The Demigod Who Snared the Sun and Fished Up Islands
Maui is the hero the whole Polynesian triangle shares; his exploits are told from Hawaii to New Zealand. In Maori tradition his full name is Maui-tikitiki-a-Taranga: born prematurely, he was wrapped in his mother Taranga's topknot hair and cast into the sea, rescued and raised by an ancestor, then returned home as the youngest and craftiest of the brothers. His weapon was the jawbone of his grandmother Murirangawhenua.
Three feats recur across the islands. He fished up land, baiting the jawbone hook with blood from his own nose and hauling a vast country from the deep: the North Island of New Zealand is Te Ika-a-Maui, "the fish of Maui," its valleys said to be the cuts his greedy brothers made in the catch. He snared the sun, which crossed the sky too fast for people to work; with plaited ropes he and his brothers caught it at its rising place and beat it with the jawbone until it agreed to travel slowly. The Hawaiian telling sets this on Haleakala, "house of the sun," on the island of Maui. And he stole fire, tricking the fire ancestress Mahuika out of her burning fingernails one by one until the last spark fled into the trees, where fire can still be rubbed out of wood.
His death explains human mortality: attempting to crawl through the sleeping body of Hine-nui-te-po, goddess of night and death, and so reverse birth, he was betrayed by the laughter of a fantail; the goddess woke and crushed him with the obsidian teeth between her thighs. George Grey's Polynesian Mythology (1855) preserves the full Maori cycle.
