The world of the trickster

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.

Coyote the Trickster (Edward Curtis, ca. 1915) [Image is in the Public Domain]

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.

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Moon eyes

The oral tradition presents anthropologists and historians with a difficult, sometimes insurmountable, problem; given that by definition its antecedents were not written down, there is no way to tell whether a particular legend is true, is entirely made up, or is in that gray area in between.

Sometimes corroboration of the true tales can come from odd sources -- such as the story amongst the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest of a massive earthquake and tsunami, that was later shown to be true not only by geological evidence -- but by written records from Japan.  But hard evidence of this type for legends in the oral tradition is rare, and in any case, an earthquake in the Northwest isn't exactly a far-fetched claim to begin with.

It's when the stories are more out there that it becomes harder to discern whether they're entirely mythological in nature, or whether there might be some bit of real history mixed in there somewhere.  Which brings us to the strange tale of the Moon-eyed People of the Appalachians.

Botanist, naturalist, and physician Benjamin Smith Barton, in his 1797 book New Views of the Origins of  the Tribes and Nations of America, talks about a conversation he'd had with Colonel Leonard Marbury, who had worked as an intermediary between the Cherokee and the American government.  Barton writes, "... the Cheerake [sic] tell us, that when they first arrived in the country which they inhabit, they found it possessed by certain 'Moon-eyed-People,' who could not see in the day-time.  These wretches they expelled."  The Cherokee chief Oconostota supposedly told Tennessee governor John Sevier about them, saying they were light-skinned, had "come from across the great water," and were the ones who'd built some of the monumental earthworks in Tennessee and neighboring states. 

Soapstone carving in the Cherokee County (North Carolina) Historical Museum, believed to be a representation of the Moon-eyed People

Those two references seem to be the earliest known sources of the story with at least moderate reliability (although note that both are second-hand).  Through the nineteenth century, the legend of the Moon-eyed People -- who were light-skinned (some said albinos), small in stature, and saw better at night than during the day -- was repeated over and over, then embellished and twisted together with other legends.

One of those is the odd Welsh tale of Madoc (or Madog) ab Owain Gwynedd, who after a family conflict in around 1170 C.E. sailed away from Wales with some friends, who ultimately settled somewhere in eastern North America and intermarried with the locals.  Of course, "somewhere in eastern North America" is a pretty broad target, so this opened up the gates for a variety of claims, including that there's Welsh blood (and/or Welsh linguistic influence) in the Monacans and the Doegs of Virginia, the Tuscarora of New York, and even the Zunis of New Mexico and the Mandans of North Dakota.  This runs up against the problem that there's no good genetic or linguistic evidence supporting any of this -- despite claims of "Welsh-speaking Indians," there's pretty certainly no such tribe.  So braiding together the Moon-eyed People (for which there's no hard evidence) with the legend of Madoc ab Owain (ditto) doesn't make the case for either one any stronger.

Side note: aficionados of science fiction and fantasy will probably recognize the Madoc ab Owain legend as the basis of Madeleine L'Engle's alternately brilliant and cringy YA novel A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which has the main character, Charles Wallace Murry, time-traveling back through Madoc's line of descent in North America.  Brilliant because it weaves together all sorts of contingent histories and what-ifs with a legend that's kind of cool; the cringy part is that a major plot point revolves around a "blue-eyed Indian = good, brown-eyed Indian = bad" thing, mixed in with a heaping helping of the Noble Savage myth.  I loved the story as a kid, but now it's hard to read it without wincing.

Be that as it may, as far as the Moon-eyed People goes, what we're left with is... not much.  Even the Wikipedia article on the legend admits, "Sources disagree as to the accuracy of the stories, whether or not the stories are an authentic part of Cherokee oral tradition; whether the people existed or were mythical; whether they were indigenous peoples or early European explorers; and whether or not they built certain prehistoric structures found in the region."

So it's a curious story, but the dearth of evidence -- combined with the fact that what we have is filtered through the eyes of white Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were inclined to view Native legends as quaint at best and outright demonic at worst -- means we have to put this in the "most likely mythological" column.

On the other hand, maybe we should wait for the people over at the This Hasn't Been History For Quite Some Time Channel to get their hands on it.  I'm sure they'll have an answer at the ready.

