Extra Reading Diary: Folklore of Laos

For the extra reading diary, I chose the Folklore of Laos unit, mainly because it is such a small country and I was curious as to what kind of stories could come out of an area like that. Here are my thoughts.

So I kind of skimmed around the titles and the first one that caught my eye was The Man In the Moon, partially because I love Kid Cudi and it reminds me of his album, Man on the Moon.

Kid Cudi's Man on the Moon album

But regardless, the story is an explanation for the face on the moon seen on the light side. The basic premise is that a blacksmith got tired of being a blacksmith one day. So he asked a wise man who controlled everything to be a stone on the mountain, then several others things, until eventually he asked to be the moon. The guy got tired of the blacksmith asking to be different things, so he got stuck being the man in the moon. Thus you have the face on the moon. Kind of an interesting way to explain how it got there!

Then I read The Origin of Lightning, because I was kind of curious how they would explain lightning based on the last story. Basically a man's wife dies and is reborn as a young girl. When it came time for her to marry, her husband came from heaven in the form of an old man. Her wreath (symbolizing who she would marry) landed on his head and everyone made fun of him. But he and his daughter rose into heaven. The father of the girl tried to shoot them down, which is what is really happening when lightning strikes.

I really didn't enjoy that story too much, it was super confusing trying to figure out who was who and what was what, but that's probably the first story I've read all semester that I didn't really understand! 

The other stories were kind of interesting, but to conserve the amount of space this takes up, I won't go into all that!