This love-song of Lolóma’s is now done into English for the first time.
The author’s style is imitated more closely, and the lines are more literally translated than was possible, or desirable, with other compositions which have been worked into these pages. The poet’s theme is the “Elopement of a Hero-god with a Goddess.” The artist’s laconic, business-like and elliptical lines, necessitate an introduction to these high personages, and a few words explaining what, by some readers, may be accepted as an addition to their knowledge of the manners and customs of Cannibal-land.
Bulitaundúa the “first-crowned,” or “sole-crowned,” or “chief one,” was a hero-god of comparatively small importance, but great pretensions. The tribe acknowledging him as its tutelar god called him “Chief of Gods,” a title which none but the tribe in question could show that he had any claim to. By all the legendary accounts, he must have been a sort of Beelzebub, for, when the gods assembled in council, he sat on an elevated seat or dais, above them all—
“By merit raised
To that bad eminence.”
His food was the wind. As a god, he was far from being wholly given to wrong-doing. He used to promise—or his priests did for him—that the trees should yield their fruit in great abundance. When the season came, he was in the habit of taking these ripe fruits, which he called his “play-things,” and tossing them hither and thither for his amusement, over all the lands of his people. Thus sketched by the poet, we may imagine him standing by an inexhaustible pile of fruits, into which, ever and anon, he plunges his hands, awful in their wondrous breadth and capacity, with which, like a giant sower sowing seed, he scatters broadcast on all the trees, his ripe and luscious gifts.
Such a god as this could not but gain a place in the poetry of Cannibal-land. But the poet who has enshrined his memory in verse, has chosen no such theme as that of “Universal fruit-scattering,” to perpetuate his name with, but has simply placed him before his country as a great love-making hero, seeking, wooing, winning, and carrying off a goddess of matchless beauty.
From the oldest traditions of the place, it appears that at Vúya—once the head town of an ancient kingdom of power—there lived a lovely lady, so lovely indeed, and beautiful, that her name was named on every island. She was in truth a goddess, but all the gods of note, except Bulitaundúa, had sought her hand, and sought in vain.
Now Bulitaundúa lived a long way off on another island, the largest of the group; and unfortunately too, he was a landsman, knowing little or nothing of sailing. He was, however, an expert rower, in the long, narrow canoes used for river work. But who would venture to sea in a craft of that sort.
Certainly none but Bulitaundúa, who determined at all risks to cross the ocean to Vúya, distant some 80 miles, and there, should he ever reach the place alive, to offer his hand and heart to the goddess of world-wide renown. His ability to eat the wind may account for the total absence of fear in this, to all seafaring men, foolhardy attempt. At the time of his leaving home, a stiff breeze was blowing from the East, but whether he ate it all up or not, the bard does not tell us; he only says that when the hero reached the sea there was a great calm. But he says this in such a way as to leave the impression on our minds that the wonderful and necessary deed was actually and instantaneously done.