The Hero in Inuit Mythology:
Kiviuq and the Abused Orphan Boy

Contents

1 Introduction (p. 2)
2 The Influence of Magic (p. 3)
   2.1 The Hero’s Abilities (p. 4)
   2.2 The Hero’s Journey (p. 7)
3 Heroic Characteristics (p. 9)
   3.1 Sexuality (p. 9)
   3.2 Revenge and Benevolence (p. 11)
   3.3 Adventure (p. 17)
4 The Hero Today (p. 20)
5 Bibliography (p. 21)
   5.1 Works Cited (p. 21)
   5.2 Further Literature (p. 22)

1  Introduction

Heroes are admired for their excellent qualities and achievements – in our world as well as in the Inuit’s. The heroic qualities the inhabitants of the Arctic north admired or still admire reflect the ethics and lifestyle that characterize Inuit society at a certain time. Therefore, it is of particular importance to find out how ancient Inuit heroes are depicted and what exactly their qualities are.
To analyze the conception of the hero in all of Inuit mythology would be a very exhausting task. Therefore, I confined myself to two well-known tales: the Kiviuq saga and the story about the abused orphan boy. The first, however, is not a single tale, it is rather a whole cycle of tales about the hero Kiviuq. Only seldom were all of the stories known to one particular storyteller or to one group or tribe of Inuit, and even more seldom were all of them told during one storytelling occasion. Only among the Netsilik Inuit in Canada and among some tribes of Alaskan Inuit were the adventures of Kiviuq, or Qayaq as he is called in Alaska, considered a complete cycle (Colakovic 6, Oman). With the beginning of recording Inuit oral tradition in written form, first, explorers like Knud Rasmussen or anthropologists like Franz Boas recognized the similarity of different versions of the same adventure and, eventually, their belonging to one cycle of tales: the Kiviuq saga. As will become clear with my selection of texts, different spellings for the hero exist. They reach from Kiviok, Kiviuq, Kivoq, Kiviung, Kiviuna, Kigioq, Keeveeok, Qiviuq, Giviok, and Qaaweiluq up to Qayaq (“Bibliography of Books and Links”). When referring generically to the hero of all the different versions of the tales, I will use the spelling Kiviuq, in all other cases, of course, the spelling of the relating text.
The second myth I will have a look at is that about the abused orphan boy. Although this legend is not as widely spread across the Arctic as the Kiviuq saga, it shall find consideration in this paper as it contains a typical image of a hero: a poor, mistreated orphan, seemingly neglected by fate, who manages to overcome his calamity (Barüske 360).
The texts I am going to analyze try to represent the variety of versions of one story or cycle of stories in the Arctic north. For the Kiviuq cycle I chose the Greenlandic tale “Giviok” (Tales and Traditions 157-161), which the Danish Hinrich Rink compiled from different versions already in 1866, trying to get at what he understood as the “whole” story. Furthermore I selected two Central (i.e. Canadian) Inuit tales: “Kiviung” (44-47), which was recorded and translated by the anthropologist Franz Boas in 1888, and “Kiviok” as told by Marcel Akadlaka (5-7), a recent recording translated into English. The Epic of Qayaq, an Alaskan version of the Kiviuq saga, is, in contrast to the other stories, a literary work. The authoress and storyteller Lela Kiana Oman collected Qayaq’s episodes and put them into literary form, whereas the preceding tales are more or less accurate recordings of what the storytellers told. The tales about the abused orphan boy, however, are not that widely known across the Arctic. The versions I was able to find are the Greenlandic “Kagsagsuk, der arme Waisenjunge” (Rink, “Kagsagsuk” 294-301), Copper Inuk Metayer’s “Kautaluk” (35-39) and “The Revenge of the Orphan Boy” (17-19) by translator Leah Idlout d’Argencourt.
In order to analyze the conception of the hero in these stories, I will first have a look at the role of magic and its influence on the hero. Afterwards, I will show how the hero’s characteristics are presented with the help of the themes of sexuality, revenge and benevolence, as well as adventure. However, I will not analyze any specific textual peculiarities. Most of the texts are only translations either of originally narrated legends in Inuktitut, or, even worse, of texts that were simultaneously translated from spoken Inuktitut to another language and then, a second time, translated into English or German. That is why I will rather concentrate on the contents of the tales and their possible intentions.

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