The Blind Man and the Loon: The Story of a Tale

Preface

xiii Preface This book tells the story of a tale, a folktale familiar to thousands of residents of the arctic and subarctic. To understand this book, it is important for readers to be familiar with the basic elements of the tale, even though it has been told hundreds if not thousands of different ways. The following text, collected in the early nineteenth century by Moravian Brethren missionaries in Nunatsiavut or northern Labrador, but never published until now, represents the basic story line. The text undoubtedly comes from an oral performance in Inuttut, the Eskimo language of Labrador, but was first hand-written in German. The storyteller and the collector remain anonymous. It was eventually collected by Hinrich Rink, a Danish scholar who actively sought out and compiled traditional tales in Greenland and other Inuit areas (see Rink 1866, 1875, and appendix D). The Blind Man and the Loon They also tell about a man called Kimungak [Kemongak], that two common loons made him recover his eyesight. He had a sister called Inukviak. The three of them, he, his mother, and his sister, lived in a place among people with extremely long fingernails and without good thoughts. At the time the three of them were together in the winter house, a polar bear came to the window, and then the mother in a hurry handed her blind son a bow and arrow and helped him take aim, and thus he shot the bear, which fell down. And he said to himself, “Because you hit the creature so well, it fell right down.” But instantly his mother screamed, “No, no, not the bear, only the frame beneath the window did you shoot.” As soon as the bear was dead, the mother and her daughter went right to the tent and left Kimungak behind alone in the winter house. While they lived off the bear, the daughter, without her mother knowing, often brought her brother something in the winter house. Because the mother who wanted him to starve would not allow that, she [her daughter] fearing her mother, hid it inside her clothing and brought it to him in that way. PREFACE xiv When she then told her mother something, her mother often said, “Have you already finished that big hunk of meat I gave you?” “I just don’t economize” was her usual answer. While now Kimungak always stayed alone in the house and often heard the cries of the common loon, he often exclaimed with great urgency, “Would that they, who so often cry, come to me and restore my eyesight.” And see, soon afterward, at night, two common loons came to him and talked to him with a human voice, and they brought him along to a pond, leading him by his arms. And there they ducked him into the water several times, asking him if he was about to be suffocated. The first time they made him breathe they asked if he saw anything, and he faintly saw the glimmer of something. Once again they dove together with him, and when again they let him breathe, they asked, “What do you see now?” Looking around, he said, “I see [the] land.” Again they ducked him under the water and when again they let him breathe, they asked him if his sight was still unchanged. At that point he saw mouse holes on the other brink of the bay and the stretched skin of the bear he had killed in his blindness. Thereupon he went home, and because his relatives did not know he had come back, he, feigning blindness, crawled into the house [on hands and knees]. His mother, they say, did not give him anything to eat before she found out that he could see. When now they left the house and went to the shore and came to a place with a lot of belugas, Kimungak used his mother as a hunting float when he harpooned a beluga. “Which one do you want me to harpoon?” her son asked. The mother answered, “Now, now, now, the dark one” [because the dark ones are not so strong]. And he harpooned that one. Being now [dragged] in the sea, she said, “Why did my son make me into a float-luk [voice of the beluga]? I, the only one who nursed him. Please let me get out, back up on smooth and dry ground-luk luma.” These were her last words and thus she became completely transformed into a...