Anguta
Also known as: Sedna's father
Mythological Narrative
In Baffin Island tellings recorded by Franz Boas, the Sea Woman's father, who cut off her fingers and now lives with her in Adlivun, carrying the dead to that dwelling.
Scholarly Commentary & Evolution
## A regional figure
Anguta belongs to the Baffin Island tellings of the Sea Woman recorded by Franz Boas in Cumberland Sound in the 1880s. Many other regional versions give the Sea Woman's father no name, or no afterlife role, or no part in the story at all, as in the Netsilik story of the orphan Nuliajuk. This site includes him because Boas's account is a major published source, not because he is found across the Inuit Arctic.
## Father and punisher
In Boas's account it is Anguta who rescues his daughter from her fulmar husband, and Anguta who, when the bird raises a storm, throws her overboard and cuts off her fingers as she clings to the boat. He is afterwards punished: in one version his own dogs gnaw off his hands and feet as he lies sleeping on the shore, and the earth opens and takes him, his daughter, and the dogs down to Adlivun.
## Keeper of the dead
Boas reports that the dead are seized by Sedna's father, Anguta, and carried to Adlivun, the land beneath the earth and sea where Sedna is mistress. Boas also describes a happier land of the dead above, Qudlivun, for those who died by violence or in childbirth. These accounts describe beliefs recorded in one region at one time, and they should not be taken as a fixed Inuit doctrine of the afterlife.
Academic Discussion & Critique
Exchange peer-reviewed hypotheses, comparative Indo-European etymologies, and archaeological field interpretations regarding Anguta.
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