Reading Notes: Nigeria Folk Stories, Reading B

 

("Lightning" by Ben Napper via Flickr)

The story that I chose to focus on for this post is “The Story of the Lightning and the Thunder” by Elphinstone Dayrell (1910). I chose this story because I thought that it related to the story that I wrote the reading notes for Part A of this reading. This story tells about thunder and lightning while relating thunder to being a sheep and lightning being a ram. Lightning is thunder’s son and lightning always makes a lot of trouble. He knocks down trees, burns down houses, and destroys the land similar to what actual lightning does. The loud sound that thunder usually makes in real life is actually thunder yelling at lightning to stop making trouble according to the story. Lightning ended up causing too much trouble and the king of people banished both lightning and thunder into the sky. The story ends by saying that the thunder you hear sometimes is when thunder is rebuking lightning but sometimes when lightning runs too far away from his mom, you cannot hear the mother’s voice. I enjoyed this story because of how many real-life elements come into play here as lightning does destroy a lot of property in real life while thunder is just sound. It also brings in the element where you sometimes aren’t able to hear thunder until a long time after lightning which I thought was quite interesting. In this story as well as the story I focused on in Reading A, the character’s names (thunder and lightning) are not capitalized possibly to symbolize the relationship between the real-life occurrences. I also noticed that this is one of the more unique stories of this reading as it makes characters out of a type of weather rather than a tangible object like the sun or the moon.