Creator and Trickster of the Arctic Skies

Raven, Tulugaq in Inuktitut, is one of the most widely distributed figures across circumpolar mythology, appearing in various regional Inuit narrative traditions as a creator figure credited with shaping features of the land, releasing the sun, moon and stars from captivity to give the world daylight, or, in some tellings, playing a direct role in the creation or transformation of the first humans, while in a great many other stories he behaves as a purely self-interested trickster, driven by greed, hunger and vanity, whose clever schemes to satisfy his own appetite end up reshaping the world as an unintended side effect rather than a deliberate act of creation. This dual character, genuine creator in some narratives and pure appetite-driven trickster in others, is treated by folklorists as entirely typical of the trickster-creator figure found across a huge swath of Arctic and Subarctic mythology, from Siberian Chukchi and Koryak raven tales through Inuit tradition and on into the raven cycles of the Pacific Northwest Coast peoples further south, reflecting one continuous, if regionally varied, mythological tradition running across the whole circumpolar north.