Episode Details

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Part One of a new shelf: Greenlandic Inuit tales, from Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1875) by Dr Henry Rink (1819–1893) — the Danish geologist who spent sixteen winters and twenty-two summers in Greenland, collected these tales from Greenlandic tellers, and translated them from the Danish himself; the English edition was edited by Dr Robert Brown (1842–1895). Billed by collector and book, as the tales Rink gathered in Greenland; not a survey of all Greenlandic tradition, and no completeness is claimed. The tales were screened in the order they stand in Rink's book under this shelf's standing rule, and a great many were set aside — every one stands named, with its reason, in the shelf register.

Katerparsuk — a poor orphan boy, tormented by a wicked man who frightens him in a bear-skin, studies the angakok's art, learns a magic song that makes a walrus throw off its skin, and answers trick with trick: playing walrus to the man who played bear to him, until the old man's boasting collapses at the evening feast. The Man Who Mated Himself with a Sea-fowl — a lonely old bachelor who plays at fatherhood with seals' skulls finds the bathing bird-women, marries the one whose clothes he has taken, and loses her and their sons when the wings grow back; his strange journey on the tail of a salmon ends at a house that turns into a gulls' hill. The Old Bachelor — a queer old fellow who hates singing learns a magic song from a flying boat's crew, flies home in his kayak, forgets the words on a mountain peak, and remembers them at the very last moment.

Chapters:

0:00 Introduction

1:51 Katerparsuk

6:34 The Man Who Mated Himself with a Sea-fowl

12:30 The Old Bachelor

Henry Rink, Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo (William Blackwood and Sons, 1875) — public domain.

Narrated by Scratch. Music: opening and closing theme, "Damp Pine Sunrise" — heard at the introduction and the close only; the tales themselves are read dry.

KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.

Greenlandic Inuit tales · Greenland folk tales · Inuit folk tales · Henry Rink · Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo · Arctic folk tales · world folk tales · free audiobook