is. A woman adopts a small bear, who grows older and stronger until he is a hunter for the woman and her community. It eventually gets to the point where he is too strong, and ultimately ends up killing a human. It's then that the bear is sent off in to the world, but not before the woman marks him with black soot so that he can be recognized. It was a bit of a sad ending in that sense, but at the end they reference that a bear with a black mark can be periodically seen hunting in the area.

Polar Bear

Eskimo Folktales