The Song of Hiawatha

Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Adult | Published in 1855

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Summary

Background

Canto Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Canto II

Cantos III-VI

Cantos VII-XII

Cantos XIII-XVII

Cantos XVIII-XXII

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Introduction-Canto IIChapter Summaries & Analyses

Summary: “Introduction”

The speaker considers where stories come from, saying that they live throughout nature and the landscape of the Ojibwe and Dakota people. However, the speaker heard them from a storyteller named Nawadaha, who in turn heard them from the natural world around him. Nawadaha was a singer who lived in an Indigenous village in the forest where he sang the song of Hiawatha’s adventures.

Summary: “I: The Peace-Pipe”

In the beginning, the great god Manito came to earth and created a pipe bowl out of the red stone he found there and a pipe stem from a reed. As he used the pipe to smoke willow bark, smoke rose high into the air and all the Indigenous tribes followed the smoke signal. After the tribes gathered, Manito told them he would send a prophet who would unite all the tribes. He invited them to lay down their weapons and their arguments, and instead make their own pipes from the red stone and smoke together as brothers.

Summary: “II: The Four Winds”

In the country of the North Wind lives a great bear, Mishe Mokwa. All are afraid of him, except one young man named Mudjekeewis, who finds the bear sleeping and slays it to protect his people. For this feat, his people name him ruler of the West Wind. After that he becomes known as Kabeyun, and he gives the other three winds to his three sons: to Wabun, the East Wind; to Kabibonokka, the North Wind; and to Shawondasee, the South Wind.

Wabun is young and handsome, but lonely. Eventually he falls in love with a maiden he sees on a riverbank. He turns the maiden into a star and takes her with him into the heavens. Kabibonokka is fierce and cruel. He sees one lone man in his winter kingdom who has stayed after his tribe moved on. Kabibonokka tries to make the man leave by bringing snow and fierce winds, but the man berates Kabibonokka and tells him he is not afraid. Kabibonokka challenges the man to a fight, and the man wrestles him into submission. Shawondasee falls in love with a maiden with a green dress and yellow hair, but he is too lazy and shy to pursue her. One day he sees that her hair has turned white. Shawondasee didn’t realize that the maiden was actually a dandelion.

Analysis: Introduction-Canto II

The poem’s central character, Hiawatha, doesn’t actually appear until the fourth canto. The three opening cantos establish the origin of the world to which Hiawatha is born, and the miraculous circumstances that lead to his birth. This approach signals the poem’s multi-generational, epic scope.

The “Introduction” that functions as the poem’s first canto is set apart from the rest of the story because it is told from the poet-speaker’s (embellished) point of view. Longfellow inserts himself into the poem, creating a frame narrative—he claims to be retelling the story of Hiawatha’s adventures from another storyteller:

I repeat them as I heard them

From the lips of Nawadaha,

The musician, the sweet singer (1.18-20).

This literary device (often also used in 19th century prose fiction) gives the work a sense of authenticity. This is especially important because, as a white American man descended from colonizing Europeans, Longfellow acknowledges the distance between himself and the root of these legends. The “Introduction” also quickly and firmly establishes the poem’s tone and rhetorical qualities: the intentional use of repeated words and phrases, the strong poetic meter and rhythm, and the weaving of Ojibwe names and words throughout the English-language narrative.

The second canto, “The Peace-Pipe,” offers parallels with Christian myths of the world’s origins and other mythological stories of creation. The story opens at the beginning of a new world, as the great god Gitche Manito forms the instrument of social cohesion that marks the transition between a time of violent discord and a time of peace and unity. The pipe he creates out of elements of the Earth, a tool of diplomacy and civilization, replaces weapons. This creation myth also lays the groundwork for the story world and Hiawatha’s role in it: Gitche Manito tells the people that he will send a savior to care for them and guide them, presaging the appearance of the epic’s titular hero.

The third canto jumps forward in time to the man who will later become Hiawatha’s father, Mudjekeewis. In Ojibwe mythology, Mudjekeewis is actually the son of the West Wind and symbolized by the great bear. In Longfellow’s rendition, Mudjekeewis instead defeats the bear and some of Mudjekeewis’s traditional feats will fall to Hiawatha instead—poetic license that calls into question how much this epic respects its source material. The canto also explores the personalities of the other wind rulers, a colorful mythology that imbues these demigod-like beings with human foibles: loneliness, anger, and sloth. Their experiences also establish the tenuous border between humans and nature (Shawondasee cannot tell the difference between a woman and a flower) or the natural and the supernatural (Wabun can turn a presumably human maiden into a star).