Heather Dale is one of the hidden gems of folk music. She’s a Canadian of Celtic descent, and much of her music is in the bardic tradition, and while she has written some absolute tear-jerkers (the first dance at my wedding was one of her songs) most of what she writes is meant to be fun, witty, and imaginative, drawing a lot of inspiration from the legends of King Arthur and his knights. But her inspiration doesn’t stop there and she has also been known to draw from Canadian and Inuit folk stories, which is where the inspiration for the next few weeks’ worth of this column will draw from. Now, instead of a single, self contained session like you are used to seeing from this series, I’m going to do something a little different and give you an adventure arc that can be used in a fantasy setting. And being that these are both Inuit legends I’m going to take this week to relate these stories to you.
The first of these stories is that of Sedna*. Sedna was a beautiful young Inuit girl who lived in the time before there was life in the oceans. One day, she and her father took a kayak trip onto the ocean, each of them with their own paddle. Their trip attracted the attention of a storm, who being curious as to what these two were doing on the lifeless ocean, began to swirl around them, causing great waves to rise up. Sedna and her father began to paddle back to shore, but they were not moving very fast. Sedna paddled with all her heart, driving the kayak forward with powerful strokes of her paddle. But her father was cowardly and craven and decided that he would move faster if it was just him in the kayak and so threw Sedna overboard.
Sedna clung to the kayak for dear life as her father struck her fingers again and again with his paddle. But still she did not let go. But the waters were cold and as Sedna clung to the kayak, the cold turned her fingers into icicles. The next blow from her father’s paddle shattered her fingers. A final strike to her head caused her to slip under the waters. Her frozen fingers sank with her. Each of her fingers became a different species of sea creature, from seal and otters to the mighty whales, and Sedna herself became the ruler of these creatures. Over time, the Inuit would pray to her to calm the seas and release the animals so they could hunt them to survive.
The Skeleton Woman** is also an Inuit legend that involves the ocean. In the story a young woman is taken to the sea by her angry father. No one remembers what she did to displease him so, but he threw her into the oceans where the sea animals feasted on her flesh, leaving her nothing more than a skeleton in the darkness of the sea floor. She remembered the warmth and light of the sun and lay there for many years, slowly becoming forgotten. But stories that the sea was haunted kept the hunters and fishermen away and all she could do was lie there and remember, unable to rest.
One day, a young man who did not know of the story went fishing on the sea. He cast his line into the sea and his line tangled up in the Skeleton Woman’s bones and she was pulled to the surface, the fisherman thinking he had caught a particularly large fish. When her bones broke the surface of the water the fisherman was terrified and paddled his kayak back to shore as quickly as he could. But his line was still tangled up in the Skeleton Woman and so she had no choice but to follow him back to shore, basking in the warmth of the sunlight all the way. The fisherman got back to shore and started running back to his igloo. The Skeleton Woman grabbed a fish off the line and devoured it, years of hunger returning to her along with the memory of the sun. The fisherman crawled into his igloo and eventually fell into a fitful sleep, only to awake later that night to find the Skeleton Woman had crawled into his igloo, attracted by the warmth of his fire. And in the firelight, he saw her for what she was, and instead of fearing her, pitied her. He untangled his fishing line from her bones and set about straightening her body that had become jumbled and tangled in his flight back to land. Through it all, the Skeleton Woman, despite craving interaction, remained quiet, fearing that he would dash her bones on the rocks, destroying her. The fisherman eventually fell back asleep and fell into dreams. As the Skeleton Woman watched him in the firelight, she noticed a single tear fall from his eye. She crawled across the floor and putting her lips to up the falling tear, drank deeply from it, slaking her thirst on the warmth and tenderness the fisherman provided. Then, her thirst slaked, she took the fisherman’s heart from his chest and began banging on each side as if it were a great drum.
“Flesh! Flesh! Flesh!” she sang as she played the fisherman’s heart, and as if in answer, skin once again began to cover her bones. She kept singing her chorus for several minutes, skin covering her bones. She sang eyes and mouth onto her face. She sang long hair from the top of her head. She sang the divide between her legs. And then craving contact, she sang the fisherman’s clothes from his body. She replaced his heart and then crawled under his blankets, laying with him, skin to skin for the rest of the night.
These two stories have come together in my mind to form an adventure arc that will take several weeks to tell in full. I’m looking forward to getting it out to you. Stay tuned, and remember – heed the call to adventure when you hear it.
*Sedna appears on Heather Dale’s 2005 album Road to Santiago.
**The Skeleton Woman appears on Heather Dale’s 2011 album Fairytale
Ben Erickson
