MDDM Ch. 63 Zepho and Stig & Paul Bunyan

[Doug Millison]

>>> 620-622  Zepho's wife cooks up a contest between her husband Zepho the
>>> werebeaver and Stig.

Bunyan, Paul

giant lumberjack, mythical hero of the lumber camps in the United States, a
symbol of bigness, strength, and vitality. The tales and anecdotes that
form the Paul Bunyan legend are typical of the tradition of frontier tall
tales. Paul and his companions, Babe the Blue Ox and Johnny Inkslinger, are
undismayed by rains that last for months, giant mosquitoes, or adverse
geography. The tales describe how Paul, who fashions lakes and rivers at
will, created Puget Sound, the Grand Canyon, and the Black Hills. They
celebrate the lumbermen's prodigious appetites. Paul's camp stove covers an
acre, and his hotcake griddle is so large that it is greased by men using
sides of bacon for skates.

A few anecdotes of Paul Bunyan recorded from oral folklore suggest that he
was known to lumbermen in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and the Northwest before
the first Bunyan stories were published by James MacGillivray in "The Round
River Drive" (Detroit News- Tribune, July 24, 1910). Within 15 years,
through popularization by professional writers, Bunyan was transformed from
an occupational folk figure into a national legend. Paul was first
introduced to a general audience by W.B. Laughead, a Minnesota advertising
man, in a series of pamphlets (1914-44) used to publicize the products of
the Red River Lumber Company. These influenced Esther Shephard, who wrote
of the mythic hero in Paul Bunyan (1924). James Stevens, also a lumber
publicist, mixed tradition and invention in his version of the story, Paul
Bunyan (1925). These books restyled Paul's image for a wide popular
audience; their humour centred on Paul's giganticness rather than on
knowledge of lumbering techniques. The Bunyan legend was further
popularized by numerous children's books and by civic festivals held to
attract tourists to "Bunyan-land."

Paul Bunyan is the subject of poems by the American poets Robert Frost,
Carl Sandburg, and Richard Wilbur and of an operetta by the Anglo-American
poet W.H. Auden and the English composer Benjamin Britten.



To cite this page:
"Bunyan, Paul" Encyclopædia Britannica
<http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=18365>
[Accessed July 17, 2002].


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