Caitlyn's Blog for Myth-Folklore Fall 2018

Extra Credit Reading: Crash Course Myth Gods and Goddesses (Baldur, from the Crash Course video The Dying God ) The first video, Great Goddesses , was quite interesting. Like in some past videos, famous psychologist Carl Jung was mentioned again. As a psychology student, I have mixed feelings about Jung, but at least Freud was not mentioned again. I thought it was interesting that primitive societies were more matriarchy focused than patriarchy.  The video about the Fire and Buffalo Goddesses immediately made me think about the movie Moana since it started by talking about the goddesses that controlled lava and other things. I had also not previously heard about the white buffalo calf woman before this video, so I found that to be interesting. The Archetypes and Male Divinities video was probably the one that presented the least new ideas to me, since the archetypes associated with male gods are quite common and obvious in my opinion. I thought The Dying God video was c...

Reading Notes: Alaskan Legends, Part B (The Moon: Image by dunc ) I liked this section of the Alaskan Legends unit by Katharine Berry Judson, just as I did the first one. It was interesting to see that the first story in this section, Origin of the Chilkat Blanket ,  is about a blanket. The raven from the previous stories did pop up again in this one. I liked this story because you can tell how important this blanket is to the Alaskan tribes. The Land of the Dead was the next story that really struck a chord with me. It reminded me of some details from my favorite video game. The woman's grandfather is referred to as a shade, since they are dead. The word shade is used consistently in the story to refer to other dead people or animals. A similar thing occurs in the video game I am talking about. However, the shades in that represent the souls of people because their souls were not able to return to their bodies. I also enjoyed The Lost Light . I did not imagine the small...

Reading Notes: Alaskan Legends , Part A  (Raven: Image by Nikon D7200 ) I found these stories to be very interesting. From the start, I liked The Raven Myth: Raven's Creation by Katharine Berry Judson. I thought it was cool that the raven from this story had the power of creation. I have not read many stories at all that show a specific animal that has that amount of power. I enjoyed the rest of the raven myth stories that followed, since they all focused on a similar thing, where the raven is the creator and cause of many things. Similarly, a few of the stories that followed these described how some of the traditions of the Alaskan tribes came to be, which are all credited to the raven as well. I found it to be interesting that the raven is often written in a way that depicts a human in these stories. At least, I end up accidentally imagining a human when reading about the raven sometimes, due to the wording that is used. The Raven and the Seals is one of the stories th...