Sometimes I run across a piece of research that is just so charming I have to tell you about it.
This particular one comes from the European University of St. Petersburg, where anthropologist and folklorist Yuri Berezkin has been working on tracking down the origins of trickster myths worldwide. Every culture seems to have them -- characters from folk tales who are clever, wily, getting themselves into and then deftly out of trouble, often helping we humans out as they go (although we're the butt of the joke just as frequently; one of the persistent themes is that tricksters may be dashing and funny, but they can't be trusted).
I remember first coming across trickster myths when I was a kid, and had a positive obsession with mythology. Loki, from Norse mythology, was a trickster of a more malevolent kind; the Greek god Hermes was the messenger of Olympus, but got his start as a small child stealing his brother Apollo's sacred cattle; and Coyote, a character in the stories of many Indigenous American cultures, one that was generally more benevolent to his human acquaintances. When as a teenager, I read Richard Adams's amazing novel Watership Down -- in the characters' tales of the wise and daring El-Ahrairah (his name means "The Prince With a Thousand Enemies," translated from Lapine), I recognized the tropes right away. El-Ahrairah is courageous, sometimes to the point of foolhardiness; out for his own gain and that of his friends, even if it means breaking the rules; not above taking every opportunity to make his foes look like idiots; fiercely loyal to the weak and powerless who call on him for help.
What Berezkin found is that trickster figures fall into three broad categories: fox/coyote/jackal, the most common, found throughout Europe, Siberia, East Asia, North Africa, much of central and eastern North America, and the Andes region down into Patagonia; hare/rabbit, found in the tales from southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (from which it jumped to North America via the slave trade; thus the Bre'r Rabbit tales, and ultimately, Bugs Bunny); and raven/crow, found in northwestern North America and across central Canada, far eastern Siberia, and a few spots in east Asia and Australia.
What's fascinating is that it appears that as people moved, they carried their stories with them, but upon settling in new areas, simply applied the same stories to a different set of anthropomorphized animals, based on whatever wildlife lived in the new region. (For example, as Indigenous Americans moved from the Northwest into the Plains, their stories remained similar in theme, but they substituted Coyote for Raven.)
Berezkin writes:
The existence of two major zones of trickster tales in Eurasia and Africa, one with the fox/jackal and another with the hare/rabbit, seems to reject the differentiation of Homo sapiens populations after entering Eurasia from Africa. During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) the Pacific borderlands of Asia and the northern/continental Eurasia were isolated from each other by sparsely populated mountainous and desert areas. Each of the major zones populated by modern people during the LGM produced its own cultural forms. When the LGM was over, the bearers of both cultural complexes took part in the peopling of the New World.
Humans have been storytellers for a very long time. If Berezkin is right, trickster stories go back at least to the Last Glacial Maximum, which is on the order of twenty thousand years ago. How much older they are than that is anyone's guess, but given how widespread they are, and the commonalities between them worldwide, they might be twice that old or more.
So the next time you tell folk tales to your children, or read mythical accounts of the derring-do, cleverness, and craftiness of figures like Prometheus and Anansi and Kokopelli and Veles, you are participating in a tradition that far antedates written language, and has been passed down through the oral tradition back into a shadowy and unknown past. You are helping to keep alive something that unites every culture on Earth.
I think Coyote would be proud.
 |
No comments:
Post a Comment