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The family tree of folk tales

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was a fantastic collection of Japanese folk tales called The Case of the Marble Monster and Other Stories.  They had been collected in the 1950s by an American, I. G. Edmonds, and through the wonders of the Scholastic Book Club became available for schoolchildren like myself.

The stories center on the wise and humorous character of Ōoka Tadasuke, who was a real person -- he lived from 1677 to 1752 in Yedo (now Tokyo), and was an acclaimed and popular magistrate who got a well-deserved reputation not only for his fairness and concern for the plight of the poor, but for coming up with brilliant solutions for difficult cases.  In the first one, "The Case of the Stolen Smell," a miserly and nasty-tempered tempura shop owner claims that a poor student living above his shop is deliberately waiting until he fries his fish, so the aroma will make the student's bowl of rice (all he can afford) taste better -- and the merchant demands compensation for all the smells the student has stolen.

Judge Ōoka hears the complaint, then orders the student to get together all the coins he has, and it looks like the poor young man is in trouble, but then the judge orders the student to pour the pile of coins from one hand to the other, and declares the fine paid.  The tempura shop owner, of course, objects that he hasn't been paid anything.

"I have decided that the payment for the smell of food is the sound of money," Ōoka says, with a bland smile.  "Justice, as always, has prevailed in my court."

The whole collection is an absolute delight.  Several of them -- notably "The Case of the Terrible-Tempered Tradesman" and "The Case of the Halved Horse" -- are laugh-out-loud funny. And in fact, I still own my much-loved and rather worn copy.

A woodcut portrait of the wise Judge Ōoka Tadasuke [Image is in the Public Domain]

Humans have been telling stories for a very, very long time.  And of course, as a novelist, the topic is near and dear to my heart.  Stories can be uplifting, cathartic, funny, shocking, heartbreaking, edifying, instructive, and surprising -- allowing us to access and express our strongest emotions, creating a deep bond between the storyteller and the listener (or reader).

How long have we been telling our invented tales, though?  The tales of the wisdom of Judge Ōoka are about three hundred years old; of course, we have far older ones, from the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), which was first written down in the twelfth century C.E. but probably dates in oral tradition to a millennium earlier, to the Greek and Roman myths, back to what is probably the oldest written mythological story we still have a copy of -- the Epic of Gilgamesh, which dates to around the eighteenth century B.C.E.  But how much farther back in time does the storytelling tradition go?  And how could we be at all sure?

A new study by Sara Graça da Silva (of the New University of Lisbon) and Jamshid Tehrani (of Durham University) has taken a shot at figuring that out.  Long-time readers of Skeptophilia may recognize Tehrani's name; he was responsible for the delightful study of the various versions of "Little Red Riding Hood" that amounted to using cladistic bootstrap analysis to determine which were related to which.  Now, da Silva and Tehrani have gone one step further -- employing another technique swiped from evolutionary genetics to analyze folk tales and determine how old the most recent ancestor of the various versions actually is.

There's a technique used by taxonomists and evolutionary biologists called a molecular clock -- a sequence of DNA, some version of which is shared by two or more species, and which undergoes mutations at a known rate.  The number of differences in that sequence between two species then becomes an indication of how long ago they had a common ancestor; the more differences, the longer ago that common ancestor lived.

De Silva and Tehrani used the same approach, but instead of looking for commonalities in actual DNA sequences, they looked at what amounts to the DNA of a story -- the characters, themes, and motifs that make it stand out.  As with Tehrani's earlier study of "Little Red Riding Hood," they found that many folk tales have related versions in other cultures that make it possible to do this kind of comparative phylogenetics.  And some of them seem to go back a very long way -- notably "Jack and the Beanstalk," their analysis of which found common ancestry with other versions dating back to the Bronze Age.

In one way, it's astonishing that this is possible, but in another, it shouldn't be surprising.  The oral tradition of storytelling is common to just about every culture in the world.  I remember my maternal uncle telling us kids creepy stories in French about the loup-garou and feu follet and les lutins that scared the absolute hell out of us (and we loved every minute of it).  That cultural inheritance has very deep roots -- and as da Silva and Tehrani showed, those roots show through in versions of stories we still tell today.

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