The Hawaiian Romance of Laieikawai | Page 5

is to please exhibits in transference
from mouth to mouth. Nevertheless, they are jealously retentive of
incident. The story-teller, generally to be found among the old people
of any locality, who can relate the legends as they were handed down to
him from the past is known and respected in the community. We find
the same story[8] told in New Zealand and in Hawaii scarcely changed,
even in name.

Footnotes to Section II, 1: Polynesian Origin of Hawaiian Romance
[Footnote 1: Bastian In Samoanische Schöpfungssage (p. 8) says:
"Oceanien (im Zusammenbegriff von Polynesien und Mikronesien)
repräsentirt (bei vorläufigem Ausschluss von Melanesien schon) einen
Flächenraum, der alles Aehnliche auf dem Globus intellectualis weit
übertrifft (von Hawaii bis Neu-Seeland, von der Oster-Insel bis zu den
Marianen), und wenn es sich hier um Inseln handelt durch
Meeresweiten getrennt, ist aus solch insularer Differenzirung gerade
das Hilfsmittel comparativer Methode geboten für die Induction, um
dasselbe, wie biologiseh sonst, hier auf psychologischem Arbeitsfelde
zur Verwendung zu bringen." Compare: Krämer, p. 394; Finck, in
Royal Scientific Society of Göttingen, 1909.]
[Footnote 2: Lesson says of the Polynesian groups (I, 378): "On sait ...

que tous ont, pour loi civile et religieuse, la même interdiction; que
leurs institutions, leurs cérémonies sont semblables; que leurs
croyances sont foncièrement identiques; qu'ils ont le même culte, les
mêmes coutumes, les mêmes usages principaux; qu'ils ont enfin les
mêmes moeurs et les mêmes traditions. Tout semble donc, a priori,
annoncer que, quelque soit leur éloignement les uns des autres, les
Polynesiens ont tiré d'une même source cette communauté d'idées et de
langage; qu'ils ne sont, par consequent, que les tribus disperses d'une
même nation, et que ces tribus ne se sont séparées qu'à une epoque où
la langue et les idées politiques et religieuses de cette nation étaient
déja fixées."]
[Footnote 3: Compare: Stair, Old Samoa, p. 271; White, I, 176; Fison,
pp. 1, 19; Smith, Hawaiki, p. 123; Lesson, II, 207, 209; Grey, pp.
108-234; Baessler, Neue Südsee-Bilder, p. 113; Thomson, p. 15.]
[Footnote 4: Lesson (II, 190) enumerates eleven small islands, covering
40 degrees of latitude, scattered between Hawaii and the islands to the
south, four showing traces of ancient habitation, which he believes to
mark the old route from Hawaii to the islands to the southeast.
According to Hawaiian tradition, which is by no means historically
accurate, what is called the second migration period to Hawaii seems to
have occurred between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries (dated
from the arrival of the high priest Paao at Kohala, Hawaii, 18
generations before Kaméhaméha); to have come from the southeast; to
have introduced a sacerdotal system whose priesthood, symbols, and
temple structure persisted up to the time of the abandoning of the old
faith in 1819. Compare Alexander's History, ch. III; Malo, pp. 25, 323;
Lesson, II, 160-169.]
[Footnote 5: Kahiki, in Hawaiian chants, is the term used to designate a
"foreign land" in general and does not refer especially to the island of
Tahiti in the Society Group.]
[Footnote 6: Lesson, II, 152.]
[Footnote 7: Ibid., 170.]

[Footnote 8: Ibid., 178.]

2. POLYNESIAN COSMOGONY
In theme the body of Polynesian folk tale is not unlike that of other
primitive and story-loving people. It includes primitive
philosophy--stories of cosmogony and of heroes who shaped the earth;
primitive annals--migration stories, tales of culture heroes, of conquest
and overrule. There is primitive romances--tales of competition, of
vengeance, and of love; primitive wit--of drolls and tricksters; and
primitive fear in tales of spirits and the power of ghosts. These
divisions are not individual to Polynesia; they belong to universal
delight; but the form each takes is shaped and determined by the
background, either of real life or of life among the gods, familiar to the
Polynesian mind.
The conception of the heavens is purely objective, corresponding, in
fact, to Anaxagoras's sketch of the universe. Earth is a plain, walled
about far as the horizon, where, according to Hawaiian expression, rise
the confines of Kahiki, Kukulu o Kahiki.[1] From this point the heavens
are superimposed one upon the other like cones, in number varying in
different groups from 8 to 14; below lies the underworld, sometimes
divided into two or three worlds ruled by deified ancestors and
inhabited by the spirits of the dead, or even by the gods[2]--the whole
inclosed from chaos like an egg in a shell.[3] Ordinarily the gods seem
to be conceived as inhabiting the heavens. As in other mythologies,
heaven and the life the gods live there are merely a reproduction or
copy of earth and its ways. In heaven the gods are ranged by rank; in
the highest heaven dwells the chief god alone enjoying his supreme
right of silence, tabu moe; others inhabit the lower heavens in gradually
descending grade corresponding to the social ranks recognized among