Malina (the Sun Woman)

The sister's torch

In the widely told Inuit story of the sun and moon, a young woman is visited in the dark by a man she cannot see. To find out who he is, she blackens her hands with soot from the lamp and marks him. When the lamps are lit she sees the marks on her brother. In anger and shame she flees with a burning torch; he follows with his own, but his falls or burns down to embers. Both rise into the sky, where she becomes the sun and he, with his faint light, becomes the moon.

Why she has a name

The name Malina, now common in English-language books, comes from Greenlandic tellings. In many Canadian Inuit versions the sister is simply the sun, Siqiniq. The name is used here because readers will meet it in general reference works, not because it is universal.

A story about boundaries

The story is told as an explanation of the sky, but also as a story about kinship rules and their violation, and about the lasting consequences of a wrong. Boas noted in the 1880s that the Baffin Island version corresponded closely to the Greenlandic one, showing how widely the story had travelled.