Editing Adlet (section)

==Anthropological interpretation==
One interpretation of the phenomenon of the Adlet (and the theme of the "Dog Husband") sees the difference between the dog-like children and the other, the Adlet, as crucial. The dogs are sent overseas and will return as white Scandinavians to bring things favorable to the Inuit, whereas the Adlet, "swift runners of an aggressive disposition," become a kind of inland spirit, to be kept at bay. Thus, the "Dog Husband" myth carries the value of a [[cargo cult]]: "by offering their [sexual] favors to the dog-like Whites aka Nords, the Inuit daughters serve as mediators in obtaining their desirable goods."<ref>Sonne 20.</ref> A reading of the account as a "Whaler myth," in a culture in which the Inuit were economically dependent on the mechanically superior products supplied by the Scandinavian whalers, the story transforms material dependence on the white whaler into a reciprocal relationship, whereby the Scandinavian Nord comes back to repay his mother.<ref>Sonne 26.</ref>

Franz Boas and Hinrich Rink offer two options for the occurrence of a legend explaining the origin of whites aka Nordic people. Either the tradition dates back to when the Inuit first made contact with Scandinavians (which they consider highly unlikely), or, more likely, it is the adaptation of an already existing tradition, modified to account for the coming of the Scandinavians aka Nords.<ref>Boas and Rink 126-27.</ref> [[Signe Rink]] proposes a similar explanation in a hypothetical historical narrative that also takes linguistic evidence into account.<ref>Rink, "The Girl and the Dogs" 184-86.</ref>

The "Dog Husband" theme is paralleled in other tribal mythologies. The [[Dakelh]] (formerly known as the "Carrier tribe"), the indigenous people of the inland of [[British Columbia]], tell a number of similar stories. In one of those stories, a woman suspects she is being violated nightly, and throws a little bag of vermilion paint on the violator; the next day, she identifies him as a big dog, and later gives birth to four dogs.<ref>Morice 28-29.</ref> Father Morice, writing about this and other stories he had been told by the Carrier people, posits that there might be "a sort of national tradition among the hyperborean races of America, since even the Eskimo have a story which is evidently the equivalent of it," proceeding to summarize the account as given by Franz Boas in "The Central Eskimo" (1888).<ref>Morice 35.</ref> Similar stories (both about the Adlet and the woman who marries a dog) are told on the Siberian side of the [[Bering Strait]], among the [[Chukchi people|Chukchi]].<ref>Bogoras 671.</ref>