Introduction: In all traditional Polynesian societies, birds engaged humans’ imagination and were very powerful symbols. This paper aims to offer a comparative study of the role of birds in traditional Polynesian narratives and to find commonalities between stories from different Polynesian island groups, in order to provide, through textual analysis, a picture of the spiritual, material and emotional relationship of Polynesian peoples with birds in pre-contact times.
Methodology: Kirtley (1971) has been used as a starting point to locate approximately 300 bird-related traditional Polynesian narratives that were collected and published in the 19th and 20th centuries by travellers, government officials, ethnographers, missionaries, anthropologists and linguists (the research excludes songs and poetry). Those texts are in Polynesian languages, English, French and German. They have all been summarised, and the recurrent themes and motifs involving the birds have been analysed in depth. “Polynesia” is understood as comprising all the island groups within the Polynesian Triangle as well as the Polynesian Outliers, but references have also been made to texts from other parts of the Pacific, particularly Melanesia, Micronesia and Australia.
Main Results: The analysis of the texts suggests that birds appear in the stories in a variety of roles. Some narratives are purely “animal stories” without human characters, which account for and give meaning to the physical and behavioural characteristics of a given species, Polynesian peoples having developed their own bodies of belief to explain a bird’s behaviour and appearance. However, birds also play a part in stories about the origin of the world and of humankind, and they appear in many stories as message-bearers sent by a deity to warn or advise humans, as guardians and protectors, as cherished pets, but also as giant man-eating birds.
Principal Conclusions: These findings suggest that birds are far from being restricted to the “animal story” genre: any type of traditional Polynesian narrative may feature a feathered creature. Birds engaged Polynesian peoples’ imaginations in such a way that all their narratives could lend themselves to featuring feathered creatures as dramatis personae.