Reading Notes: Nigeria Folk Stories, Reading A

 

("Sun and Moon" by Wonderlane via Flickr)

The story that I chose to focus my reading notes on for this post is “Why the Sun and the Moon Live in the Sky” by Elphinstone Dayrell (1910). This story is about how the sun and the moon, his wife, invited the water and his people their home. The water warned the sun that his people were numerous and that they would have to buy an extremely large compound to house them all. Once the water arrived at the sun’s house, a few of his people went in and filled the house until the water was knee-deep. Every now and then, the water would ask the sun if it was okay for more of his people to come in, to which the sun agreed. Eventually, the water filled the entire house until the sun and his wife had to escape to the roof. They eventually went up to the sky and stayed there ever since. This story and the others in this section all have a similar plot and ending to them. It usually ends with why something is the way it is such as why the cats kill rats or why the sun and moon are in the sky. One unique thing that I thought was interesting in this story is that the characters in this story aren’t capitalized. My guess for the reason that the characters aren’t capitalized is that possibly the author wanted to make the impression that the sun, moon, and water are the actual objects in real life but I am not sure.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Introduction to Chris the Computer Science Major

Image
Hi, my name is Chris, and this post will be a little introduction to me. I am currently a junior at OU as a Computer Science major. You may ask why a Computer Science major is taking a class about Mythology and Folklore and the main reason for that is because I have always enjoyed mythology since I was a kid. I enjoyed reading books that were based around mythology, specifically the Percy Jackson series, and enjoyed learning about all sorts of folktales from different cultures as I continued to grow older. I am Vietnamese but I was born in Oklahoma and have lived here all my life. If I’m being honest, Oklahoma is pretty boring as there’s not much to do so I wouldn’t mind moving to another state. As for my hobbies, I only really have one hobby which is playing basketball but in recent times, it has been kind of difficult to keep that hobby going. Therefore, I really want to find a new hobby to replace basketball at least for the time being. I think that learning how to play an i
Read more

Week 3 Story: Cat Fables

Image
The Cats and the Dog      There once was a group of cats who were abandoned by all and living on the streets. They wandered the streets together scrounging for food and usually came up with loads of food. One day, all the cats split up to look for food. They looked around at houses, in the trash, everywhere you could think of. The cats all got together at the river and all of them came up empty. The cats looked at each other dejected and began to sulk until one cat noticed a lone dog looking for food by the river. The cats asked the dog, “Have you had any luck finding food?” The dog replied, “No, I haven’t found any food for the past three days.” The dog then ran off in a hurry as he desperately need to fill his stomach. In their heads, none of the cats could even think of the last time that they had gone three days without food. They all looked at each other and realized that they were quite lucky and that someone always has it worse than you. ("cat" by grey via Fl
Read more