People build their world from shared stories and I enjoy hearing others’ stories.\u00a0 This narrative wanderlust led me over to the retelling of a set of Hawaiian myths by no lesser a source than King David Kalakaua.\u00a0 He was the last male monarch of Hawaii, and seems to have a respect for the material tempered with a scholar’s instinct for context.\u00a0 He is well versed in Hawaiian and Western traditions.<\/p>\n
Hawaii has a shorter history than Europe or America.\u00a0 The islands were unsettled before a few hundred years CE, and settlement seems to have been transient until circa 800 CE.\u00a0 They can sustain humanity but they’re far enough from human settlement that bootstrapping their habitation was difficult.\u00a0 One interesting aspect of that history is that the islanders claim a merged history and mythology that remains in the dim clouds of human memory.\u00a0 Kalakaua imbues his discussion with both a realism for historical accuracy and a literary appreciation for the power of myth.<\/p>\n
The legends are a combination of cheer leading for the various royal lines and tribal powers and general chauvinism for the emerging nation.\u00a0 Kalakaua frames each with a political and social framing that helped me understand who has a stake in the power of the legend.\u00a0 Then he dives in and tells the story as a story.\u00a0 It’s enlightening in ways that many tellings of Western myths are not.<\/p>\n
Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
People build their world from shared stories and I enjoy hearing others’ stories.\u00a0 This narrative wanderlust led me over to the retelling of a set of Hawaiian myths by no lesser a source than King David Kalakaua.\u00a0 He was the last male monarch of Hawaii, and seems to have a respect for the material tempered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2696"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2698,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2696\/revisions\/2698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}