The Song of Hiawatha The Song of Hiawatha The Song of Hiawatha is an 1855 epic poem in trochaic tetrameter by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that features Native American characters. The epic relates the fictional adventures of an Ojibwe warrior named Hiawatha and the tragedy of his love for Minnehaha, a Dakota woman. Events in the story are set in the Pictured Rocks area on the south shore of Lake Superior. Longfellow's poem, though based on native oral traditions surrounding the figure of Manabozho, represents not a work of transmission but an original work of American Romantic literature. Longfellow's sources for the legends and ethnography
The Song of Hiawatha (Coleridge-Taylor) was published as The Song of Hiawatha and had its first complete performance in 1900, at the Royal Albert Hall. The later parts of the overall work were not nearly as successful as the first part, "Hiawatha's Wedding Feast", which continued to be regarded as a work in its own right and received many hundreds of performances in the UK and overseas countries such as the USA, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand. It became so famous in Britain that for many years it rivalled Handel's "Messiah" and Mendelssohn's "Elijah" in the public's affections. Nothing else he ever wrote equalled