Nathaniel Bright Emerson
Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula
e-artnow, 2020
Contact: [email protected]
EAN: 4064066057596
Table of Contents
II. THE HALAU; THE KUAHU--THEIR DECORATION AND CONSECRATION
IV. SUPPORT AND ORGANIZATION OF THE HULA
V. CEREMONIES OF GRADUATION; DÉBUT OF A HULA DANCER
VI. THE PASSWORD--THE SONG OF ADMISSION
VII. WORSHIP AT THE ALTAR OF THE HALAU
VIII. COSTUME OF THE HULA DANCER
XXI. THE MUSIC AND MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS OF THE HAWAIIANS
INTRODUCTION
This book is for the greater part a collection of Hawaiian songs and poetic pieces that have done service from time immemorial as the stock supply of the hula. The descriptive portions have been added, not because the poetical parts could not stand by themselves, but to furnish the proper setting and to answer the questions of those who want to know. Now, the hula stood for very much to the ancient Hawaiian; it was to him in place of our concert-hall and lecture-room, our opera and theater, and thus became one of his chief means of social enjoyment. Besides this, it kept the communal imagination in living touch with the nation's legendary past. The hula had songs proper to itself, but it found a mine of inexhaustible wealth in the epics and wonder-myths that celebrated the doings of the volcano goddess Pele and her compeers. Thus in the cantillations of the old-time hula we find a ready-made anthology that includes every species of composition in the whole range of Hawaiian poetry. This epic1 of Pele was chiefly a more or less detached series of poems forming a story addressed not to the closet-reader, but to the eye and ear and heart of the assembled chiefs and people; and it was sung. The Hawaiian song, its note of joy par excellence, was