The Greenlandic legend of "The Mother of the Sea" is about Uitsatagangitsoq, who travels to the Mother of the Sea since his settlement is suffering from hunger due to a lack of animals to catch. He then has to persuade her to release the animals. In order to get her to do this, he is ordered to go back home and explain to the humans what they have been doing wrong in their lives.
Asiaq – The Mistress of the Weather - It is the nature of the wind to turn everything upside down. Therefore everything is also upside down on her.
It is said that in the dim and distant past Asiaq, the Mistress of the Wind, used to wander from settlement to settlement in search of a husband. Since she controlled wind and weather, she always made sure she had good weather for her wanderings. But however much she looked, she found no man who wanted her. Then one day she stole a little boy whom she wanted to bring up to be her future husband. It was a little boy who was being looked after by his blind grandmother. They were inside the house. When a woman entered the house and wanted to seize the boy, the grandmother thought it was the boy's mother, and she let her take him. Shortly afterwards the boy's mother came and asked for him. But the boy was gone. They looked everywhere, but did not find him, and the mother was grief-stricken.
In her strange house Asiaq now reared the boy as her future husband, and when he was big enough, she took him as her husband. But since she was ashamed of having taken a boy as a husband, she never left her house again. From now on she left the weather bad all the time. The hunters could not go hunting, and she wilfully made the people starve. Asiaq looked terrible, and nobody could get near her, except the shamans. They came to her to get her to provide good weather, so that it was possible to go hunting and provide food for the humans.
The humans' forefathers always said that the weather was better in the old days. They probably refer to the moment in time when Asiaq was incessantly wandering to find herself a husband and therefore made sure the weather was always good.
Post a Comment
Post a Comment