Like the music inspired by The Song of Hiawatha that I shared last week, there’s an abundance of parodies inspired by Longfellow’s poem. A full-length parody that imitates the poem chapter by chapter was published the following year (1856). It was originally titled The Song of Milgenwater: Translated from the Original Feejee, which was changed to The Song of Milkanwatha (same subtitle) by the third edition (1883). It’s pretty ridiculous!

To give you a taste I’ll share the beginning of the introduction, starting with Longfellow’s original:

Should you ask me, whence these stories?
Whence these legends and traditions,
With the odors of the forest
With the dew and damp of meadows,
With the curling smoke of wigwams,
With the rushing of great rivers,
With their frequent repetitions,
And their wild reverberations
As of thunder in the mountains?
I should answer, I should tell you,
“From the forests and the prairies,
From the great lakes of the Northland,
From the land of the Ojibways,
From the land of the Dacotahs,
From the mountains, moors, and fen-lands
Where the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah,
Feeds among the reeds and rushes.
I repeat them as I heard them
From the lips of Nawadaha,
The musician, the sweet singer.”

Now here’s the opening to The Song of Milgenwater:

If an individual person,
Say John Smith,* or John Smith s uncle,
Or some other friend of his’n
Should propound to me the question,
Whence derived you these traditions
Which you are about to tell us.
With their incidents peculiar;
These strange legends so mysterious,
With the smell of trees and flowers,
With the sound of brooks and breezes,
With the roaring of the thunder
Ever sounding, never ceasing,
Going when you think it s stopping,
Going as a woman’s tongue goes,
As a lively woman’s tongue goes;
I would speak up, I would tell him.
From the regions far beyond here.
From the mighty wildernesses
Where the Spoopendykes inhabit,
Where the Noodles pitch their wigwams,
From the hill-tops bare and breezy.
From the valleys soft and mushy.
From the marshes and the duck-ponds,
Where the melancholy bull-frog,
Brek-e-kex-co-ax, the bull-frog,
Sitteth in the slimy waters
As I heard them, so I tell them,
Literatim et verbatim,
Just exactly as I heard them
From the mouth of Rumpalumpkin,
Him as played upon the bagpipes,
Played and sang between the blowings.

You can read more of the first edition or the third edition if you’re interested.

I also enjoyed the the translator’s preface which begins, “That, in many of its parts, there is a strong correspondence between it and Mr. Longfellow’s last great work, ‘The Song of Hiawatha,’ is too apparent to be overlooked. But so far from basing upon this similarity of incident and treatment, a charge of literary piracy against Mr. Longfellow, as has been done by some who have discovered a much fainter likeness to a poem of Scandinavian origin — the translator recognizes in it only another evidence of that unity of thought which characterizes the human species, and which is a natural consequence of the unity of the races, of which the great family of man is composed.”

Makes me smile.