Re: Literary durability (and answers to Hiawatha questions)

> 5. Hiawatha note
>     Posted by: "joseph harris" [email protected] joe9438
>     Date: Thu May 15, 2008 5:54 pm ((PDT))
>
> From: "Daniel P. B. Smith"
>> 1) What's the opening line?
>
> Thre is an intersting question here [and yes, the lines I
> remember are not any opening I find!].   Are you asking for the
> opening line of the introduction
>
> Should you ask me, whence these stories?
> Whence these legends and traditions...
>
> or of Chapter 1
>
> On the Mountains of the Prairie,
> On the great Red Pipe-stone Quarry...

Well, I had in mind the former; anyway, you got the answer (and I  
missed the imprecision in my question as I posed it).

Now, to everyone who answered "By the shores of Gitche Gumee," you  
are utterly mistaken. I don't have an explanation for this common  
misconception, but perhaps it comes from Disney, or perhaps some  
shortish excerpt got anthologized in schoolbooks.

The question of the mittens is unfair and rather tricky; it's a  
rather minor detail and it would have gone unnoticed, had a wag not  
penned a takeoff called "The Song of Milkanwatha," which came out  
_just one year later_ than "The Song of Hiawatha." It contained the  
_famous_ passage about Hiawatha's mittens, how he turned the skin- 
side outside and he turned the fur-side inside.

In "The Song of Hiawatha," he just _has_ a pair of mittens (doesn't  
mention how he got them); "When upon his hands he wore them, He could  
smite the rocks asunder."

But the point that I was making is, the _joke_ is in our culture, but  
the _work_ is quite forgotten.

Question three, about the ending, is I think a very fair one, as the  
ending of the story would be generally familiar to a person who had  
really read "The Song of Hiawatha."  It concludes with the arrival of  
some Christian missionaries; Hiawatha tells the tribesmen "Listen to  
their words of wisdom/Listen to the truth they tell you," and canoes  
into the sunset.

> What I find tremendously impressive in such a long piece is the
> maintenance of the beat of the drums.
>
> Joseph Harris

I'll grant you, Longfellow does it beautifully--and it's a _lot_  
harder than it looks. "The Song of Milkanwatha" is seventy-six pages  
long, though!



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