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Intentionally epic in scope, Longfellow himself described it as "this Indian Edda," and wrote it in the same meter as the Finnish folk-epic, The Kalevala.
It was published on November 10, 1855 and was an immediate success.
A short extract of 94 lines from the poem was and still is frequently anthologized under the title Hiawatha's Childhood (which is also the title of the longer 234-line section from which the extract is taken). This short extract is the most familiar portion of the poem. It is this short extract that begins with the famous lines:
The poem closes with the approach of a birch canoe to Hiawatha's village, containing "the Priest of Prayer, the Pale-face." Hiawatha welcomes him joyously and the "Black-Robe chief"
Hiawatha and the chiefs accept their message. Hiawatha bades farewell to Nokomis, the warriors, and the young men, giving them this charge: "But my guests I leave behind me/Listen to their words of wisdom,/Listen to the truth they tell you." Having endorsed the Christian missionaries, he launches his canoe for the last time westward toward the sunset, and departs forever.
Curiously enough, Dvorák claimed that "the music of the negroes and of the Indians was practically identical," and some passages that suggest African-American spirituals to modern ears may have been intended by Dvorák to evoke a Native American ambience.
The poem was later used as the basis for a three-part cantata, Scenes from the Song of Hiawatha ( 1898— 1900), by the English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
There is virtually no connection, apart from name, between Longfellow's hero and the fourteenth-century Iroquois chief Hiawatha who founded the Iroquois League. Longfellow took the name from works by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, whom he acknowledged as his main sources. In 1856Events January 8 Borax is discovered ( John Veatch). January 29 Queen Victoria institutes the Victoria Cross February 18 The American Party ( Know-Nothings) convene in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to nominate their first Presidential candidate, former Presi Schoolcraft published The Hiawatha Legends, based on this material.
In his notes on the poem, Longfellow cites Schoolcraft as a source for "a tradition prevalent among the North American Indians, of a personage of miraculous birth, who was sent among them to clear their rivers, forests, and fishing-grounds, and to teach them the arts of peace. He was known among different tribes by the several names of Michabou, Chiabo, Manabozo, Tarenyawagon, and Hiawatha." Longfellow's notes make no reference to the Iroquois or the Iroquois League or to any historical personage.
According to ethnologist Horatio HaleHoratio Hale ( May 3, 1817 December 28, 1896), American ethnologist, was born in Newport, New Hampshire. He was the son of David Hale, a lawyer, and of Sarah Josepha Hale (1790-1879), a popular poet, who, besides editing Godey's Lady's Magazine for many y (1817-1896), there was a longstanding confusion between the Iroquois leader Hiawatha and the Iroquois deity Aronhiawagon due to "an accidental similarity in the Onondaga dialect between [their names]." The deity, he says, was variously known as Aronhiawagon, Tearonhiaonagon, Taonhiawagi, or Tahiawagi; the historical Iroquois leader, as Hiawatha, Tayonwatha or Thannawege. Schoolcraft "made confusion worse ... by transferring the hero to a distant region and identifying him with Manabozho, a fantastic divinity of the Ojibways. [Schoolcraft's book] has not in it a single fact or fiction relating either to Hiawatha himself or to the Iroquois deity Aronhiawagon."
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