Article 4 How to Love the Arctic Sun? With Ceremony - Folk Tales and Their Cultural Implications

LINK: http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/featured_articles/990120wednesday.html

Sara Houck

Location: Arctic Circle, during winter months (December-February)

Quote: Stars shine at midday, and through violet bands brighten the immense sky for brief periods around what would be high noon in Toronto, 1,950 miles south, the sun does not appear at all for seven weeks.

Anecdote: This describes how the sky is like and how bright the atmosphere is during winter solstice in the Arctic Circle. The sun is not visible in this region for seven weeks because of Earth’s Northern Hemisphere tilting away from the sun during the winter months.

Vocabulary:

high noon- the highest or most advanced stage or period

pretense- something imagined or pretended

Storyline: Because of the Earth being tilted on its axis, the sun does not apparently rise in the Arctic region during the winter months. This can explain why there has been a celebration occurring when the sun finally emerges until people have come from the south to divide the day into components, which halted the celebration.

Jason Yingling

Location: This article takes place on the island of ice high in the Canadian arctic. It is 1,950 miles south of Toronto. The temperature routinely hits 32 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. It becomes even colder due to the lack of sunlight.

Quote: "The first person who saw the sun would rush back to the sod houses or igloos to tell everyone," Rosie Iqalliyuq, a 96-year-old elder, said through a translator. A great igloo would be built. Soapstone lamps that had provided the only illumination during the long night would be ceremoniously extinguished, she remembered, and relit from a single wick.

Anecdote: “So on Saturday night, with the temperature outside low enough to turn a man's breath to crystals of ice”. No light for seven weeks due to the way the Earth’s axis tilts during the winter.

Key Vocab:

"The great darkness" - The time when the sun disappears and day becomes night

Hamelet - A Group of only a few families or people, not quite a village.

Story Line:

The Inuit’s celebrate the coming of the sun by lighting traditional soapstone lamps filled with lumps of pink seal blubber