Wolf and Rabbit
Rabbit said to Wolf, “I shall make a new animal. It shall stand on two legs and run free across meadows and mountains.”
Wolf said, “I will send large beasts to eat your new animal.”
Rabbit said, “My animal shall band together and fight off even large beasts. They shall travel together to stay safe.”
Wolf said, “I will weaken the bones of your animal over time, so that the old cannot walk, and are left behind.”
Rabbit said, “They shall settle many homes close together and tame the plants to eat.”
Wolf said, “I will send sickness that travels between their homes and kills them.”
Rabbit said, “They shall learn from their parents how to stay safe from the sickness. They shall think of many things and work together to create them.”
Wolf said, “I will send evil thoughts, and they will use their knowledge only to kill each other.”
Rabbit said, “They shall speak wisdom and love each other and live in peace, making beautiful things.”
Wolf said, “I will make their lives short and everything they love will wither and die.”
Rabbit said, “They shall learn the secrets of nature, and make their lives longer than the crumbling of the world.”
Wolf laughed and said, “Then you have created a God, and I will bow to it.”
Rabbit agreed that this was fair and set to work.
The comanche figures of wolf (the idealist who creates perfect things) and coyote (the one who soils creation) would have been very good for this. I find their schema very useful, it’s like “first, things were perfect, then something messed it up”. I guess many of us, especially here, are born with this intuitive sense that the world was supposed to be a reasonable place designed by reasonable people, and so we need to be told, “No, that’s a reasonable thing to hope for, darling, but something happened. Things got messed up. You’ll have to adjust.”
~ The First Domestication. Pierotti, Fogg (2017)
Somewhere I’ve got a draft of a story about how wolf made the world to be a perfect reflection of wolf’s will alone, and so wolf was free of any obligations to anyone, but then all of that got screwed up when a second being (coyote) came into existence and started doing its own thing and spreading around. Since then, everyone has had to live under the curse of Other People, and all of the rules and borders and negative externalities that come with that. But of course, if wolf had gotten their way, you and I wouldn’t exist.
In this sense, it was coyote who made humans.
See also: Eru and Melkor.
Something about Tolkien I noticed this month: Despite Tolkien being an extremely widely read conlanger who wrote in detail about fantasy cultures, he hasn’t really introduced a single new word to the english language. I find this very concerning. Ada Palmer has introduced many words that I think may have a life outside of her work (utopian, bash, sensayer, nurturist), so what is Tolkien doing? Is there some kind of attachment to impracticality deep in his thoughts that keeps him from doing it? It doesn’t seem like that’s it, as both “Mathom” and “Eucatastrophe” would be useful to have around (I may try to hoist eucatastrophe given that the lack of that word may be the reason positive singularities are rarely depicted)
He’s done something stronger than that: he has taken words that existed before, and replaced whatever meanings they may have had with his own. Elf, dwarf, orc, … these now indelibly bear his mark.