Essay: Eskimo Folk Tales

The stories in the Eskimo Folk Tales were my favorite tales to read in the past few weeks. They are so interesting with the context of their stories because some are very gory as well as sporadic like a dream. For example, in the story of The Wife Who Lied, when the woman returned to her people and had them think she was treated poorly in the other village, they took revenge. They wanted to hit the village where it hit them most which was to attack all the women in the village when the men were away. They could have easily waited till the men returned from their battle but they wanted to take revenge in a sinister kind of way by attacking the vulnerable women who didn’t have anything to do with the ‘bad’ treatment of the main character. Later in the story when the woman’s village destroys the village, two men in her village kill her. Not in any way either, they cut off her arms and let her bleed out in the forest because she lied about her ill treatment. The best example of a story having a dream theme to it was Makíte. The story starts off with a husband who lived with his wife and her family. The wife said she would leave him if he were unable to kill any seal. Since he can’t catch any seal’s, he runs away. When he runs away the family chases after him until he elongates his strides to outrun them. He came to an old house and when he opened the door, a loud scream was made then he saw the owner of the house. After a deal with the owner, Makíte sleeps in the house only to wake up to the housekeeper trying to kill him. He ran away and ran into another house but this time it was a house that had dwarfs trailing in and out of the house. Once he walked into the house, he saw a dark figure coming at the house through the window. The dwarfs prepared for war with the darkness. The darkness and the dwarfs summoned their own dog that barked waves. The dwarfs dog one and the waves drowned the darkness. Makíte then built a house there and lived there till he died.

An Eskimo by E. Nielsen (1890).