It's the ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes your host. And in today's podcast

we are talking about ancient Polynesian mythology. That's right, it sounds fascinating and

it is fascinating. We have got Christina Thompson on the show once again to talk about this

aspect of ancient Polynesia. We're going to be focusing on creation myths. We're going

to be looking at some voyaging stories. We're going to be looking at the stories of sea

creatures that lurked beneath the waves of the Pacific Ocean. And we're also going to

be shining a light on the reception of this Polynesian mythology in more recent times.

So that further ado is Christina. Christina, it's great to have you back on the podcast.

I'm totally thrilled to be here. Well, I'm thrilled that you agreed to come back on because

we're talking more Polynesians mythology or culture because Christina Polynesian or

culture, this was right at the heart of their society. Yes, so the oral traditions of Polynesia

are really wonderful just in the way that everybody's oral traditions are wonderful, but they

are also mercifully reasonably well documented. And I think that is thanks to the fact that

the European arrival was comparatively late. So it isn't like where I live in Boston,

where you have a lot of this early contact was a very long time ago and not as well documented.

And the Europeans who arrived were not as interested, I think, in documenting it. But you do have

some people in the 19th century, the late 18th and early 19th century, a pretty small window,

actually, kind of 1790s. Well, I mean, it goes on through the 19th century, but the important part

of it, I think, is the early decades. And some of them were missionaries and some of them were not,

but they just got interested in understanding what Polynesian peoples, what islanders believed.

And so sometimes they were interested in it because they were going to convert them. That was the

goal. But even if you wanted to convert people, you had to understand what they already thought.

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