The Legends and Myths of Hawaii: The fables and folk-lore of a strange people

In 1888, Hawaii's last king committed to writing the stories his people had carried orally for generations, stories already beginning to fade as the islands shifted beneath colonial pressure. David Kalakaua was not merely a collector but an inheritor of this tradition, and his account pulses with the authority of a living culture. The legends unfold with vivid particularity: Hina, whose tragedy echoes across the islands; Hua, the strange king of Hana; Kelea, the legendary surf-rider of Maui who abandons her royal status to chase waves with reckless joy. Here are akua and menehune, shape-shifting chiefs and matters of kapu, Hawaiian cosmology rendered not as anthropology but as living belief. The stories do not soften the savage elements: cannibalistic feasts, brutal warfare, passions that erupt without modern restraint. This is a civilization still in touch with forces modern readers have sanitized from our own myths. What makes this volume invaluable is its timing. Written just years before the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, it captures a worldview in its final unaltered state.