A Comparative Study Of Creation Myths In Mongolian And Inuit Folk Literatures

A Comparative Study of Creation Myths in Mongolian and Inuit Folk Literatures-Focusing on the Structure and the Motif of Mythic TextsPrimitive myth is deemed as "living fossil" for the study of human history and culture in ancient times, of which some are still popular in a number of societies and cultures told from mouth to mouth up to the contemporary era, but some of them have been documented as written records by human. Although creation myth is created imaginatively by primitive men, and its plot and storyline are lack of logic, it contains original world rifts and philosophy of mankind in its time of "childhood" of human development. Also human ancestors and Cultural Heroes in myths are often regarded as primitive literary characters. Myth is of sociological and historical value; furthermore, it acquires appreciation and academic value in the sense of Letters by degrees. It is not too much to say that myths impact on human life of later generations comprehensively.Therefore the study on myths, as well as the comparative study between myths of different cultures and ethnic groups, is of significance. This thesis adopts a parallel method to compare creation myths in Mongolian and Inuit folk literatures, and it mainly includes:introduction and collection of mythic texts of creation myths in Mongolian and Inuit folk literatures according to the distribution of different tribes in main concentrated areas; a comparison of narrative plots within three types of creation myths, and each type of them is illustrated with a table; an analysis of common motifs in Mongolian and Inuit creation myths.This thesis is original both in contents and method. A few creation myths texts in Mongolian and Inuit folk literatures are taken as objects for study to compare North American Natives and Northeast Asian, which are associated closely from the prospective of Anthropology. On the one hand, it enriches concrete comparative studies of Mongolian folk literature; on the other, this thesis testifies to the extant mythological theories. This thesis makes an attempt to utilize the method which Russian scholar Boris Lyvovich Riftin once adopted in his research of Bensen Uliger, and the method is to compare the plot by resolving the plots of the narrative texts into several motions. Motif analysis, as another essential constituent in this thesis, is supposed to review and test existing academic definition of mythic motifs. It is of the greatest importance that this thesis can be conducive to the verification of the origins and relations between the two groups through the comparison of motifs in creation myths.Cutting into structure and motif, this thesis operates on creation myths in Mongolian and Inuit folk literatures. From the macro-angle of comparative literature, this simultaneous research takes the earliest literary form of two ethnic groups as object; moreover, the parallel research of this kind breaks the limitations of time and region to contrast the cultures of the two ethnic groups on the same stage of human development, which, more specifically, is to compare the oral literary pieces from mid-late clan society to the feudal society of Mongol and Inuit. At the end this thesis verifies that the creation myths in Mongolian and Inuit folk literatures share obvious similarities only in the type of Earth-Diving myth based on the comparison.Due to the limitation of language and academic materials, this research is not capable of covering the myths in living form for comparison. It inspires the author to put further focus on field research, which is connected with folk literature inheritance in living form, to further folk literature studies without constrain of text-based mythological researches. Considering that there are barely comparative researches which contrast Mongolian mythology with those of North American Natives, though Mongolian mythology itself is sufficient at home and abroad. Cross-cultural or cross-regional mythological researches can been seen, but comparative researches that intensively lay emphasis on the inner structure are not easy to be found. This thesis is an attempt which is supposed to enlighten the researches afterwards.