Given my keen interest in charting the course of adventure-fiction within the greater context of prose and poetic literature, I took considerable time getting around to Longfellow's famous narrative poem.
The bulk of Longfellow's work is not well regarded with younger audiences today, although older connoisseurs of poetry are likely to remember the engrossing rhythms of "The Children's Hour," "Paul Revere's Ride," and the epic of a figure who began as a historically verifiable 16th-century chief but was transformed by the poet into a catch-all demigod amalgamating assorted Native American stories. By the time Longfellow wrote the SONG, the entire tradition of the epic poem, which could trace its heritage back to many of the earliest civilizations, was clearly on the decline, and I would say that the SONG was probably the last specifically "heroic" epic of any consequence (including such latter-day efforts as Yeats' "Wanderings of Oisin.") After the SONG, almos all adventure-related narratives, whether as high-toned as IVANHOE or as trashy as THE BLACK MONK, became dominated by the medium of prose.
Archaic heroic epics served many purposes: to celebrate a nation's founding (the Aeneid), to dramatize a great martial conflict (the Iliad), or to bring a warrior back to his homeland (the Odyssey). The SONG is probably closest in spirit to the Iliad, which alludes to, but does not chronicle, the fall of Troy. The SONG describes the way of life of the Iroquois tribes that lived in the Northeastern United States, at a time before that way of life ended due to the incursions of European colonists. But even though by 1855 not all Native American tribes had been fully subdued by the U.S. government, the decline of the Iroquois stands for the eventual decline of all Native Americans within the U.S. borders (and to some extent to all such colonial endeavors). which I would imagine Longfellow foresaw.
Experts on myth and folklore have declare that Longfellow's mixing and matching of Native American stories is far from faithful, even to the few written records of the oral tales in the poet's own time. Nevertheless, I don't judge literary myths primarily by accuracy to source, and so I found the SONG replete with many fascinating myth-tropes. Some of them are etiological in nature, like describing the invention of pictographic writing or the formulation of rituals to banish the spirits of the deceased. And many tales reflect the Indians' focus on all non-human creatures as "people" in their own right, capable of helping or harming the principal hero in his adventures. But for me I was frankly surprised at how many combative stories Longfellow works into his epic.
Longfellow's Hiawatha is a demigod. A divine being, the West Wind, sires the future hero on a mortal woman (albeit with her own deific background), and then deserts her, patently competing with the Greek gods for the place of "worst deadbeat dad." As an adult Hiawatha takes his magical weapons and engages his heavenly father in combat to avenge his mother, who dies lovelorn-- but the West Wind can't be killed, so that Hiawatha must return to Earth and become a culture hero to the Iroquois. Aside from the etiological myths mentioned above, most of Hiawatha's activities are martial in nature, as he subdues the great sturgeon that swallows him whole, and conquers the immortal magician Meggisogwon, who has one vulnerable point (helpfully revealed to the hero by a clever woodpecker). Hiawatha also has a couple of larger-than-life friends-- Chiababos the minstrel and Kwasind the Strong Man-- but they end up meeting untimely ends, arguably signaling the decline of the fantasy-world in which Hiawatha dwells, even before the European colonists arrive to plunge the timeless wilderness into "real time." Most of the major characters are male, and so there's not much focus upon the lives of Native American females. The only time a female character is especially significant involves a magical ritual of corn-protection performed by the hero's famous wife Minnehaha, who performs the ritual by walking around a cornfield nude. Yet Minnehaha also dies during famine, underscoring that even in the fantasy-land Death still held its dominion.
Since the founding of the United States changed so much about the world, both in its "New" and "Old" incarnations, it's somewhat appropriate that an epic about the decline of the "noble savages" occupying that land should also stand as the last of the great heroic epics.
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