Category Archives: Myths

“Land of the Giants” (Brittany Champagne)

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General Information about Item:

  • Genre: Creation Myth
  • Language: English
  • Country where Item is from: Norway
  • Informant: Stephanie Everett
  • Date Collected: 11-3-17

Informant Data:

  • Stephanie Everett is a female class of 2019 Dartmouth student from Silver Springs, Maryland. Stephanie is currently an intern at Northern Stage in White River Junction, Vermont and is an avid singer. She has a passion for hiking and has even worked the AT as an emergency medical responder to those participating in the Dartmouth 50 (50 miles of hiking on the Appalachian Trail).

Contextual Data:

  • Social Context: While this legend is often spread orally by hikers of the Jotunheimen National Park in Norway, Stephanie informed me of various mythological researchers and hikers that have posted about similar or slightly different legends. Stephanie’s uncovering of this legend spiked her curiosity and she admitted to looking at various Internet posts regarding the legend. According to Stephanie, the variations of the legend all tended to have the same general message.
  • Cultural Context: The creation myth of the “Land of the Giants” was mentioned after the informant was asked about any stories they’d come across that were associated with any of their hiking expeditions. The mythological context has been passed down for centuries, beginning with the creation of the world but is only familiar to those that have hiker the Jotunheimen National Park or are familiar with Norwegian culture.

Item:

  • Legend based on how the Jotunheimen National Park, Norway – the ‘Land of the Giants’- was created and thus got its name.
  • The creation of the mountain range is rumored to be based on Norse mythology.
  • It is said that the footprints of giants created the mountains seen to this day in Norway

Informant’s Comments:

  • “How the mountains were formed is based on mythology. The giants and giantesses in Norse mythology, otherwise referred to as Jötnar, are rumored to be the creators of the mountains.  The giants roamed the Earth and it was said that their craters created the mountains that we climb at the National Park.  I remember one of the numerous giants associated with this creation was named Ymir.”

Collector’s Name: 

Brittany Champagne

Tags/Keywords:

  • giants, mythology, legend

Myth – Lone Pine

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Title: Lone Pine myth

General Information about Item:

  • Genre: Verbal Folklore
    • Subgenre: Myth
  • Language: English
  • Country of origin: USA

Informant Data: Sam Lee ’18 is a 21-year-old male from Turlock, California. He has been rowing since joining light-weight crew in college as a walk-on.

Contextual Data:

Social Context: This myth is told to freshmen by upperclassmen. It can be told by any number of upperclassmen to any number of freshmen at a time; there is no formal or specific location or time to tell it. Freshmen take the story seriously when first hearing it. They often realize later that the story makes no sense in reality.

Cultural Context: This myth ties rowing to Dartmouth culture by connecting Dartmouth’s symbol to their own sport. It incorporates freshmen into the school’s culture. It encourages team bonding and creates excitement for the sport.

Item: This item is a myth describing the origin of crew at Dartmouth. Using the prominent Dartmouth symbol of the Lone Pine, the story connects freshmen to their new home.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTjUjf41xBs&feature=youtu.be

Transcript of Associated File:

Once upon a time, Dartmouth was covered in trees, but as Dartmouth developed and people moved in, they they started to cut down all the trees until Dartmouth was basically a landscape.
But there was one tree and it was by – kind of by where the the statue of Robert Frost is –  there’s a tower there and it’s the one tree that stayed there as the tallest among all the trees. Because all the trees were starting to be cut down, this was like the one tree that was left. It was the Lone Pine. The people of the town of Hanover were really proud of this tree because it was like the one last pine tree that they had after people had cut down all the other ones. And this stood the test of time for like 50 years until one day during a particularly bad storm a lightning bolt came and struck the tree and split it in half, and a lot of people were confused about this, like “What are we gonna do about this? Like this is like our Lone Pine, this is our symbol and it’s now split in half. What should we do with it? Like we should just like cut it down and we should just burn it or something.” And the rowing team at the time realized that this was gonna happen and they decided that one night they were gonna before the town had a chance to cut down the tree they decided that they were going to go out with axes cut down the street and make a boat out of it. And that’s what they did.

Informant’s Comments: There might be more to the story. He has only heard it once before during his freshman year. It might change between people as they tell the story with variations, but he doesn’t know that for sure.

Collector’s Comments: This myth is an etiological myth, as it describes the origin of rowing at Dartmouth. It might be regarded as truth for a moment, but it is more of a sacred story than a story to be followed as actual truth.

