Idylls of the South Seas

Tetua, the old bard of Tahiti, holds within his mind and heart a wealth of tales of a bygone age, a time when his island home had not yet felt the hurried pace of the white man upon its shores. Stone first used Tetua as narrator of Polynesian legends in THE SHIP OF FLAME. The stories he tells, handed down through the generations by word of mouth, are to him as familiar and comforting as old friends.
The stories in this volume are not literal translations of ancient songs and myths, but are rather presented, as the author points out in his preface, “in such a way that they might have living reality for a reader who has little or perhaps no personal familiarity either with Polynesian peoples or with Polynesian islands.” as Tetua weaves the spell of Tahiti, we come to know “the youths and maidens and men and women not as so many strange means but as real human beings.”