University of Virginia Library

Editor's Preface
Wallace Rice

"HIAWATHA," rightly regarded as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's greatest, most characteristic, and most original poem, has for Americans the marked merit of being entirely concerned with tales of the aboriginal inhabitants of the North American continent. It is, from beginning to end, a metrical version of legends originating with the Algonquin family of Indians, of which the Ojibways or Chippewas were the most prominent tribe. Yet Hiawatha himself was not of this family, but was an authentic historical person, neither a myth nor a demigod, who was a great chief among the Onondagas in the fifteenth century, not only the framer of a code of laws by which they were long bound but also the successful negotiator of the remarkable treaty by which the Five Nations, afterwards the Six Nations, were confederated; best known to us as the Iroquois.

Longfellow had taken an interest in Indians from early youth, and early formed a plan to commemorate their legends in his verse. From Schoolcraft he obtained nearly all the material utilized in the cycle he named "Hiawatha." Originally his intention was to group the legends about the mythical personality of the Algonquin deity, Manabozho, but the beauty of the Onondaga chieftain's name and the untrustworthy

authority of Schoolcraft's "The Hiawatha Legends" determined the present title of both hero and poem. Nevertheless, the poet's imagination has invested his hero with much of the character of the strong man who bound together the most compact and efficient league of Indian tribes known to history within the present boundaries of the United States-a man, he it said, who despised the Ojibways and all their appurtenances with the natural distaste of the powerful Iroquois for the easily defeated Algonquin.

"Hiawatha" was begun on June 25, 1854, and its 5,314 lines were concluded March 29, 1855; nine months later. Its meter, derived from that of the great Finnish epic, the Kalevala, consists of eight-syllabled lines, with stresses falling on the first, third, fifth and seventh syllables. Octosyllabic verse, whether trochaic, as here, or iambic, as in Scott's "Lays of the Last Minstrel," is by far the easiest of all measures to write; and the fact that "Hiawatha" is unrhymed made the American's task greatly easier than that of the Scotchman. Longfellow had a taste for exotic meters, as may be seen from his use of the classical hexameter in "Evangeline," but he did not succeed in making either the Evangeline or the Hiawatha measure native to the English-speaking peoples; and no poem of consequence has grown out of the trochaic tetrameter of the verses that follow.

Yet there can be no doubt of the suitability of the measure to the subject matter here, as in the Kalevala. It is just the sing-song that would be used by a teller of tales about the

campfire, with each verse about the duration of a breath, lacking in rhyme so that little particularity in memorization is demanded of the narrator, repetitive so that he can go back from time to time and collect his thoughts, and so easy of composition that a line may be made up on the spot to replace one lost to the mind. It would be no serious task to anybody to he compelled to speak in these octosyllabics for a day, or even a week, as a slight test will prove.

It is an excellent rule in literary composition to use the commonplace as the vehicle for the conveyance of unusual thoughts and a foreign atmosphere. In this, Longfellow's instinct was far surer than that of the critics who considered his work adversely at the time of its publication, on November 10, 1855. The mere fact that "Hiawatha" was so readily memorized-and that lapses in memory could be so easily covered up-brought it into a favor which it could never have attained were it rhymed, or were its measure that of English heroic verse. Its fluent vehicle bore successfully the burden of the feelings, the habits, the ideas of the American savage, all strange and exotic to English ears. It has done more than all the writings in the world combined to give the Caucasian mind an understanding of and sympathy with that of the North American Indian.

Longfellow has left a careful pronouncing vocabulary of all the proper names used from the Indian languages in his poem. These show an almost bewildering confusion of vowels, some having the quality of French, some that of English. The name of the titular hero himself is to

be pronounced as if spelled hee-ah-wah'-tha, though the French transliteration made it Hayénwatha, with the accent on the second syllable. The proper names throughout are used with the rarest skill, both to give melody and variety to the verse and to lend it that more subtle quality known as atmosphere. Even when most uncouth, they call to mind primeval forests and the devious, slender trail worn by the warrior's moccasins through immemorial ages.

And no American can fail to derive a satisfaction, apart from poetic enjoyment, in the fact that thus is preserved to the world the real personality, however overlaid with myth and legend, of a great fellow-countryman, a contemporary of Columbus, and, through this poem, now scarcely less well known.