I’ve noticed the Eskimo folk tales focus a lot on vengeance and the consequences of doing wrong by another. These are good morals, but I kinda wish there was more variety to it.
‘Papik, who Killed his Wife’s Brother’, and ‘Pâtussorssuaq, Who Killed His Uncle’
The moral of this story and the one before it is ‘it is wrong to kill’. Of course it is, that’s why we have laws against murder and the like today. It appears the Inuit also had their own form of punishment for murder, though it came about in the way of superstition and evil spirits.
In each story, a man kills another man out of envy of his hunting skill or his wife. One of the family members of the murdered man either dies or kills themselves to exact revenge on the murderer in the form of an evil spirit. And so we see in both stories that the man who murders is torn to pieces by the angry spirit of the victim and THAT is why you shouldn’t kill. Not that it’s immoral and outright rude, but that you’ll be torn apart. Some people just need better incentive, I guess.
The Eagle and the Whale
A group of brothers with two sisters keep trying to get the sisters to marry, but they refuse. Frustrated, they tell their sisters that one will have an eagle for a husband and the other a whale for a husband. Then the sisters are whisked away by their new husbands and live with them for a while. Why is it so bad that women don’t marry?
The sisters (understandably) don’t like their husbands and so begin making rope. One uses hers to get off the eagle husband’s rock, the other uses it to trick her whale husband and escapes. The brothers help their sisters do this because they’ve missed them. The husbands are killed by the brothers and everyone lives happily ever after.
One thing I noticed in this - the eagle husband brings back narwhal and walrus for the girl to eat. How big are eagles in Greenland? They sound frightening.
The Narwhal, the unicorn of the sea.
Image: Wikipedia
Atarrsuaq
A man named Attarsuaq had many enemies. He bore a son who he taught to swim very well and hold his breath underwater for a long time. His son grows and he continues to teach him how to swim, but one day he does not return because one of his enemies has finally killed him. They come down to the hut to finish the job, but the boy lures them out to sea with his great swimming capabilities and kills them one by one on top of an iceberg. One man is left alive to go back to his village and tell the other men to never come again. The boy grows up in peace without any trouble from his father’s enemies.
Reading this story, I thought it would first take a turn where the son swam so much he eventually turned into a seal and his father one day accidentally killed him. There’s a lot of revenge in this story, though, and it didn’t take the turn I thought it would.
Check out the Eskimo Stories here!
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