Epic Poem: The Song of Hiawatha

Overview
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha is an American epic that braids together legends and cultural motifs drawn largely from Ojibwe and other Great Lakes peoples into a continuous life story of the hero Hiawatha. Set around the forests, rivers, and shores of “Gitche Gumee” (Lake Superior), the poem presents a mythic prehistory in which a wise leader seeks to teach his people arts of peace, live in harmony with the natural world, and prepare them for an age of change. Written in rolling trochaic tetrameter inspired by the Kalevala, its chantlike cadence lends a ceremonial solemnity to feats, love, loss, and prophecy.

Origins and Setting
The poem opens with Gitche Manito, the Great Spirit, calling the warring nations together and kindling the peace-pipe, a vision of harmony that frames Hiawatha’s mission. Hiawatha himself is born of the West-Wind, Mudjekeewis, and Wenonah, and raised by his grandmother Nokomis after his mother’s death. Growing beside the inland seas and among pines and birches, he learns the voices of animals, reads the landscape’s signs, and is tutored by elders and experience to become a culture hero.

Hiawatha’s Deeds and Teachings
The narrative proceeds through episodes that show Hiawatha improving the fortunes of his people. He fishes the great sturgeon Nahma, wrestles the personified spirit of maize, Mondamin, buries him as instructed, and receives corn as a gift to nourish the tribes. He develops picture-writing on birch bark to preserve memory and law. He slays the sorcerer Pearl-Feather (Megissogwon) with guidance from the woodpecker and rewards the bird with its red crest, a pattern of reciprocity between human and nonhuman helpers. Through these acts the poem celebrates the origin of foodways, technologies, and customs as sacred gifts secured by courage, discipline, and respect.

Love, Friendship, and Conflict
Hiawatha courts Minnehaha, “Laughing Water,” daughter of the Dacotah, a union meant to heal enmity between neighboring peoples. Their marriage brings a season of joy, underscored by the music of Chibiabos, Hiawatha’s sweet-voiced friend, and the feats of the gentle giant Kwasind. Yet sorrow follows. Chibiabos is lost beneath winter ice and becomes a lord in the land of spirits; Kwasind, envied for his strength, is slain by malevolent dwarfs. The mischief-maker Pau-Puk-Keewis sows disorder, insults Hiawatha’s household, and leads creatures to ruin; after a relentless chase through his transformations, Hiawatha brings him down, reasserting moral balance. These episodes blend wonder with the stern intelligence of a public leader responsible for justice.

Famine, Loss, and Vision
A hard winter descends, and famine tests the people. Minnehaha sickens and dies despite Hiawatha’s desperate foraging. The hero’s grief is deep yet measured, part lament and part instruction about the cycles of nature and the endurance of memory. In the poem’s final movement, signs and voices foretell the approach of a new spiritual order. Strangers in a “great canoe” appear from the sunrise, “Black-Robe” missionaries bearing the cross and a message of peace and forgiveness. Hiawatha welcomes them, counsels his people not to resist, and recognizes in their teaching a continuity with the Great Spirit’s law.

Farewell and Legacy
Having completed his mission as teacher and lawgiver, Hiawatha gathers his companions, offers counsel, and departs alone in his birch canoe, paddling westward into the glowing horizon toward the Islands of the Blessed. The poem closes on a benediction of change that honors the old ways while acknowledging the arrival of the new. Through its ceremonial rhythm and cycle of wonders, The Song of Hiawatha renders a national myth of instruction, mediation, and farewell, imagining a hero who binds communities to the land, codifies useful arts, bears private sorrow without abandoning public duty, and yields the stage gracefully as another age begins.