Reading Notes: British North America Tales, Reading A

 

("Sun over Earth" by NASA via Flickr)

The story that I chose to focus my reading notes on for this post is “Creation of the Earth” by Katharine Berry Judson (1917). This story is about how the creation of the Earth as well as the how the moon, sun, and stars ended up in the sky. In this story, the Earth, Sun, Moon, and Stars are all characters with the Sun and Earth being spouses and the Moon and Stars being relatives of the Sun. The husband Sun always got yelled at by his wife, Earth and ended up getting kicked out of the house they shared because the Earth complained that the Sun made the house too hot. This happened a lot and Sun ended up moving away with his relatives Moon and Stars, leaving the Earth alone. Old Man went up to the Earth and asked why she was alone to which she told what had happened. The Old Man went up to the Sun, Moon, and Stars to send them up into the sky where they would never be able to desert or hide from someone again. The Old Man then changed Earth to the way we know now and since the Sun is now in the sky, she will never be alone again. One thing that I noticed about a lot of the stories in this section is that many of them are based around how the world we know now was created. Just like how in this story, it explains why the sun, moon, and stars are in the sky far away from us. In this story, these objects are made into actual characters shown by making them have dialogue as well as actually capitalizing their names. One final thing that I noticed is the fact of the Old Man. I didn’t know who the character was by just reading this story, but through research I found that he shows up very often in Native American tales and is typically credited for creating the world that we all live in.