Thomas G. Thrum (1842–1932)

This collection of native Hawaiian myths and legends, ranging from tiny snippets of folklore to complex tales with rambling plots, was originally published in 1907. The stories themselves are generally interesting, sometimes just for the glimpses they give of Hawaiian culture (particularly the way in which Hawaiian folklore is intimately tied to specific places) and sometimes because they're pretty good stories in their own right, featuring the kinds of heroes and conflicts and random bits of supernatural intervention that can be found in legends all over the world. Unfortunately, many of them are not particularly well-told, and I couldn't help thinking that sometimes a little more context would be nice, for readers (like me) who have only a very vague familiarity with Hawaiian culture and history. Also unfortunate is the fact that it started off very much on the wrong foot for me; the first chapter, which is the only one to deal at all with Hawaiian creation myths, is entirely about parts of Hawaiian mythology that happen to have similarities to stories in the Old Testament, so it's pretty much just a collection of small, out-of-context pieces of stories that I'm willing to bet have been distorted at least a little bit to make for a better cross-cultural fit. The rest of the collection, at least, avoids doing any more of that. But, as the introduction points out, the stories have been edited somewhat so as not to offend Victorian sensibilities, which is annoying.

The blurb on the back cover of the edition I have suggests that this is "an excellent first introduction" to Hawaiian folk tales and mythology. I suppose one could do worse, since I do feel like I've come out of it knowing more about the subject than when I went in. But surely there must have been better examples published in the last century.… (altro)