Reading Notes: British North America - Part A, The Man in the Moon

The Man in the Moon

Central Eskimo

I think the setting in this one is actually the star, because it's literally set on the moon. The way the story is told, you get this very unearthly (obviously), magical, kind of feel.  I imagine this small, desolate house surrounded by the grayish, rocky plains of the moon, covered in white deerskins so that it almost blends in with the surroundings. Instead of actual halves of walruses guarding the door, I imagine two statues of the upper bodies and heads of the walrus on either side of the door, facing each other,  and they come to life just as you pass between them and try to snap and bite at you.

You enter the house and see a red-and-white dog sitting in the entryway. It's the only dog on the moon, and I imagine it to be kind of stately and observant, watching you as you enter the house. The story talks about an inner room and an outer room, and in the inner room sits  the Moon's wife, the Sun. I imagine that the eskimo can kind of see her through the doorway, and as he moves closer to see her, she brightens her glow to blinding levels, and the Moon gets up to shut the door. 

The outer room I imagine being more simple, with a rug and two chairs and a fireplace, where the Moon and the Sun normally sit together. By the wall, there are piles of deer meat (because I guess the moon is so cold, who needs refrigeration?) I imagine then that the Sun and the Moon do their weird dance for the Eskimo, and then the Moon takes the eskimo out the back door of the house, which sits at the top of a slight incline, and they look down into the plains to see huge herds of deer running across the land. The eskimo picks one, and a hole opens up for the deer to fall through, landing in the plains of the earth below. The story says there are seals living in a large house, but that doesn't fit the atmosphere to me, so instead I imagine the Moon taking the eskimo to a kind of rocky, sandy area, and there are seals resting on rocks there. When the eskimo chooses one of them, the rocky sand disintegrates and a hole forms, and the seal falls through there and lands in the ocean of the earth below. There would be a big contrast between the two worlds, the moon being dry and gray and rocky, and the earth being full of water and plants and sunshine.

A Canadian seal (Source: National Post)

Story Source: Myths and Legends of British North America by Katharine Berry Judson (1917).