The moral of the story is...

I stumbled upon the folk tales section in the library a few days ago. Up till today, I’ve read 2 books from that shelve, and I find the Canadian Inuit folk tales to be completely weird. Now, a normal story, especially a folk tale would carry a moral lesson in it, or at least a story line or something. But these Copper Eskimos, I don’t know, their stories are simply weird!

Take for example, the story of The Deceitful Raven. It is less than a page long and tells of a story of this bird who told the people of a settlement that visitors are coming and they should make way down the foot of the cliff to meet them. So they set out and when they reached the foot of the cliff, they took shelter there. Seeing this, the raven flew to the top of the cliff and when everyone was asleep he jumped and danced and caused an avalanche, burying everyone beneath it. The raven waited in eager anticipation for spring to come and the snow to disappear because he liked to peck out the eyes of the victims. The end.

Yeeeerrr~ Did you just feel a cold gush of wind? Creepy… All the tales are like that. Either kill someone, or take revenge, or no storyline at all. The Ghost Hunter is an example of one that has no purpose. It started off with this guy fearing ghosts, but he ends up living with them, and then the story changes on to his hunting trips, completely abandoning the idea of ghosts in its theme, and finally he disappeared in a bowl of water. Uh…okayyy…

And then there’s this one, Kidnapped by Wolves, talking about two wolves trying to steal a couple’s baby. The male wolf took of his skin and thus looked like a man. He walked over to the couple working in the fields and invited them to dance. Coincidentally, the couple loved dancing so they agreed. The wolf started singing magic chants and soon the couple was under his spell. Seeing their trance-like state, the female wolf sneaked into their house and ran away with the baby. Soon the couple woke up and chased after the wolves. When they found the wolves’ den, they waited till night fall to kill the wolves. When the wolves were asleep they emerged from their hiding place and ‘let their arrows fly’ killing the wolves instantly. But the female wolf had been holding their baby to her chest so (let me quote) “The arrow that pierced her chest killed the child at the same moment.” And that’s it. The end. Whoa. Award winning story. Perhaps this story does have a moral. Never dance when a wolf invites you to.

I have to say, reading what I’m blabbing here, or reading someone’s blog about what he had for dinner yesterday and the rest of the days before that, would definitely have made more sense. So the moral of the story is, don’t live in an igloo if you don’t want you brain to be frozen.