A Kayak Full of Ghosts: Eskimo Folk Tales (International Folk Tale Series)

This book is very entertaining and the stories are great to share. Eskimo heritage is all about sharing stories.

A great collection of unique tales from the north. Some of the English could be better, but that's overcome by the excellent storytelling.

I used also used this book for my college history class. It was very entertaining, but be forwarned that there is a lot of graphic and suggestive language in the book!

as advertised

My SO and I take turns reading stories out of this book to each other every night since we got it and we're usually laughing at the absurdity in no time at all. We reference the sillier, memorable moments for the tales to each other and are already on the hunt for a similar book, as we've had this two months now and are running out of stories. Definitely get if you want to laugh with an SO or friend!

I was just reminded of this after reading a scatological posting on a peculiarly narrowly targeted Web site. This book is a phenomenal journey through the dark side of the human psyche, and--as may be expected--its concepts of "mythology" are anything but mainstream. Do not expect pantheons of radiant beings eating grapes and enjoying sexual delights or, for that matter, defeatist gods fighting giants while continually fearing the end of days (particularly after Odin slays Gullveig with Gungnir and Loki eats her heart). Neither should you expect "standard" story lines, such as Theseus slaying the Minotaur or Thor battling Jormungandr: stick to Padraic Colum and his Beardsleyesque drawing buddy, Willy Pogany, for that sort of thing. The character of myths ranges from scatological to sexual ("swinging," even) to necrophiliacal to cannibalistic to unclassifiable. Unfortunately, since so many of the myths are eponymously yclept for their protagonists, their names are utterly forgettable--Kiviarssuq and Aaqaqoq and Nuqtiluq, perhaps. One aspect I could not understand was that the overwhelming majority of the stories were not of the etiologic character that underlies the lion's share of, say, the Greek and Norse and Hindu traditions. To that extent, they could just as easily be taxonomized as mere folktales--with all that that implies and all that that fails to imply--revelatory of the shockingly limited range of the grossly vulgar colloquial Inuit mindset. (Fine, call me ethnocentric if you like: call me anything but late for dinner.) Just expect to be shocked senseless by jaw-dropping behaviors from weird people. The author offers us an unwitting foretaste of what lies ahead while talking of his visit to an Inuit friend, who was busily snacking on caribou droppings fried in seal fat, or regaling us with the compositions of other Inuit culinary delights, including odobenid vesica (that sounds so much more appetizing than "walrus bladder": you might even think it's a type of rare vegetable) swimming in saliva. There's more oddball material here than you can cut with an ulu!

Ignore the eggheads reviewing this book. I lived in Alaska for years. Eskimos, Inuets, etc. are some of the most "humane" people you could ever meet. Perhaps retelling the violence and "perversions" of their myths and stories is one reason these people are so gentle and considerate in actual life, a lesson lost on Puritan America.

Exemplary story-telling. The Inuit storytellers who created these tales made them to be re-told, to be laughed at, gasped at, wondered at, by ordinary people. Millman has done a service to readers. The ghosts of the original Inuit storytellers are undoubtedly more gratified by Millman joyfully sharing these tales with you and I, than by university libraries full of unreadable line-by-line literal translations prefaced with lengthy ethnographic "context." These stories can speak for themselves, and Millman allows them that.I prize my rare and expensive academic Inuit ethnographies. But I simply love reading this book. These stories were meant to be enjoyed and shared, not just stuffed and cataloged.JNH

The Eskimo peoples live in an extreme environment. It thus stands to reason that their tales will also be extreme, concerned with hunger, disease, cannibalism, madness. Such subjects do, of course, make good copy the world over. What is striking here, though, is the matter-of-fact way in which they are explored. A woman marries a blowfly because she's fond of him ; other people get murdered for equally dead-pan reasons. Some of these stories are funny, in a twisted kind of way, others are magical, others are disturbing. There's quite a lot of sex and violence and excrement, so be warned What bothers me is not the subject matter but that the author has, by his own admission, altered these tales ; he hasn't simply recorded what he heard from the Eskimo storytellers. One issue here is : does an outsider have the right to tamper with other people's stories ? If we concede that he might have such a right, the problem becomes : which elements of the tale have been altered ? Which elements have been exaggerated/trivialized/bowdlerized/edited out altogether ? And what impact does that have on how we hear the story and, by extension, perceive the culture ? There are no easy answers , and I acknowledge that Millman is not claiming to be an anthropologist, but I do think it needs to be pointed out.

I like the read and the stories though most are unsuitable for telling arond a fire with children present. I get the sense that some of the translation is awkward , which has reduced my trust of how accurate these stories are and whether any subtler meaning or play on words has been missed but the author's foreword is very good and gives an example of the complexities of the language he worked with.

Read this after spending two weeks kayaking in Greenland. It gives a good insight into the lives of the people who who lived there at the turn of the last century.