Collector’s Name: Sam Gochman

Tags/Keywords: Light-weight rowing, crew, D150, myth, Lone Pine

Malaria Pills

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Title: Malaria Pills

Informant info: Michael Rodriguez. Informant attends Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH as a United States Army Veteran. Informant enlisted in the Army in 2003 and was a member of the 1st Battalion 8th Marines Bravo Company, which is an infantry military unit. He was stationed out of camp Lejeune North Carolina. Informant served in Iraq from June 2004 to December 2004. He was awarded a Purple Heart. He was from a military family, as well. Informant is 31 years old.

Type of lore: Verbal Lore, Myth

Language: English

Country of Origin: USA

Social / Cultural Context: Informant was asked if there were any ghost stories that related to the area that he was stationed in or military related. He replied that there weren’t really any ghost stories but there was a sort of myth around the malaria pills that gave you night terrors or weird dreams.

Associated file:

Malaria Pills

Transcript:

“You are on Malaria pills, you know malaria… and I don’t know if they still do, but the pills that they gave us, like, they’re known to cause, um, like a, not necessarily like nightmares, sort of like, they give you weird dreams. Everyone knows, when we take the malaria pills, you’re gunna get some fucked up dreams. I can’t really remember mine, but I remember my buddies, like popping up, like. He was sleeping, and we were in this tent out in the desert, and he like pops up in the middle of nowhere and he’s like ‘There’s a snake! There’s a snake! Get it off me! There’s a snake!’ and we were all like looking at him like ‘yo, bro like there’s no snake there, like, I think you were just having a nightmare.’ ‘No , there’s a snake…’ No those malaria pills just fuck you up. And you always hear a lot of guys like, whether it was actually those malaria pills or like people being stressed. And like you’re near those people at night when you’re normally not. And you’d hear these people having these nightmares, which normally do when they’re stressed, but you never know that. So, whether or not it was the malaria pills or just like the normal stress of going to a new area and being deployed, I’ll let science decide on that.”

Informant’s comments: He thought the effect that the malaria pills could’ve had on those people was funny. He was skeptical on whether or not it was actually the pills or just stress and described the malaria pills incidents as kind of ghost stories.

Collector’s Comments: Thought it was funny the way he described his friend’s dream.

Tags/Keywords: Malaria, military, pills, verbal lore

 

Third Battalion

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Title: Third Battalion

Informant info: Michael Rodriguez. Informant attends Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH as a United States Army Veteran. Informant enlisted in the Army in 2003 and was a member of the 1st Battalion 8th Marines Bravo Company, which is an infantry military unit. He was stationed out of camp Lejeune North Carolina. Informant served in Iraq from June 2004 to December 2004. He was awarded a Purple Heart. He was from a military family, as well. Informant is 31 years old.

Type of lore: Verbal Folklore, Myth, Song

Language: English

Country of Origin: USA

Social / Cultural Context: Informant was interviewed at Dartmouth College. Informant was asked about certain superstitions or rituals that they had experienced during their time in the military. The informant described a myth that the third battalion group being tougher than the other battalions, even though there was no difference between the battalions.

Associated file:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByAeKMYqcV3uc1FlcG9SYWY5dHVtMkdtWDBfLTV3TFh6Y2hV/view?usp=sharing

Transcript:

[I have recorded the item exactly how it was told to me in the interview]: “I was in the second battalion. There’s three battalions, like thats how they would separate all of these people that were coming in. Like, ‘hey you’re in the second battalion’ and then the next group that’ll come in… they sort of rotate between these battalions and the companies between them. There’s always this sort of idea that the third training battalion was a harder group of marines, if you came out of third battalion boot camp. But it’s really just a load of crap. They think they’re harder because they’re sort of in a different section of Parris Island, an older section. Where there’s more woods and stuff and i think thats it. But they think ‘well we’re kinda out in the woods by like 400 meters’… you know what I mean. It’s not like they’re out in the middle of nowhere. There’s just more trees.”

Informant’s comments: He did not believe in this tradition at all, but he believed that the soldiers in the third battalion strongly believed it.

Collector’s comments: Interesting how offended the informant seemed to be by the thought that their battalion was thought to be better than his for no good reason. Especially since he thought that boot camp was pretty easy for himself.

