Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers

Translator: Robert Bringhurst

Robert Bringhurst's translations from the classical Haida mythtellers introduce one of the world's great oral literatures to the English-speaking world. Together, these three volumes reveal the enormous depth and subtlety of First Nations tradition.

Volume I

Robert Bringhurst

A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythellers and Their World

Native American oral literature has often been presented, wrongly, as a sea of anonymous folktales. Here instead are the works of unforgettable individuals who speak with a crystal clarity.

Included in this first volume of the trilogy Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers are the words of the blind poet Ghandl, the crippled master myth-spinner Skaay, the historian Kilxhawgins, and other Haida authors.

The linguist and ethnographer John Swanton took dictation from the last great Haida-speaking storytellers, poets and historians in 1900–1901. Together they consciously created a great treasury of Haida oral literature in written form. In this first volume of his trilogy, Bringhurst brings these works to life in the English language and sets them in a context just as rich as the stories themselves one that reaches out to dozens of Native American oral literatures, and to mythtelling traditions around the world.

This magnificent trilogy represents a decade of work from Robert Bringhurst, one of North America's most respected poets, linguists and cultural historians.

Shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction, this book provides an eloquent overview to the Haida imagination.

Volume II

Ghandl, Translated from Haida by Robert Bringhurst

Nine Visits to the Mythworld: Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas

Legendary Haida mythteller Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas tells us nine luminous and richly textured tales of a world in which human beings, spirit beings and animals have poignant and profound effects on one another’s lives.

In the Fall of 1900, a young American anthropologist named John Swanton arrived in the Haida country, on the Northwest Coast of North America, intending to learn everything he could about Haida mythology. He spent the next ten months phonetically transcribing several thousand pages of myths, stories, histories and songs in the Haida language.

Swanton met a number of fine mythtellers during his year in the Haida country. Each had his own style and his own repertoire. Two of them—a blind man in his fifties by the name of Ghandl, and a crippled septuagenarian named Skaay—were artists of extraordinary stature, revered in their own communities and admired ever since by the few specialists aware of their great legacy. Nine Visits to the Mythworld includes all the finest works of one of these master mythtellers.

In November 1900, when Ghandl dictated these nine stories, the Haida world lay in ruins. Wave upon wave of smallpox and other diseases, rapacious commercial exploitation by fur traders, whalers and miners, and relentless missionization by the church had taken a huge toll on Haida culture. Yet in the blind poet’s mind, the great tradition lived, and in his voice it comes alive.

Bringhurst’s eloquent and vivid translations of these works are supplemented by explanatory notes that supply the needed background information, and by photographs of masterworks of Haida visual art, in which the stories Ghandl tells are given potent visual form.

Shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize.

Volume III

Skaay, Translated from Haida by Robert Bringhurst

Being in Being: The Collected Works of a Master Haida Mythteller, Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay

This book features three masterpieces by legendary Haida mythteller Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay.

Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay was born in the Haida village of Qquuna about 1827. Crippled by an injury in middle age, he devoted himself to the art of telling stories. He could neither read nor write, and it is purely a matter of luck that his work survives. But so great were his talents that he remains the most important figure in all of Haida literature.

In October 1900, Skaay dictated three works to a visiting linguist, John Swanron. Each of them a masterpiece of its kind. One is the legend of Skaay’s own lineage. The second, Raven Travelling, is the longest and most complex version of the story of the Rave ever recorded on the Northwest Coast. The third is The Qquuna Cycle, the largest and most complex literary work in any Native Canadian language. It is a poem of epic length and one of the true masterpieces of North American literature.

Bringhurst’s translation of these works is the first to present them as the literary classics that they are. His introduction sets the works in context, and his notes supply the background information needed to move freely in Skaay’s rich and vivid world.