Abraham Fornander’s Collection of Hawaiian Antiquities and Folklore

Record summary

Abraham Fornander’s multi-volume Collection of Hawaiian Antiquities and Folk-Lore preserves Hawaiian genealogies, legends, religious traditions and accounts tied to named landscapes and supernatural beings. Although publication extended into the twentieth century, the collecting and preservation project belongs substantially to the nineteenth-century intellectual context. It offers identifiable material for comparing Indigenous place narratives with later “haunted island” or anomalous-place interpretations. Its categories and translations are mediated by a colonial-era collector, and individual narratives must be checked against Hawaiian-language sources and modern scholarship on compilation practices.