Angalo and the Salt Bridges

About the legend

Being

Ilocano Origin Myth

Cultural meaning

In Ilocano tradition, Angalo is a giant from the very first days of the world. The old stories about him explain how the land and the sea came to look the way they do, and this one answers a question every child by the sea has asked: why is the water salty?

Fun fact

Two names in this story, Asin and Angin, are Ilocano words: asin means salt, and angin means wind.

Cultural notes

This story comes to us from one printed telling. Dean S. Fansler's "Filipino Popular Tales" (1921) gives it as Tale 80, "Why the Ocean is Salty". It was told by José M. Paredes of Bangued (then Ilocos Sur, today the capital of Abra), who heard it from a farmer. Fansler wrote that he knew of no close version anywhere else. He spells the giant Ang-ngalo and notes that he is the same as Angalo, who, Fansler writes elsewhere in the book, is the hero of many Ilocano legends told along the Abra River. He also quotes Blumentritt, who called Angangalo "the Adam of the Ilocanos", a giant who made the world at the order of the highest god. In 1889 the Ilocano writer Isabelo de los Reyes wrote down another telling that, he said, every Ilocano knew. In it Angngaló is so tall that his head touches the sky and one step takes him from Vigan to Manila, and the soil he digs out of the flat ground becomes the mountains and hills. His three daughters want to carry salt to Manila, and he carries them across the sea; in the middle of the sea they fall into the water with their loads, and the sea has been salty ever since. De los Reyes also tells of a huge footprint in the rock called Bangbang, at the mouth of the Abra River, said to be Angalo's. Many peoples tell why the sea is salty. In a Norwegian folktale, the answer is a magic mill that keeps grinding salt at the bottom of the sea.

About this retelling

Traditional retelling of an Ilocano myth An Ilocano myth of why the sea is salty, printed by Dean S. Fansler in 1921, retold for children.

The old telling gives this story its frame: Angalo, the only son of the god of building, who loves work and walls his caves against the angry wind; the woman across the sea who waves to him with a black handkerchief (a scarf in our telling); his footprints, which are the deepest places in the sea; Sipgnet, goddess of the dark, who wants a house of bricks as white as snow; Asin, ruler of the Kingdom of Salt, and the salt bricks; hundreds of bamboo bridges, work by day and by night, and the Ocean, who cannot bear to have her sleep disturbed and breaks the bridges with big waves. In the old telling, millions of hired carriers work day and night, and they sink into the sea with their bricks. We changed this for children: our helpers are villagers who come of their own will, the bamboo floats, Angalo carries every helper to the shore, and only the salt melts into the sea. The old telling calls Sipgnet a beautiful maid; we left out talk of beauty, and the line that the sea was once made of the tears of goddesses. The old telling says little about why things went wrong, so we let the action show it. Asin's question, the old fisherwoman, the seven nights, Angalo's wish to make his father proud, his apology, the unfinished white house, Sipgnet giving up her bricks and spreading her dark over the sea, Angalo's evening rest and all the words the characters speak were written for Filipino Tales. The title is ours too; the old telling is called "Why the Ocean is Salty".

Sources

• Dean S. Fansler, "Filipino Popular Tales" (1921), Tale 80: "Why the Ocean is Salty" (Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive (printed book))
• Isabelo de los Reyes, "El Folk-lore Filipino", vol. I (1889), chapter XIV: "Cosmogonía" (Project Gutenberg)

Themes

• Consideration
• Rest
• Responsibility
• Ilocos
• Ilocano
• Luzon
• Giants
• Origin myths
• Why stories
• Sea
• Salt

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