Week 7 Extra Reading Notes: Khasi Folktales, Part A

This is a similar style to one of the Chinese fairy tales that I read a few weeks ago. It was about how the cat and dog came to dislike each other. I was a little confused as to why in this story, the lion wasn't chosen to be the king of the jungle, but rather the tiger instead. Tigers are really cool, but I think of the lion as the king of the jungle usually. The monkeys were very clever and I'm surprised the tiger never caught on to what they had done. I guess the tiger was described as ignorant for a reason!

The scenery described in some of the stories is extremely vivid. The sacred characteristics of the Iei Tree are highlighted with the different descriptions of the setting. It helps me because these don't come with many pictures, so sometimes I have trouble coming up with the right images to follow the story. Even without a single picture I still feel as though I am imagining the same thing as the author. Making sure the setting is set well really helps the reader delve further into the story.

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"Hunting the Stag Lapalang" is a really neat way to introduce the background of Khasi lamentations. To have the hunters even realize how deep the love of the mother stag was for her son really emphasized how much she mourned. That would be a great idea to research a culture a little bit and then write a story about how their customs came to be. It would be good to mix up my writing style to a more informative storytelling mode as opposed to completely fictional. Maybe with the Native American readings coming up in Week 9 I can do that! If their is a Choctaw reading I could do that because I actually know a few people at OU that are part Choctaw. Those will be cool to read because Native American culture is so prominent in Oklahoma, so I could focus my research on tribes closer to Norman.

Bibliography: Khasi Folktales, Mrs. K. U. Rafy