The Song of Hiawatha

This section immerses the reader in Hiawatha’s world and in his relationships with those around him including his grandmother, father, and best friends.

Like many epic heroes, Hiawatha has superhuman origins: His grandmother Nokomis is a woman from the moon already pregnant with her unborn daughter Wenonah. Wenonah gives birth to Hiawatha after a visit from the ambiguously supernatural Mudjekeewis, who abandons her after one visit. This divinely-influenced pregnancy has analogs in Greek mythology, where gods often impregnate mortal women who go on to raise demigod heroes. Hiawatha’s extraterrestrial ancestry is also interestingly matrilineal—Wenonah does not seem to have a father, nor is there expectation that Nokomis should want a partner. This detail has some echoes of the Catholic version of the Immaculate Conception (the idea that Mary had Jesus despite being a virgin, and that Mary’s mother Anne also had Mary without having sexual intercourse). Finally, it is possible also to see Nokomis’s story as one of migration and attempted assimilation.

Hiawatha’s childhood is undercut by tragedy: Wenonah’s brokenhearted death. By nursing and raising Hiawatha, Nokomis is given a new chance at motherhood, teaching Hiawatha about the world, answering his questions, and telling him myths and legends. While they are forging the bond that will carry them through the entire poem, Hiawatha provides emotional balm for what Nokomis had lost. However, the early loss of his mother shapes Hiawatha’s coming of age narrative. As he grows “Out of childhood into manhood” (5.1), he learns the story of his mother’s death and how it affected his grandmother. The rage he feels for his father’s abandonment transforms the boy into a warrior; in seeking vengeance, Hiawatha is taking on key masculine roles of the Indigenous culture he comes from. Moreover, defeating his father assures Hiawatha of his place in the succession, as Mudjekeewis agrees to leave him a piece of his kingdom—a detail that may betray the intrusion of European hereditary monarchical traditions into Longfellow’s narrative.

“Hiawatha’s Fasting” offers a story of enlightenment that parallels the travails of mystics and others who seek divine visions and inspiration through experiences of solitude and bodily deprivation. Hiawatha’s journey into the woods to fast and pray is an archetypal motif: The story of a man purifying himself to gain new insight has echoes in the Norse myth of Odin’s bodily sacrifices for knowledge and in the writings of Longfellow’s American contemporary Henry David Thoreau, whose famous work about the philosophical rewards of individualist solitude, Walden, was published the year before The Song of Hiawatha.

Cantos 4 and 5 are foils to each other: In one, Hiawatha comes up against an external adversary that has broken his family, and in the other, he comes up against his own limitations in order to bring prosperity to his wider community. By defeating his internal and external antagonists, he passes the threshold of manhood. At the close of these battles, when Hiawatha has left his childhood behind for good, he sees Minnehaha for the first time.

The seventh canto, “Hiawatha’s Friends,” briefly sets Hiawatha’s story aside in order to explore the characters of Chibiabos and Kwasind. They offer other versions of masculinity—extremes that Hiawatha will have to navigate to find his own way of being a hero. Chibiabos is the consummate artist, while Kwasind is male strength without boundary. While this canto treats these qualities as lighthearted, there is also an air of warning behind the characterizations—Hiawatha cannot assume too much of his friends’ traits if he wants to be the wise protector of his people.