Five tales from Mala, Ulawa and Sa'a, in the southeast Solomon Islands, told exactly as Walter G. Ivens printed them in 1927. A fisherman's hook catches in a yam rooted in the sand beneath the sea, and the hidden yam becomes the food of all the villages, carried from landing to landing with its incantations. A murdered priest's ghost comes to two girls cooking yam soup, and their quick wits turn him away unharmed. Siho i Salo, Descended from the Sky, the man-eating ghost whose ears are like pandanus umbrellas, empties the canoe house by night, eats the whole pig Porotaki throws him, and ends as the appointed guardian of the garden and the forest. A stolen wife is followed across the sea to Mala and brought home by stealth, and Lady Chop Forest works her planting miracles in a garden measured in hundreds of fathoms. And Sau mamare i ta'alu is drawn up to the sky in a net, and her husband Uheli memu climbs the lengthening areca nut, is fanned back to life on a strange beach, and descends with her at the feast.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Chapters:
02:30 The Story of the Yam
08:33 The Appearance of a Ghost
09:34 Siho i Salo, 'Descended from the Sky'
25:20 The Story of the Flying Snake
37:39 The Story of Sau mamare i ta'alu
Passage notes, exactly as told: in The Story of the Yam, eight pigs offered in sacrifice stand in one line of ceremonial description. In The Appearance of a Ghost, the priest's killing is one clause of backstory; the scene itself is the two girls' harmless trick on his ghost. In Siho i Salo, the man-eating ghost eats no one — the men slip away, and Porotaki feeds him a whole pig, which he eats raw in one vivid passage (bones cracking, the ground running with blood); he ends as the garden's appointed guardian. In The Story of the Flying Snake, a war is declared against the stolen wife's hosts in a single clause as an off-page consequence and is never depicted; the tale's body is the flight and the planting miracles. In The Story of Sau mamare i ta'alu, the killing of Topo i salo is a single clause at the climax of an abduction-and-recovery tale whose substance is the journey and the recovery; the alternate ending printed with it carries no killing. After the first tale and its music you will hear this episode's short spoken break, placed there by design.
Left out of this part, by name: The Story of Lord Mweo, the Familiar of a Shark (Ulawa), which stands between Siho i Salo and the Flying Snake in the book, and The Story of Puungilalamoa (Sa'a), which stands next after these tales — excluded whole under this shelf's written register, and never narrated. This part tells five tales of Mala, Ulawa and Sa'a from Ivens's folklore chapter, and the shelf claims no completeness that its exclusions contradict.
Source: Walter G. Ivens, Melanesians of the South-East Solomon Islands (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1927) — stories of Mala, Ulawa and Sa'a, public domain.
Narrated by Magnolia. Music: opening and closing theme, "Blazing Fire", with the same theme as a short separator between stories; no music under the narration.
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