And yet the Polynesians, so like us physically, have in their romances none of the familiar veins that one can discover in, let us say, the folk-tales of the darker peoples in the lands around India. I take up Studies in Religion, Folk-lore, and Custom in North Borneo and the Malay Peninsula,[2] and I strike at once into: [[xiv]]
Now the Raja had given it out that whoever could remove the dragon’s head should marry his daughter, who was shut up in an inner room and enclosed by a seven-fold fence of ivory; but nobody could do it, for the dragon’s head was as big as a mountain.
This is from a folk-tale told amongst the aboriginal tribes of the Malay Peninsula. And when I read the opening of another tale I am in an imaginative land so familiar that I know every turn and track in it.—
“Oh,” said Serunggal, “it is no use my stopping here. I had better go and marry a Raja’s daughter.”
The tale goes on, and we have the Raja setting the adventurous youth three tasks, just as the King or the Enchanter sets the youth three tasks in a story that has been told in every village in Ireland and Serbia, in Spain and Sweden, in Russia and Italy; in a story that was given literary form in classic Greece in Jason and Medea, and in mediæval Wales in Kulhwch and Olwen. And this tale of Serunggal and the Raja’s daughter belongs to one of the dark tribes of Borneo.
There are animal helpers in this particular tale, just as there are animal helpers in the ancient Greek folk-tale of Cupid and Psyche. Indeed, the stories belonging to Borneo and the Malay Peninsula are well filled with animals—turtles and deer, elephants and ant-eaters; they might be the material out of which Rudyard Kipling made his unforgettable Jungle Book and his Just-So Stories.
In Polynesia we find no romance that is based on formulæ familiar to us. Only occasionally does a helping creature appear. There are practically no animal stories, [[xv]]for the sufficient reason that the Polynesian did not have opportunities for forming a wide animal acquaintanceship. He brought the pig and the dog to the Islands with him; and the shark and the turtle, the owl and the plover, were the only creatures that aroused an interest in him. Even the way of counting things is changed when we get into Polynesian romance: instead of three, seven, and nine, we have four, eight, and sixteen for the cabalistic numbers.
And yet, as all human desire is the same, and as human mentality compels a certain sequence of incident, and there seem to be patterns in incident that all human beings find it delightful to work out, the Polynesian stories have the elements and the combination of elements that make fine narrative. Often the Polynesian story-teller rediscovers a formula that we have used to make a memorable tale. Thus, in the present collection, the daughter of the King of Ku-ai-he-lani will recall Cinderella, and the story of Au-ke-le will recall the story of the Irish hero Oisin and all the other stories of men who travelled far and returned to their own land; it will remind us of Odysseus and Rip Van Winkle.
In the folk-romance and in the mythological stories of Europe there are places that may not be entered, and there are women whom a man must not approach. There is Blue Beard’s Chamber; there is Danaë, and there is the Eithlinn of Celtic mythology. Polynesian romance has places that may not be entered, and women who must not be approached by men. And it has these instances in almost every story. Indeed, without the guarded maiden and the forbidden place a Polynesian story-teller would find it difficult to carry on. And one knows that when he was [[xvi]]dealing with one or the other he was dealing with the life around him: the place was tapu,[3] the maiden was tapu. And the place or the maiden was tapu simply because a king or a chief with the privilege of declaring tapu had so declared it. When we read the story of Ka-we-lu in The Arrow and the Swing, or of Kama in The Story of Ha-le-ma-no and the Princess Kama, we can easily see how, as the simplicity of tapu was forgotten, the maiden would be given a fantastic security like that of Danaë in her brazen tower, or like that of Eithlinn in her inaccessible island, and we can see how motives would be invented for keeping her apart: Danaë’s son and Eithlinn’s son are destined to slay their grandfathers. Every race has had tapu. But the Polynesians held to it and made it their single discipline. In these Polynesian stories we are at the very beginning of a romance that for Europeans has grown to be fraught with magic and mystery.
I spent the months of January, February, March, and April of 1923 in the Hawaiian Islands. I went there under the following circumstances: The Hawaiian Legislature had formed a Commission on Myth and Folk-lore; the function of the Commission was to have a survey made of the stories that had been collected and that belonged to [[xvii]]myth and folk-lore of the Islands, and to have them made over into stories for children—primarily for the children of the Hawaiian Islands. By an arrangement made between the Commission and the Yale University Press, I was invited to make the survey and to reshape the stories.