A narrative told across Polynesia in which the trickster demigod Maui tricks his brothers into paddling far out to sea, then casts his enchanted fishhook Manaiakalani and hauls up land from the ocean floor; in the Maori telling the catch becomes the North Island of New Zealand, Te Ika-a-Maui, the fish of Maui, while Hawaiian versions describe Maui attempting to draw the islands together into one landmass, a line or a lost balance breaking the effort before it is complete.
Facts
History
Historical NoteGrey's 1855 collection and Beckwith's 1940 survey record the tale from living oral tradition among Maori and Native Hawaiian communities respectively rather than from any single ancient written text, since Polynesian narrative tradition was primarily oral before European contact. 2 Historical NoteManaiakalani, the name of Maui's enchanted fishhook in the story, is also the Hawaiian name for the star line formed by the tail of the constellation Scorpius, translated Come From Heaven by Beckwith, so the same hook that hauls up land in the telling is identified with a real, still visible star grouping used in traditional wayfinding. 2 Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NotePacific folklorists read the wide geographic spread of the fishing-up motif, told with local variation from Aotearoa to Hawaii to Tonga and Samoa, as evidence of a shared Polynesian narrative inheritance carried by voyaging ancestors rather than independent invention at each landfall. 1 Sources
Primary SourceGeorge Grey's Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand Race (1855) and Martha Warren Beckwith's Hawaiian Mythology (1940) are the standard nineteenth and twentieth century scholarly collections. 1 Meaning
Central MotifA trickster's enchanted hook drawing solid land up from the sea floor, explaining the shape of real islands as the residue of his catch 1 Text
Source TextRecorded across independent Maori and Hawaiian oral traditions, collected in George Grey's Polynesian Mythology and Martha Beckwith's Hawaiian Mythology 1 Controversy
Point in DisputeVersions differ on whether Maui's catch succeeds completely, as in the Maori account where the North Island results directly from the haul, or is interrupted partway, as in Hawaiian tellings where an impatient brother or a broken taboo severs the line before the islands can be drawn fully together. 2 Connections
Associated With
Source Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand RaceGeorge Grey
Maui, Deities Source Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand RaceGeorge Grey
Belongs to Tradition
Source Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand RaceGeorge Grey
Sources
1. Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand Race
2. Hawaiian Mythology
Māui (Wikipedia)
In Group: Trickster Cycles of Africa, the Americas and Polynesia, Introduction, sentence 1Quote, In Group: Trickster Cycles of Africa, the Americas and Polynesia, Introduction, sentence 1
Māui or Maui is the great culture hero and trickster in Polynesian mythology.
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