Sacred Texts -- Pacific Islander Religions

Hawaiian Mythology: Preface

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This is the preface to an academic reference work on Hawaiian native mythology, situated within the tradition of comparative folklore and mythology scholarship of the early-to-mid twentieth century. The author describes a study compiled over decades beginning in 1914, rooted in personal childhood experience on Maui and shaped by collaboration with native Hawaiian informants, scholars, and institutions including the Bishop Museum and Vassar College's Folklore Foundation. The work aims to document and analyze Hawaiian traditional storytelling that survived the first century of Western contact, while openly acknowledging it covers less than half of the full mythological corpus. A substantial portion of the preface is devoted to guiding non-Hawaiian readers through the linguistic conventions of the language — proper name construction, pronunciation, the role of the definite article, and the glottal stop — treating linguistic access as a prerequisite for meaningful engagement with the material. The author frames Hawaiian as a language whose melodious, vowel-rich sound lends itself naturally to the oral chanting traditions the mythology grew from. This preface signals a work that is both scholarly and personally invested, blending ethnographic fieldwork, linguistic analysis, and reverence for a living cultural tradition — useful for anyone interested in Polynesian mythology, Hawaiian oral literature, or the history of American folklore scholarship.

Hawaiian Mythology: Preface

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