Love Medicine
Detail of beadwork from an Ojibwe medicine pouch
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Hiawatha
Does anybody understand he end of the sections we had to read over the weekend. I get the main gist of it and how Osseo and Oweenee had a son. I just don't get what it has to do with Hiawatha at all. I also don't understand the part about the sisters and husbands taking their human form again when the son shoots one of them women, as a bird. So if you understand it, please let me know.
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2 comments:
I skipped a lot of Hiawatha's story for you since the poem is very long. The last part you read is an excerpt from the story of Hiawatha's wedding and relates the stories that were told as entertainment at the wedding.
So there is a story teller at Hiawatha's wedding, and he tells those myths to entertain the guests. Longfellow had lots of myths he wanted to include, but not all were about Hiawatha, so Longfellow used a common epic convention and had a character in his poem tell stories about mythical times within his narrative. Think about how Dante includes a separate story about different characters in many of his cantos (the Manto story comes to mind).
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