The Goose Wife is a mythical female character that appears in tales from the Inuit and other ethnic groups that dwell across the circumpolar Arctic region.
Due to the great similarities between both characters, the goose wife has been compared to the swan maiden, another female that alternates between human and bird forms.
Scholars have noted the great similarities between the character of the goose wife of the folklore of Arctic peoples[2] and the swan maiden,[3][4][5][a] which appears across Eurasia in several mythologies.
The human hunter meets a man named Qayungayung, carving boats and creating sea animals with every wood splinter.
[21][22][23][24][25] In a version collected by Kira Van Deusen, Kiviuq finds three maidens bathing, all three having cast their water bird skins: "a sandhill crane, a loon, and a Canada goose".
During his journey, he finds obstacles he has to overcome: two grizzlies mauling each other, a lit qulliq (lamp/stove), a pot boiling a stew made of human parts, and two mountains that clash against each other.
Her sister-in-law mocks her laughter, and, tired of the abuse, the snow goose wife finds the goosekin, wears it and flies away with the baby on her back.
[29] Franz Boas collected a tale from the "Central Eskimo" (Cumberland Sound), with the title Ititaujang (or Itajung), after its main character.
[30][31] As the tale continues, on the way to his wife, hunter Ititaujang meets a man named Ixalu'qdjung chopping a piece of red wood with his hatchet.
Eventually, the village suffers from a period of hunger, and the bird maiden, daughter of a sky god, tells her husband her father will bring them food.
[37] Author Lawrence Millman published an Inuit tale titled Asalok's Family, gathered from sources in Greenland and Labrador.
Three sons are born to them; Asalok teaches the boys human skills, like hunting, but their mother makes them fetch feathers for themselves, so they can weave wings.
[41] Ethnographer Bernard Saladin D'Anglure collected a Goose Wife tale from an Igloolik informant named Kupaaq, who learned it from his mother.
One day, the Inuk man hunts some arviq (bowhead whale) meat and asks his wife to come help him, since the other men's wives are doing the same.
[42] Author Margaret Lantis published a version of the bird-wife from Kodiak Island and compared it to tales from Baffin Land and from Greenland.
[44][45] In a tale collected by Elizabeth Burrows in Old Hamilton, Lower Yukon, with the title The Goose Girl, a man has three sisters, the youngest with an eye in the middle of her head.
[46] Canadian anthropologist Diamond Jenness collected a tale titled The Duck Wife, from an informant named Fred, an Eskimo from Nome, Alaska.
[48] Danish scholar Hinrich Johannes Rink collected an "Eskimo" tale from Greenland, which he titled The Man who mated himself with a Sea-Fowl.
As time passes, the goose wife, now stranded in a human life, begins to miss her flock and gathers enough loose feathers for a new garment for herself.
He passes by two earth spirits, a boiling pot with seal's flesh inside, and some hairless dogs, until he meets a creature named Kajungajorssuaq.
The old woman ponders about the strange behaviour of her great-grandchildren: they peck at the leather walls of the hut to look for pebbles, and gather feathers found on the beach.
[54] In a Tlingit tale collected by Swanton from Sitka, Alaska, The Brant Wives, a KîksA'di finds two women bathing in a pond, and steals their bird garments to force them to marry him.
[56] Swanton also published a Haida tale, collected from a teller named Walter McGregor of the "Sealion-town people", with the title He who hunted birds in his father's village.
The old man gives the headman's son a bone marlinspike, then bids him fetch oil, two sharp wedges, a comb, a cord, salmon roe, a coho skin and a spearhead, and points him to the direction of the trail.
In the sky land, he meets a half-person, then two men collecting firewood, to whom he gives the wedges, and finally reaches his wife's home village.
[2] Charles Fillingham Coxwell [de] translated a Chukchi tale collected by Bogoras from a Reindeer Chuckchi source near the Oloi river.
The man gets a club and defeats the birds, and in the next day, he sprinkles water on them to freeze his enemies, then takes his gull wife and sons back with him.
[66] Modern writer Rosamund Marriott Watson, under the pen name Graham R. Tomson, wrote Ballad of the Bird-Bride, a poem from the point of view of an Inuit hunter who marries the grey gull maiden and laments her departure.
In this tale, a man named Marek discovers a lake where gulls and wild geese come to bathe, take off their feathers, and become women.
The man and the bird maiden have two children, a boy and a girl, and one day Marek's mother sends her to fetch willow buds in winter.