Paul Bunyan
Paul Bunyan is a fabulous lumberjack from a so-called tall tale , a story that tries to embed natural phenomena in a fairytale-like story - in the case of Bunyan, created by an American journalist .
origin
The lumberjack legends
It is said that Paul Bunyan was a logger of vast size and titanic strength. In stories about him, it is said that he and his blue ox, Babe, were so tall that their footprints created ten thousand lakes in Minnesota (including Lake Bemidji , which looks like a giant footprint). Babe measured 47 ax handles and was found by Paul during the blue snow winter. He once helped Paul straighten a road by simply pulling on it.
As with many myths, this attempts to explain physical phenomena in a story. Bunyan's birth, like the birth of many mythical heroes, was strange: five storks had to carry the baby. When he was old enough to clap his hands and laugh, it caused a vibration that shattered every window in the house. Paul created the Grand Canyon when he pulled his ax behind him and created Mount Hood when he put stones on his campfire to put out it.
He is a classic American " big man " as he was popular in the 19th century. In addition, the Bunyan myths arose from stories that were told in the logging camps and which were often quite rude. In one such story, extreme cold forced bears to forage for food; one of them went to a wood store. The bear chased the woodcutters up a tree with a ladder on it. To prevent the bear from climbing after them (apart from the fact that bears can climb a tree without such a ladder), they kicked the ladder away. This saved her from the animal, but kept her trapped in the tree. To get down from there, the lumberjacks urinated down at the same time, creating a pole of ice to slide down on. Such tall tales , though watered down over time, were ascribed to a single person, Bunyan, and thus became the stories we know today.
The myth in the newspapers
The earliest published versions of the Paul Bunyan myth can be traced back to James MacGillivray , a traveling newspaper reporter who wrote the first article about it for Oscoda Press in 1906, as well as a long version of the article for the Detroit News . He allegedly collected stories from loggers in order to decorate them himself. He began spreading the legend on July 24, 1910 when The Round River Drive was printed. It contained a story relating to Dutch Jake , another mythical lumberjack of enormous height and strength, about a Bunyan sponsored competition to cut down the largest tree in the forest, and allegedly also the narrator even participated.
Popularization of the myth began with William B. Laugheads Introducing Mr. Paul Bunyan of Westwood, California - a series of Bunyan advertising brochures for the Red River Lumber Company . Some of these leaflet narrations were based on Laughead's recollections of stories he had heard ten years earlier in a Minnesota lumber yard. Others were exaggerated narratives based on his own experiences. Laughead created much of the Bunyan "canon" through the advertising brochures, including the blue ox Babe and Johnny Inkslinger .
literature
- Max Gartenberg: Paul Bunyan and Little John . In: Journal of American Folklore . 62, 1949.
- Leonard Maltin: Of Mice and Magic - the History of American Animation , Revised edition. Edition, Plume Books, May 1990.
- Georges Bélanger: La collection Les Vieux m'ont conté du père Germain Lemieux, SJ. Francophonies d'Amérique, Presses de l ' Université d'Ottawa , no. 1, 1991, pp. 35-42
- Georges-Hébert Germain: Adventurers in the New World: The Saga of the Coureurs des Bois . Libre-Expression, Montréal 2003
Web links
- The story of Paul Bunyan
- The Paul Bunyan Logging Camp (English) Museum and rebuilt lumberjack camp .
- Folklore History of the Paul Bunyan Legend (English) Paul Bunyan: How a Terrifying Lumberjack Became a Legend; the book searches for the origin and creation of the legend about Paul Bunyan
Individual evidence
- ↑ Is Paul Bunyan a fraud? May 10, 2002