Hiawatha
Hiawatha names 2 different subjects across the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf. Each is set out below.
Hiawatha he-a-wa'tha, The Song of
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
he-a-wa'tha, The Song of, a narrative poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, published in 1855. The poem is based upon the legends of the North American Indians and was the first successful poem making use of this material. Hiawatha is a mythical character, known by that name among the Iroquois and by other names among other Indian tribes. He is believed to have been of miraculous birth, and to have been sent to clear the rivers and lakes, open up the forests, and to teach his people the arts of peace. In the Indian legends he displays certain capricious characteristics which are wholly lacking in Longfellow's conception, which idealizes the hero in a way to remind one of Tennyson's King Arthur. The poem consists of an introduction and twenty-two sections or chapters recounting the story of Hiawatha--whom Longfellow makes an Ojibway-from the incidents connected with his birth, through his life, to the coming of the white man and the departure of Hiawatha the Beloved To the Islands of the Blessed To the Kingdom of Ponemah To the land of the Hereafter. Many beautiful legends and fanciful customs of the Indians are here brought together in an attractive and lasting form. The meter of the poem, called trochaic tetrameter is adapted from that of the Finnish Kalevala, of which Longfellow had made a study. It is without rhyme or stanza, containing four accented syllables to a line, and is characterized by short phrases, simple sentences, and frequent parallelism; that is, the partial repetition of lines. This form of poetry was entirely new in America, and, although immediately popular, Hiawatha called forth a great deal of ridicule and some even bitter criticism. The numberless parodies, however, which were written on it have long since died natural deaths, while Hiawatha lives and will live to open up a new world of enjoyment to every reader of American literature . Longfellow never visited the region on the southern shore of Lake Superior, where the scenes of the poem are laid; he never saw Minnehaha Falls; his material was obtained from the writings of Henry Rowe School-craft; the form of his poem was borrowed from the Finns; and yet this poem is his most distinctively original work, and has been said to be "more redolent of the primitive soil of America than anything else in our literature." Ten thousand copies of the poem were sold during the first four weeks after its appearance. It has been translated into nearly all modern languages, and into Latin. It has been called "America's national epic poem," and ranked with the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf and the French Chanson de Roland . Edmund Clarence Stedman says of it: Hiawatha is the one poem that beguiles the reader to see the birch and ash, the heron and eagle and deer, as they seem to the red man himself, and to join for the moment in his simple creed and wonderment. See Longfellow ; Schoolcraft
Hiawatha he'a-wa'tha, a noted warrior
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
he'a-wa'tha, a noted warrior, possibly legendary, of the Iroquois. To be more exact, he was reputed to be an Onondaga chief, a man of traditional wisdom. His name means, "He who seeks the wampum belt." He was credited with having formed the confederacy of the Five Nations in northern New York . When Longfellow was gathering together the traditions of the Ojibways for his famous Indian poem, he boldly substituted the rhythmic name of Hiawatha for Manabosho, the unpronouncable, unwieldly name of the Ojibway hero about whom their legends cluster. Longfellow also ventures to say that his tales came from the Vale of Tawasentha in the country of the Mohawks of eastern New York. The i in Hiawatha should have the sound of i in machine. To give the long sound, as is authorized unfortunately by most lexicons, is not only contrary to Indian usage, but contrary to the wish of the poet Longfellow as well. A long i destroys the melody of the word. The same remark holds true of Chicago, Winona, and other Indian names. See Longfellow
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 entry hedges that Hiawatha was "possibly legendary" and notes, almost in passing, that Longfellow "boldly substituted" his name for the Ojibwe hero Nanabozho; that substitution is now the first thing said about the poem. Modern scholarship treats Hiawatha as a historical Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) figure who, with the prophet Deganawidah, persuaded the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca to accept the Great Law of Peace efore European contact and is remembered through the Haudenosaunee oral record and the wampum belt that bears his name. The Confederacy is a functioning government today, and in 1988 the U.S. Congress passed a resolution acknowledging its influence on American constitutional thinking. Longfellow's poem, meanwhile, has slid from "America's national epic" to a period piece more often studied as an example of how white writers romanticized and muddled Native material than as national scripture.
Written for this edition, 2026.