Instead of wallowing around in pained self-pity, I sat down and read quite a few of these Trickster Tales. Coyote and his antics kept me company while I felt incredibly under the weather.
I re-read several of the earliest Trickster Tales. The one that I continued to like the best/find the most interesting was the Origin of the Sun and the Moon. THe story seems to proceed with the same feel that the other tales do, with Coyote playing a trick and either getting away with it or suffering the consequences for it. However, at the very end of the tale it takes a turn. Two frogs wish to take two human men as their husbands. They blind one man in one eye and the other has the frog stuck to his face. Out of shame, both men decide they would prefer to be the sun and the moon. The blinded man became the sun because "The sun, as we know, has only one eye (Erodes 11)." To the right is a picture I found of the "Eye of the Sun" located in Monument Valley. Here is a Link. In relation to the frog sisters who wanted the two men for their husbands, here is a photo, and a link to that photo.
Since we had been talking a lot of about the etiological properties of myths for the past few classes, I thought that this particular story was appropriate. The American Indians clarified that the eye of the sun is there because the man who is the sun is blind in his other eye, and the moon has dark spots because it is the frog sister on the other man.
We have always heard the phrase the "man in the moon" but I don't think I knew that there was a theoretical man in the sun until reading this story. Also, the frogs seemed out of place in the story to me. The transition was very poor and made it seem as though that bit of the story was just tacked on, perhaps as a later addition into the oral tradition. When I read these stories I always wonder which parts were truly originally there and which ones were added as time passed by, as new people told the story, as new questions were asked of the storytellers.
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