Episode Details

A neglected older wife, carried away on an ice-floe to a far shore, is pitied and taken in by Sun-Man and sent home in plenty to the husband who wronged her; the youngest of eight brothers, carried off by a giant and kept as a living toy for the giant's children, is fed on their food and grows to giant size himself; and a herdsman flees across the tundra from a monstrous child born out of a tumor on a great buck's neck, up a tree and into the country of his own Being — Reindeer-Born is told in both of the book's printed versions.

Chapters:

00:05 — The Polygamist

04:30 — The Giant

05:23 — Reindeer-Born

From Chukchee Mythology (1910) by Waldemar Bogoras — Part I of The Jesup North Pacific Expedition, Vol. VIII (Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History). Public domain. The Polygamist was told by Nuwat, a Reindeer Chukchi man; The Giant by Irmi, a Maritime Chukchi man; and Reindeer-Born by Viyento the Blind, a Maritime Chukchi man, and in its second version by Uttiqai, a Reindeer Chukchi man — narrators recorded at Mariinsky Post and in the camps, 1900–1901. Fresh English rendering by KacheliTV; The Polygamist is heard with the husband's blow left untold, and Reindeer-Born with its grimmest beats — the monster roasting its own flesh, the human bones in the tent, and the streaming blood of the wolves' fight — trimmed, per the shelf's screening ledger. Northern Tales gathers the Chukchi, Siberian Eskimo, Koryak, Yukaghir and Even tales from Bogoras's Jesup North Pacific Expedition volumes, in the books' own order.

KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.