The Song of Hiawatha (1855) is an epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, set among the Ojibwe on the shores of Lake Superior. Written in a trochaic metre borrowed from the Finnish Kalevala, it tells of the hero Hiawatha and his love for Minnehaha.
The poem
The poem follows Hiawatha from his birth and childhood, raised by his grandmother Nokomis, through his deeds for his people, his marriage to Minnehaha, a woman of the Dakota, and her death in a famine, to his departure towards the sunset.
Longfellow drew on the studies of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, an Indian agent married to an Ojibwe woman, Jane Johnston, who had collected Ojibwe stories. The name Hiawatha was taken from an Iroquois leader, though the hero is mostly based on the Ojibwe figure Nanabozho.
A new music
Longfellow wrote the poem in unrhymed trochaic tetrameter, the metre of the Finnish epic Kalevala, which he had read in German. Its insistent rhythm and repetitions were meant to suggest the songs of oral tradition.
The metre was so recognisable that it was endlessly parodied, by Lewis Carroll among others, in Hiawatha's Photographing.
Success and debate
Published in November 1855, The Song of Hiawatha sold some fifty thousand copies within a few years, a huge number for a poem. It was set to music, painted and recited across America and Europe; the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor based a cantata trilogy on it.
Today it is read as a classic of American Romanticism, but also criticised for presenting Native peoples as a vanishing race and for mixing traditions from different nations.
Anecdotes
Hiawatha's Photographing
Lewis Carroll wrote a parody, Hiawatha's Photographing (1857), in which the hero tries in vain to take a family photograph, in Longfellow's unmistakable rhythm. In a preface, Carroll claimed no merit for imitating a metre that was, he said, 'known to be so easy'.
A cantata for the choirs
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's cantata Hiawatha's Wedding Feast (1898) was one of the most performed choral works in Britain for decades; a staged version was given every year at the Royal Albert Hall in the 1920s and 1930s.
Frequently asked questions
Is Hiawatha a real person?
There was a historical Hiawatha, an Iroquois leader linked to the founding of the Iroquois Confederacy, but Longfellow's hero is largely based on Ojibwe legends of Nanabozho.
What metre is The Song of Hiawatha written in?
Unrhymed trochaic tetrameter, borrowed from the Finnish epic Kalevala.
Where is the poem set?
On the southern shore of Lake Superior, 'by the shores of Gitche Gumee', in the land of the Ojibwe.