This post had its genesis in a question on reddit/mythology, encouraging other redditors to share their favourite myths from their home countries. I’ve always loved the fact that Wolverine made my world, especially if you look at it from an airplane, where the scars left by the retreating glaciers at the end of the Ice Age do make you think of claw marks.
Review of In Search of the Swan Maiden: a Narrative on Folklore and Gender, by Barbara Fass Leavy.
Although this book is called The Swan Maiden, its subject could be described as: “a story about a fairy captured by a mortal man and forced into a tedious domestic existence and, obversely, about a mortal woman courted by a demon lover who offers her escape from that same mundane world.” (Loc. 347)
The Iroquois Confederacy had a number of stories about the morning star, which they called Gendenwitha, It Brings the Day.
One story is about the beautiful woman named Gendenwitha. It began with a hunter who was captured by the dawn after he chased the Sky Elk into the heavens. She set him to guard her lodge and help the sky hunters.
He saw Gendenwitha, then a mortal, and fell in love. While the dawn was bringing in the day, he was singing to his love, as a bluebird in spring, then as a blackbird in summer, and as a hawk in fall.
Finally he went to earth in the form of a hawk, and took her up to the sky. The dawn was angry, and turned Gendenwitha into a star, which she placed above her door, out of reach of the hunter. And so Gendenwitha became the morning star.
If you like the image at the top, click here.
This may seem like a strange topic for a post, but oddly enough I was inspired by yesterday’s post about the northern lights. If you didn’t read it, I’m from Labrador, in northern Canada, and while the aurora is always a little chancy, you can count on fireweed every summer.
We Are Star Stuff 