THE ARROW AND THE SWING
This is one of the most famous of the Hawaiian stories. It is given in the Fornander Collection, Vol. V, Part I, of the Memoirs of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, with the title He Kaao no Hiku a me Kawelu, the Legend of Hi-ku and Ka-we-lu. It should be remembered that Hi-ku’s arrow was more for casting than for shooting: the game that he was playing at the opening of the story consisted in casting his arrow, Pua-ne, over a distance. Ka-we-lu was living under tapu. But, like many another heroine of Polynesian romance, she was not reluctant about having the tapu broken. There is one very puzzling feature in this story. Why did Ka-we-lu not give her lover food? Her failure to provide something for him is against all traditions of Hawaiian hospitality. Of course, in the old days, men and women might not eat together; Ka-we-lu, however, could have indicated to Hi-ku where to go for food. The food at hand might have been for women only, and tapu as regards men. Or it might have been tapu for all except people of high rank. If this was what was behind Ka-we-lu’s inhospitality it would account for a bitterness in Hi-ku’s anger—she was treating him as a person of a class beneath her. But these are guesses merely. I have asked those who were best acquainted with the Hawaiian tradition to clear up the mystery of Ka-we-lu’s behavior in this particular, but they all confessed themselves baffled by it. The poems that Ka-we-lu chants to Hi-ku, like the poems that Ha-le-ma-no chants to Kama, have a meaning beneath the ostensible meaning of the words. [[214]]
With regard to Ka-we-lu’s death it should be remembered that according to Polynesian belief the soul was not single, but double. A part of it could be separated or charmed away from the body; the spirit that could be so separated from the body was called hau. In making the connection between Hi-ku and the lost Ka-we-lu I have gone outside the legend as given in the Fornander Collection. I have brought in Lolupe, who finds lost and hidden things. This godling is connected with the Hi-ku-Ka-we-lu story through a chant given by Dr. Nathaniel Emerson in his notes to David Malo’s Hawaiian Antiquities.
Mr. Joseph Emerson gives this account of Lua o Milu, the realm of Milu, the Hawaiian Hades: “Its entrance, according to the usual account of the natives, was situated at the mouth of the great valley of Waipio, on the island of Hawaii, in a place called Keoni, where the sands have long since covered up and concealed from view this passage from the upper to the nether world.” Fornander says that the realm of Milu was not entirely dark. “There was light and there was fire in it.” The swing chant that I have given to Hi-ku does not belong to the legend; it is out of a collection of chants that accompany games. The Hawaiian swing was different from ours; it was a single strand with a cross-piece, and it was pulled and not pushed out.
Mr. Joseph Emerson, in a paper that I have already quoted from, The Lesser Hawaiian Gods, says that Hi-ku’s mother was Hina, the wife of Ku, one of the greater Polynesian gods. In that case, Hi-ku was originally a demi-god.
THE DAUGHTER OF THE KING OF KU-AI-HE-LANI
Given in the Fornander Collection, Vol. IV, Part III, of the Memoirs of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, with the title Kaao no Laukiamanuikahiki. The girl’s full name means “Bird catching leaf of Kahiki.” Her mother is Hina, a mortal woman [[215]]apparently, but her father is a demi-god, a dweller in “the Country that Supports the Heavens.” In the original, Ula the Prince is the son of Lau-kia-manu’s father; such a relation as between lover and lover is quite acceptable in Hawaiian romance. When she comes into her father’s country the girl incurs the death-penalty by going into a garden that has been made tapu. Lau-kia-manu, in Kahiki-ku, seems to have the rôle of Cinderella; however, the Hawaiian story-teller gives her a ruthlessness that is not at all in keeping with our notion of a sympathetic character.