338 GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF MYTHS. 



him, and the soft jelly-fish rolled themselves about him to pro- 

 tect him as he was drifted on shore again, and his great an- 

 cestor the Sky, Tama-nui-ki-te-Rangi, saw the flies and the 

 birds collected in clusters and flocks, and ran and stripped the 

 encircling jelly-fish ofi", and behold there lay within a human 

 being ; so the old man took the child and carried it home.^ As 

 the Polynesian Maui is among the clearest and completest per- 

 sonifications of the Sun, there is some force in Schirren's argu- 

 ment that this story means the Sun being set free by the Sky 

 at dawn, from the Earth which covers him at night f for it 

 must be remembered here that one of the most prominent ideas 

 of the Polynesian Mythology is that the Earth is a huge fish, 

 which Maui draws up with his line from the bottom of the sea, 

 and that Manias death, the sunset, is told in the story of his 

 creeping into the mouth of his great ancestress, Hine-nui-te-po, 

 whom you may see flashing, and, as it were, opening and shut- 

 ting, where the horizon meets the sky ; there Maui crept in, 

 and perished. And not only would such an explanation of the 

 tale of the Red Indian ' Tom Thumb ' be a fitting one, in that 

 he, like so many personifications of the Sun in other countries, 

 is a slayer of Giants, but he will appear a few pages further on 

 as the Sun- Catcher in a plain, open Solar myth. In any full 

 discussion of the group of tales, it would be necessary to inves- 

 tigate their correspondence with the European stories of Tom 

 Thumb, who was swallowed by the cow and came out unhurt, 

 and of Little Red Riding"-Hood, who was swallowed whole by 

 the wolf, and came out alive when the hunter cut him open.^ 



In the next myth, that of the Sun- Catcher, the Polynesian 

 Sun-god Maui again makes his appearance. He began to 

 think that it was too soon after the rising of the sun that it 

 became night again, and that the sun again sank down below 

 the horizon, every day, every day ; so at last he said to his 

 brothers, " Let us now catch the sun in a noose, so that we 

 may compel him to move more slowly, in order that mankind 

 may have long days to labour in to procure subsistence for 



1 G-rey, 'Polynesian Mythology,' pp. 18, 31. 



^ Schirren, pp. 143-44, 29. But the legend is very erroneously given. 



3 J. & W. Grimm, ' Marchen,' vol. i. pp. 142, 198, 28. 



