Where Hiawatha Shows Us How It's Done

The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this quite a bit. As far as epic poetry goes, this is very readable and doesn't require a lot of footnotes or outside sources to make perfectly comprehensible. The stories it tells are naturally entertaining, leaning heavily toward mythology, though there are often moments of realism interspersed with something more like tall tales. Hiawatha feels usually like a normal human, living with his wife in a tent and going out hunting on cold days, but then he puts on moccasins that let him cover miles with every step, or he fights with an unbeatable immortal (rather like Jacob wrestling all night with an angel). Friends of his die, and the people suffer from disease, all very realistic and everyday in the worst way, but then they get some supernatural help. It's an interesting mix. (It reminded me of Monkey, Waley's version of Journey to the West, with its central character gaining in supernatural strengths as the novel goes on.)

It's funny to me that I just happened to read the Kalevala of Finland just before this, because Longfellow was a fan of that work and consciously modeled his epic after that one. There are a lot of parallels in landscapes, topics, and episodes, and I'll admit that made me think about the similarity, the equality, of very different people on two continents in some ancient time--say, 800 years ago--doing their best to survive in a cold, wet land, hunting and fishing and marrying and fighting. I pictured Hiawatha in his canoe he built alongside Väinämöinen in the boat he built, imagining them existing in the same world simultaneously, and that was somehow kinda mind-blowing. I'm still processing why.

There are clearly some concerns (or so we think now, in a way I doubt many people considered at the time) with a white English-speaking American telling the myths of a native people, reworking them and free-styling them to suit himself, which is what he did. It's pretty bold, and many would say not his place. Let them tell their own stories, we would say. Fair enough. But the one advantage Longfellow has over genuine native myth is that his work is accessible to an audience that has a background like mine, and it's only then that it can have the power to affect me. (And others.) It's not that I ever doubted the humanity of either Ojibway people or Finns, or questioned the equality between them and all of us, but unspoken assumptions create habits of thought we aren't even aware of. I always kept European history and Native history in two different timelines in my head, like they're two different worlds. Being forced to consider the parallels brought the two worlds into collision in my head. For example: the lengths that Hiawatha must go to in order to win a wife from among the Dakota people was reminiscent of Ilmarinen among the Northern people, completing impossible feats to win a wife. There's a lot like that in the story, and it refreshed my thinking. It's something like realizing your parents were just like you once, and you see them in a new way. Similar feeling.

I liked the heartbeat trochaic meter of the poem (BUM-bum, BUM-bum, BUM-bum, BUM-bum), as it put me in mind of native chants and drumbeats, though I think some people find the rhythm a bit too heavy. I also liked the lack of rhyme, because that would have been intense... not a fan. Anyway, the Kalevala was in trochaic tetrameter, which was Longfellow's reason to choose it, but I thought it worked. Even reading it silently, I kept the beat going in my mind, and it added something to my appreciation for the work. I don't usually feel that way about meter.

One disappointing aspect of this is the way it feels incomplete. We have Hiawatha disappearing into the west, so we have a kind of closure, but the episodes in his life feel sporadic and random with big gaps. It's like we got a half or a third of the story, and the rest just has to stay untold, like the unfinished Canterbury Tales or something. Longfellow leaves his readers with a lot of questions unanswered. In addition to that, I have quibbles with a few other elements of the work, ones that can be traced to the time and place he wrote, and I hardly need elaborate on them as they're so easily guessed.

Overall, this is a pretty entertaining read, easily accomplished in little bites over a few weeks or big bites in a few days. Before this, all I knew about it was what the Smothers Brothers told me, and I was a little disappointed that we didn't get very much about his mittens here. Overcoming that, I ended up liking this enough to recommend it.

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