THE ORAL LITERATURE OF THE POLYNESIANS by Bruce Biggs we in the pacific world are heirs to a great literary tradition of which H. and N. Chadwick, in their world survey of oral literatures, could say— ‘A great and very varied amount of cosmological speculation has been recorded from Polynesia. The Polynesians seem to have devoted more attention, and to have exercised greater intellectual activity in connection with the whole subject than any other peoples included in our survey … The Pacific is rich in possession of a vast body of oral prose, which is distributed throughout the whole area … almost every kind of prose narrative is represented in all stages of development … Everywhere we meet with a great wealth of saga, and a high standard of art and technique.’ I hope that you may wish to read, either in the original or in translation, some of the songs and stories with which this article is concerned, and to this end I have added a reading list. Unfortunately many of the source books are out of print, and only obtainable at libraries with good Pacific and New Zealand collections. But some important books are in print and I have included them.

Summary I will begin with a brief outline of the linguistic situation in Polynesia, a situation which makes it possible for the student of any one language to hold the key to the others, and so to what the Chadwicks call ‘one of the two finest oral historical traditions in the world’. Then, after some reference to our sources for Polynesian oral literature, and its scope, I will discuss in more detail some Maori material, illustrating three of the major literary media, namely prose narrative, poetry and genealogical recital. I will not discuss such minor literary forms as proverbs, riddles, and fables, all of which were popular in some or all of the Polynesian islands. Nor will I discuss oratory, though it was, and is, important everywhere in the area.

The Language of Polynesia The Polynesian linguistic situation, both historical and contemporary, is reasonably well understood. By the beginning of the Christian era a language called Proto-Polynesian was spoken, most probably in Tonga or Samoa. Proto-Polynesian would not sound particularly strange to the speaker of any contemporary Polynesian language. He would be familiar with its system of five vowels, the total absence of consonant clusters and final consonants, and the rather small inventory of sounds. The almost complete absence of grammatical concordance, and the marking of grammatical categories by particles rather than by inflection would be familiar. And he would recognise much of the vocabulary. After a time a migration took place, and a colony of Proto-Polynesian speakers was set up in Eastern Polynesia, possibly in the Society Islands or the Marquesas. Whether the migration which occasioned this linguistic split, and the other migrations which succeeded it, was planned or accidental, we are not able to say. But it is clear that after a period of some centuries during which each branch developed independently, colonies of western or eastern Proto-Polynesians were established on practically every habitable island and atoll of the triangle demarcated by Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island, and on many small islands far to the west and north of Polynesia proper. Western-Polynesia speaking people settled in Tonga, Samoa, Niue, Futuna and Ellice Islands; Proto-East Polynesian speakers settled all of French Polynesia, Hawaii, Easter Island, the Cooks, and New Zealand. All of these linguistic colonies have developed more or less independently for many centuries. The linguistic picture today is as follows. There are two closely related groups of languages called Eastern Polynesian and Western Polynesian. Any two members of the same group share much basic vocabulary, and there is a considerable degree of mutual intelligibility. If the comparison is made between the two groups, the percentage of basic vocabulary differences is seen to be greater and the degree of mutual intelligibility drops sharply, so that the Maori speaker, for ex-