Big Man Myths
“The world of Giants
prepared the way for the world we know today.
The world of Giants
is the subject of legend.
The legends tell the
history of our People, and
Teach us by example
how to live and die.”
From the Yakama
Nation Museum
In the time
when this country was still young, it was viewed as a big land with big
challenges. In response the Americans made some big man myths. The two men that
stand apart in size and strength are Alfred Bulltop Stormalong, and Paul Bunyan
with his blue ox Babe. The stories of these men portray them as towering over
others and creating things to match their size. These men through myth and
folktale helped to shape the world we live in.
Stormalong
is guessed to have been a 30 foot tall man who sails a ship with a hinged mast
so it won’t catch on the moon, so long that his men had to ride horses from one
end to the other, and so wide that it had to squeeze through the English
channel. The passage was so tight that the scraping caused the white cliffs of
dover. He swam to the bottom of the Atlantic to wrestle with a giant octopus
that was holding onto his ships anchor. His lifelong rival was a Kraken (Giant
Squid) who he fought several time and finally beat by trapping it in a
whirlpool. There are several different endings to his long life. One is that he
ate himself to death, the second that he worked himself to death steering his
ship during a race. The final one is that he saved a bunch of ships and sailors
during a hurricane only to be swept away himself at the end.
Now Paul Bunyan was said to be 64
axe handles high. When you do the math on that it comes out to be about 95 feet
tall. Babe the blue ox was supposed to have grown so big it took a murder of
crows a day to fly down his length, he even had a mate Bessie the Yeller Cow,
who was built on the same frame. Babe and Paul were attributed with many great
things from pulling roads straight, to creating mountain ranges. Many of the
tales around him were also fairly comical. Things like boys skating around on a
stove with butter on their feet in order to make flapjacks for Paul.
What is
it about America that made us create these giants to help in the shaping of our
world? Not just saying that big men did big deeds in how they worked, but that
they physically shaped the world we live in. Stormalong fought against things
that sailors feared like the kraken and saving other ships from hurricanes.
While Paul Bunyan was a hardworking man who served as an inspiration to others,
for his hard and problem solving. Stories told to entertain and to a degree
explain things.
I think every culture has various myths about people of irregular shapes and sizes, but the way I imagine stories like this being created was just a way to pass the time when moving on down these roads. I can't imagine a lot of adults knowing the answers to "how did these roads get here," a question likely to have been asked by their children. And maybe in an attempt to look smart, they thought up this grand story about an unbelievably huge man that created the roads with his bare hands! (And, if you want to be cynical about it, you could claim that they didn't want to attribute anything to the Native Americans that likely helped form those roads in the first place)
ReplyDeleteStill, it's a testament to how strong those characters are that they've endured in our culture so long even though there is relatively little mythology surrounding it.
- Cailean Lord, Sublime Time Machine
Interesting, Ian. Paul Bunyan is familiar, but Stormalong is new to me; thanks for making that parallel.
ReplyDelete