Folk Tales of the Cook Islands — Part 1 (The Origin of Dancing · Echo; or, The Cave Fairy · Seeking for Light)
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Part one — the premiere of a new shelf. Three myths of the Cook Islands, heard as their collector printed them in W. W. Gill's Myths and Songs from the South Pacific (London, 1876). In The Origin of Dancing, out of a forgotten myth of Uti and Hina, the first "great spirit-dance" is held on the sacred marae Arai-te-tonga — and Hina dances with her brothers and her children, one of whom learns that none may eat or speak until the sumptuous roasted bananas of the ovens are uncovered on the fifth day. In Echo; or, The Cave Fairy, in the days when the people of Mangaia knew nothing of fish or of fire, five boys chase two dragon-flies across the plain to the echoing cave Te-piripiri-o-te-a'iti and vanish into it after the laughing voices that answer their calls — and after them come their parents, the king himself, and the fish-catching fairies whose secret the world learns at the price of a single human life. And in Seeking for Light — Gill's English of a fragment of an ancient chant — the bracken sighs upon the sandy street at Kanga, a traitor's voice is heard at the going down of the sun, and the sound goes forth ceaselessly: "Seek light! Seek light!" The episode opens and closes with its theme, Winter Palace Rhapsody, heard also briefly between the stories.
Chapters
0:39 The Origin of Dancing
7:00 Echo; or, The Cave Fairy
20:05 Seeking for Light
Nothing in Gill's book has been excluded from this shelf: no tale killed anyone or ate anyone, and none was left out for danger or violence. The shelf nonetheless makes no claim of completeness for the book. Gill's volume also carries long historical annals of wars and migrations, traditional accounts of the creation and the gods (among them the Rarotonga dialogues The Creation, Primordial Man, and The Children's Bread, which stand on the bench for later parts of this shelf), song texts, notes and appendices; this first part reads narrative myths only, and further parts will draw on the bench as they are built.
From Myths and Songs from the South Pacific by W. W. Gill (1876), public domain — The Origin of Dancing and Echo; or, The Cave Fairy complete, and Seeking for Light the fragment of an ancient chant Gill prints, in book order, in Gill's English. Narrated by Magnolia. Theme: Winter Palace Rhapsody.
KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
