Local legends of North Sumatra in a comparative literature perspective: Themes, motifs, and character education

These North Sumatran legends preserve cultural memory and represent community understandings of family relations, identity, responsibility, and the consequences of human actions. This study compares Sampuraga, Pulau Simardan, Sikantan, and Lau Kawar through comparative literature, particularly comparative thematology, and considers their implications for literature-based character education in schools. The study adopts a qualitative descriptive method involving close reading, data recording, identification of themes and motifs, comparison of conflict structures, and symbolic interpretation of geographical settings. The analysis identifies shared concerns with family rupture, identity, recognition, responsibility, catastrophe, and the cultural meanings attached to place. However, the thematic transformations differ: Sampuraga, Pulau Simardan, and Sikantan foreground the rejection of a mother following upward social mobility, whereas Lau Kawar depicts the neglect and exclusion of a family member within a communal setting. These findings inform a five-stage conceptual learning sequence: identifying, comparing, interpreting, recontextualizing, and reflecting and creating. The proposed sequence treats legends as literary works and resources for cultural literacy and character education. It remains a conceptual proposal and has not yet been tested in an actual classroom.