Creating Creation

What are the major differences or similarities between the ethos of the creation story or stories you are familiar with and the story King tells in The Truth About Stories ?

First, a note. We have learnt throughout this course the importance of telling stories correctly – once something is said, it cannot be unsaid. With this in mind, I would like to say that one of the three main stories I will present is coming to you second-hand. What I mean is, it’s a story that was passed through many people before it came upon my ears, and the details I remembered most could paint the picture differently.

So, to begin, the stories.

Ethos, by definition, is the characteristic spirit of a culture, era, or community as manifested in its beliefs and aspirations.  We have all heard the creation story according to the Bible. Having grown up in a very Catholic home, it was once a practical joke amongst my sibling and I to say “And on the third day there was, …”. The next story is one that I could confidently say I have heard more than once before, but in that same breath would also have to include that I would not be able to repeat it or remember it if I tried. Kind of like a song that when someone mentions you can think of it instantly, but can’t remember how it goes. This is the story that King Tells in The Truth about Stories, the story of the woman who fell from the sky.

The third story I am familiar with was told to me in two parts. When I was 16 years old and thought I knew everything there was to know, I went to visit my sister for the first time in Denmark. She was working on a sailing ship at the time and living on a tiny-island. For context purposes, imagine a pirates-of-the-Caribbean style ship and the vast sea off the coast of Denmark and you got a pretty good picture of what that summer looked like. Prior to going I was instructed to read the entirety of We the Drowned by Carsten Jensen. It’s a very good read, although a little long. It tells the story of a village in Denmark, which is very much known as a small sailing town even to this day.

In the village where we were, there is a lighthouse, and in this lighthouse, lived a very, very old man named Sævarr. My sister wormed his way in to his favor by accident, and he ended up having a small soft spot for the very short Canadian girl who found herself living a Sailor’s life. We baked bread that day, and when it was dark out we got a bottle of rum and made our way down to the lighthouse. There was a small group of people there when we arrived, all men and one women. To paint the picture a little more, they looked very much like who you would expect to see stepping off a Viking’s ship. Everyone had brought something, we ate and then we drank, and then we were sitting around a fire outside. It was then that the old man (who’s name I will never be able to pronounce correctly) began his story. He said that it was the story that his father told him, and that his fathers father told, and so on, all the way back to the very first one of them. This is the story:

In the beginning there was only water. Then came salt and from the salt came sand, and from the sand came the land and then the trees. The gods came down and looked at the land, and said this will do. They let the animals loose and left, only to return when the world was ready. Years later, the first Scandinavians came to be and then they built their ships. They set sail to create the rest of the world. On the ship they brought with them a jar of salt, a jar of seeds and a jar filled with leaves from the first tree. First, they poured the salt to create new land. Then they planted the seeds to grow the animals, and let the leaves loose to the wind that carried their ship, and the wind gave birth to the trees. The world was created.

The purpose of telling the story in two parts is still a mystery to me, but the combination of events still left quite the impression.

Same, Same, Different.

All of the stories of creation share one major theme: first there was nothing and then there was something. Each story was unique in its telling, but I found that all had similar items. There’s an aspect of nature to be accounted for, and animals too. The Sailors story and the King story both talk of the land being created by something, salt and sand in the former and dirt in the latter.

What was most interesting to me about the two-part story was that in the Jensen book, they speak of Christianity. The famous first line in the novel goes like this: “Many years ago there lived a man called Laurids Madsen, who went up to Heaven and came down again, thanks to his boots” (Jensen, 1). Even then, throughout the novel religion is mocked for its callousness towards the worshippers, and the contradictory teachings in scripture. The second part of the story is the part deserving of more focus for the context of this course. The way the story was presented was in a similar tone to that of King’s story about Charm and her twins. Each piece was told the way the story should make the reader feel. On the contrary, the genesis story is very cold, it does not embrace the reader. I have found many bible stories to be like this, which I believe is largely in part to the language used to tell them.

In looking at comparing the stories of creation, I also noticed something I found rather striking. The genesis story is so common not only due to the very large and very loud presence of the Catholic and Christian religions, but also because it is in the bible. The bible is a written account of what had happened. However, the story King tells, as well as the sailor story, are both based on oral traditions. As King would say: each time someone tells the story, it changes (1). Similar to the Indigenous peoples in Canada, Danes (especially in Greenland) rely on Oral Traditions to tell their histories.

There are many more creation stories, all possessing similarities and differences. I do not believe that any one story is more true than another, however I can respect that it is not my place to tell someone that what they believe is false (even if it means listening to my Great-Aunt tell me for the hundredth thousand time that God created the world in his image. For context, she’s a nun.)

Works Cited

Colville, Liz, and Carsten Jensen. “Dive Into A Danish Tale Of Seafarers And Dreamers.” NPR, NPR, 23 Feb. 2011, www.npr.org/2011/07/14/133964690/dive-into-a-danish-tale-of-seafarers-and-dreamers.

Thisted, Kirsten. “On Narrative Expectations: Greenlandic Oral Traditions about the Cultural Encounter between Inuit and Norsemen.” Scandinavian Studies, vol. 73, no. 3, 2001, pp. 253–296. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40920318. Accessed 12 Mar. 2020.

King, Thomas. “The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative.” 2003