Reading Notes: Cherokee Myths, Part A

I decided to read Cherokee Myths this week. I'll be honest, I had to look up what a terrapin was (spoiler: it's just a turtle). I was surprised to see the story of the tortoise and the hare here, though in a different form. I heard the story growing up as part of Aesop's fables, and I think it's really fascinating that a completely different culture has the same setup of a race between a turtle and a hare where the turtle wins. The values illustrated by the stories are different, however, since Aesop's version teaches perseverance, that, "slow and steady wins the race," while the Cherokee version seems to praise the cleverness of the terrapin in tricking the wiley rabbit and the other animals.

Were I writing a story on one of these myths this week, the terrapin and the hare would definitely be in the running. I think it would be fun to try and find a place between Aesop and the Cherokee for the story, perhaps in which both the rabbit and the terrapin cheat.

There were a lot of stories about the rabbit and I don't understand why, in many myths, the rabbit is a boastful and mean character. They seem pretty cute and nice to me in reality, but hey, maybe I'm completely misunderstanding them. Anyway, the Cherokee myths often seem to be explaining the ways of the world more than focused on character development, but I'd be interested in exploring the rabbit's character by having him learn his lesson from one of the stories, and then he could pass the lesson on. For example, after the deer wins the antlers, instead of being jealous and grinding down the deer's teeth in the next story, he could realize he shouldn't have cheated and perhaps go have a conversation with the terrapin on playing fair - even though in the terrapin's original case, cheating worked just fine since he was a "good" animal.

Image: Terrapin. Source.

Bibliography: Myths of the Cherokee by James Mooney (1900). Source.