Week 11 Essay: The Khasi Folktales

(Tiger: MythFolklore)

For this week’s reading assignment, I read the Khasi Folktales. Unfortunately, it has been a really busy week so I was only able to read half of them. In this essay, I plan to give feedback about the stories within this unit as well as the UnTextbook reading option in general. From what I read, the Khasi people seem to be very observant of nature and really like to create folktales that explain their observations. If the observations that these stories are founded upon are all true, then I actually learned a couple of things. For example, I did not realize that tigers are afraid of monkeys, but now I do and I learned it through a pretty entertaining story that also warned us not to propose marriage to an unknown bride. That was another thing that I noticed about all of the stories: coupled with their explanation about the observation, the Khasi people also tried to include some kind of moral (regardless of how random it may have seemed). Within the unit, my least favorite story was How the Dog Came to Live with Man. I thought that it was significantly longer than the rest, and I wasn’t a huge fan of how they portrayed the dog. I really liked dogs, so I would have preferred the pig to be the deceitful character. In fact, I actually considered rewriting this story for my storytelling post yesterday. On the other hand, my favorite story was U Biskurom, which is actually the story that I chose for my storytelling post. This story was more focused on mankind, rather than the world around us. Despite the pessimistic theme, I really enjoyed the story. It was kind of funny how they portrayed the ignorance and greed of the men, especially at the end when they shouted at the heavens and U Biskurom sent down drops of blood that actually lead the men to believe that their shouts killed him. Although there were several stories that lacked notes at the end, they were all pretty short and easy to follow. There is nothing that I would recommend to change about this unit. I also noticed that we were asked if there is any information that we wished to have before choosing our unit. I really enjoyed the little descriptions underneath each of the units, and the titles of the stories did a really good job of summarize the types of stories that they contained, so there isn’t really anything that I would recommend adding to the descriptions either.

Click here to read the Khasi Folktales!