Tags/Keywords: Third Battalion, Military, Myth

Homecoming Burning Freshman

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  1. Burning Freshman
  2. Informant Data: Ayana Whitmal is a 20-year-old, female, sophomore (’18) who attends Dartmouth College. She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts and now resides in Hanover, New Hampshire during the school year.
  3. Type of lore: Verbal; Genre: myth
  4. Language: English
  5. Country of Origin: US
  6. Contextual Data: Ayana Whitmal attends Dartmouth College, and has participated in homecoming for each of her two years as a student. She heard this myth from an upperclassmen her freshman year.
  7. Item: Every year, the upperclassman put one freshmen in the middle of the bonfire and burn them.
  9. Informant’s comments: The myth is a form of hazing
  10. Collector’s comments: This myth scares the freshmen into thinking homecoming is an awful event. It is the way for the upperclassmen to spook the freshmen almost as if an adult does when it tells a child a scary story at a campsite before bed. It creates this love-hate relationship with the upperclassmen. On the one hand, they are probably terrified of the upperclassmen, then after the bonfire they are joined with the entire Dartmouth community.
  11. Myth, burning freshman

Ghost Stories – Parris Island

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Title: Ghost Stories – Parris Island

Informant info: Graham “Ossie” Osborn. Informant attends Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH as a United States Marine Corps Veteran. Informant was a member of the First Reconnaissance Battalion.

Type of lore: Customary/Verbal, Tradition, Ritual, Superstition, Myths

Language: English

Country of Origin: USA

Social / Cultural Context: Informant was interviewed at Dartmouth College. Informant was asked about his ghost stories during training and overseas. He discussed his time on Parris Island training to be a Marine and some of the ghost stories related to that.  Parris Island is located in Port Royal, South Carolina.

Associated file: https://www.dropbox.com/s/z1us1frzhrn0u2t/IMG_7545.MOV?dl=0

Transcript: Item: [I have recorded the item exactly how it was told to me in the interview]: Funny enough, there was a ghost story at Parris Island. I was a first recruit training battalion and right out the battalion, you’d look over and it was just a marsh that looked like a coastal undeveloped area, a swampy marsh. There was a story back in the day where when recruits were allowed to smoke during training, someone claimed to be on a smoke break and actually tried to run away through the marshes, but didn’t make it back, but the people that were on fire watch had to wakeup the whole platoon so everyone that was on fire watch and one of the drill instructors marched them out to the marsh just trying to haze them a bit. But apparently six or seven of them drowned and this is right outside where our barracks were for those 3 months and there was always stories over looking over the marsh at night, especially when on fire watch, that you would see moonbeams, what we called flashlights, the same way we call pens, ink sticks, turning on in the middle of the march. I never saw it, but people did claim they did when they were on fire watch. It was kind of an intimidating thing, so I am sure it was just them seeing things.

 

Informant’s comments: Parris Island has a lot of history and folklore associated with it over the decades of people that have trained to be Marines there.

Collector’s comments:  Ossie didn’t seem to appear that the ghost stories phased him in the slightest.

Good Luck Charms

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Title: Good Luck Charms

Informant info: Matt Menezes. Informant attends Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH as a United States Army Veteran (2004-2013) . Informant was a member of the 82nd Airborne Division and deployed twice to Afghanistan (2007-08, 2008-09) as well as spent two years as a drill sergeant for basic combat training (2011-13).

Type of lore: Customary/Verbal Folklore, Superstition, Myth

Language: English

Country of Origin: USA

Social / Cultural Context: Informant was interviewed at Dartmouth College. Informant was asked about good luck charms during their time in the military. Informant discussed how in their MRE (food rations) there were pieces of candy called “charms” that nobody ate because they were considered bad luck.

Associated file:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/11vv5a27kzlycgq/Dartmouth_Folklore_Collections_Matt_Menezes.mp4?dl=0

Transcript:

Item: [I have recorded the item exactly how it was told to me in the interview]:I wouldn’t say there are good luck charms; I would say that there are a lot more bad luck charms. I was a paratrooper so I used to jump out of airplanes all the time and something you never tell anyone when they are about to jump is good luck. It is just one of those things that whenever it is said somebody gets hurt. One of the other things is one of the pieces of candy that comes in your MRE or field rations are called “charms,” but you’re not supposed to eat those because it’s really bad luck. One of the other things is there is something called the rain turtle. So what you do is, because I was and infantryman and we were always outside, is the rain turtle is somebody draws a turtle on the ground and if you urinate on the turtle it’s supposed to summon the rain gods and have it torrentially downpour.

Informant’s comments: During the informants response he commented on MREs which is an abbreviation of meals ready to eat. Informant told me that the following is a common superstition across all branches of the military.

Collector’s comments: Another one of the veterans we interviewed from a different part of the military also followed the rule about not eating the “charms”