The Sun Sister and the Moon Brother

A story told across the Arctic

The story of how the sun and moon came to the sky is told, with variations, from Greenland to Alaska. Franz Boas noted in 1888 that the Baffin Island version corresponded exactly to the Greenlandic one; Rasmussen heard it in Iglulik and elsewhere in the 1920s. In Greenlandic tellings the sister is often named Malina and the brother Aningaaq; in many Canadian tellings they are simply the sun and the moon. The story deals with a serious breach of kinship rules, and tellers handle it with care; this retelling stays at the level of published summaries.

The visitor in the dark

Long ago, a brother and sister lived in a large village. In the winter, when people gathered in the dance house (qaggiq) and the lamps were put out, a man came to the sister in the darkness, and she could not tell who he was. It happened again and again. Determined to learn his identity, she blackened her hands with soot from the lamp, and the next time he came she marked him, smearing the soot on his face or his back.

The discovery

When the lamps were lit again, she looked at the men, and saw the soot on her brother. In some tellings she speaks bitterly to him before she leaves; in some Greenlandic tellings she cuts herself in grief and anger, a detail this site mentions but does not dwell on. Then she seized a burning brand of moss and fat, or a torch, and ran out of the house.

The pursuit

Her brother seized a torch too and ran after her. She ran faster and faster, and her torch blazed; he stumbled or fell in the snow, and his torch was nearly put out, so that it glowed only faintly, like embers. Running, the two were lifted up from the earth and into the sky. The sister, with her bright flame, became the sun. The brother, with his dim light, became the moon, and he pursues her still.

What the sky shows

Many details of the sky are explained by the story. The moon follows the sun but never quite reaches her, except at an eclipse. The dark marks on the moon's face are the soot from his sister's hands. In some regions the moon's monthly absence is explained as his going away to hunt, and the moon became, in Iglulik belief, a powerful spirit in his own right, with a house in the sky and a role in hunting luck and in the conception of children.

How the story is used

Like many Inuit stories, this one explains a feature of the world and at the same time teaches about human conduct: the rules of kinship, the lasting consequences of a wrong, and the way shame and anger can separate people for ever. Elders have pointed out that such stories were told to children and young people as ways of passing on those rules.

Regional differences

The name of the torch, the manner of the sister's flight, whether she cuts herself, and what she says to her brother all vary by region. In some Alaskan tellings the moon is linked with a man named Igaluk. Readers should treat the version here as a composite outline of published tellings, not as the definitive form.