Episode Details

A scabbed and starving orphan, fed in the dark by a Kele who pities him and made whole again, crosses the sea with his eight uncles paddling, to win the young wife of the murderous Kele across the water — and turns every one of his paddlers hard as stone under the monster's teeth. And an orphan suitor, shown the secret of the nail by a Mouse-woman, opens the stone chest where a rich man's daughter sits sewing by lamplight, wakes her, and is sent out of the bright world into the dark one to steal a trimming for her father's collar out of a sleeping giant's pillow.

Chapters: 00:05 — Tale about Qolento 11:20 — The Girl in the Stone Chest

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. Tale about Qolento was told by Nutenkeu, a Maritime Chukchi man, at Unisak, Indian Point, in May 1900; The Girl in the Stone Chest was told by Nikon Ritegreu, a River Chukchi man, in a settlement "By the Cliffs," on the Middle Anadyr. Fresh English rendering by KacheliTV; Tale about Qolento is heard with its closing episode — the old wife's challenge — left untold and the paddle's making left unspoken, and The Girl in the Stone Chest with the suitor's arrival at the opened chest softened to the girl's waking, 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.

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