The Song of Hiawatha / Kalevala, free on Librivox.org

[Mayacaman]

I have been listening, for the past nine weeks, to the old Epics, on audio-books read aloud on iTunes on my Mac, at night, as I pass into sleep & beyond. Many such treasures are free for all to download @ the website, Librivox.org. One of the several that I have enjoyed, is the Song of Hiawatha, an Epic that my little Jewish grandmother used to recite to me verbatim -she knew most of it by heart- when I was very young, back in the early, early 50's...

The Song of Hiawatha was written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and based on the Traditions and Stories of the Ojibwe Tribe that were published in a book by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Songs and Tales that were gathered by his Chipewa wife and her mother. The meter that Longfellow employed in the Song of Hiawatha is called "trochaic tetrameter."

Trochaic tetrameter is the same meter that is found in the Kalevala, the national epic of the Finns. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow evidently read the early German translation of the Kalevala when it was translated & published in the 1840's, not long after Elias Lönnrot assembled and published his Collection of the Ancient Finnish Lore in the 1830's.

The Kalevala is an ancient Epic - probably about three thousand years old - dating back to the early Bronze Age, in the frozen North-lands. That is why it is fascinating. The Kalevala also is available as a free audio-book @ Librivox.org where there are two translations available: the Kirby translation, which I have in an old two-volume edition from Everyman, and the Crawford translation, which has a wonderful and very informative Introduction, written in the nineteenth century by a true scholar...

The trick is opening up the files, after you have downloaded the zip file, Selected All, and placed them in a New File on iTunes. Here is a video about all that technical stuff. It's really not hard to do. Enjoy Poetry subliminally, as you sleep...