Igotanay 1

Jose Igotanay
Mr. Wendel
Eng 1
3 Nov 2014

Flood Mini-Research
The Jivaro flood story by Gaster, and the flood story Caari by Frazer appear to have a
lot in common with each other. Both of the stories start by introducing two characters and how
they lived through a worldwide flood. Jivaro by Gaster states, Two brothers survived the flood
in a mountain[](126). In the other story, it also relates that two brothers had taken refuge on
a mountain from the flood and survived. But there is more to support the fact that these two
stories have comparable information. The stories also mention birds with faces of women and
what one of the men from each story had done to them. A part from Caari quotes,The
brothers took the macaw as a wife(268-269). Just like the brother in this story, one of the
brothers in the Jivaro story had taken one of the birds and had married it as well. To sum up
things, the two stories are clearly related in more than one way.

Though both of the stories, Jivaro by Gaster and Caari by Frazer, have their similarities,
they also have their differences. Both mention about the birds with faces of women but each
story contained two different kinds of birds. In the Caari story it says, ...the elder brother hid
and presently saw two macaws, dressed like Caaris, enter the house and begin to prepare food
they had brought with them. The man saw that they were beautiful and had faces of
women[](268-269). This part of the story is basically saying that the two birds with faces of
women were macaws but in the other story the two birds were parrots with faces of women.

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There is also more information about the differences of these two stories, just like the paragraph
about their similarities. Another difference explains about how many children the couples had.
Gasters story states that, From this union came three boys and three girls[](126).
Information from Frazers story is not quite identical about how many children the couple had
had in his story; they had double the amount of children from Gasters story. All things
considered, there clearly appears to be diverse facts in both stories that makes them differ from
each other.

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Works Cited
Frazer, Sir James G. Folk-Lore in the Old Testament, vol. 1, Macmillan & Co., London, 1919.
Gaster, Theodor H. Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament, Harper & Row, New York,
1969. (Most of the flood stories in this work are taken from Frazer, 1919.)
Isaak, Mark. Flood Stories from Around the World. Flood Stories from Around the World.
N.p., n.d. Web.05 Nov. 2014.