The Song of Hiawatha, presentation copy

Lot 45
15.06.2023 10:00UTC -05:00
Classic
Vendu
$ 20 160
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Lieu de l'événementEtats-Unis, New York
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ID 967552
Lot 45 | The Song of Hiawatha, presentation copy
Valeur estimée
$ 12 000 – 18 000
The Song of Hiawatha, presentation copy

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1855

LONGFELLOW, Henry Wadsworth (1807-1882). The Song of Hiawatha. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1855.



By the shores of Gitche Gumee,

by the shining Big-Sea-Water,

Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,

Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.

Dark behind it rose the forest …



Presentation copy of the first American edition, first printing, of Longfellow's great epic, inscribed to fellow poet Mary Horsford, with a rare autograph quote containing a stanza of the poem. Horsford, who died in the same month this book was inscribed to her ("Mrs Horsford with the regards of the Author, November 1855"), had just published her own verse treatment of Native Americans entitled Indian Legends and Other Poems. This lot also includes a letter by Longfellow containing a quote from the poem. Although Longfellow was generous when it came to producing fair copies of his work for his admirers, he rarely chose to quote from "Hiawatha;" RBH records only four examples sold at auction in the past fifty years.



Longfellow referred to this, his most iconic work, as his "Indian Edda," influenced by European epic cycles like the Kalevala as well as by the work of ethnographer Henry Schoolcraft and the author's friendship with the Ojibwa writer George Copway (who would name his daughter after Longfellow's famous heroine, Minnehaha). Although the title hero shares a name with the historic founder of the Iroquois league, Longfellow's characters and plots are all mythic. The poem is written in trochaic tetrameter—the same meter as the Kalevala and erroneously thought at the time by Schoolcraft to be a natural meter for Ojibwe languages. It was named by the Grolier Club the most influential book of 1855, inspiring everything from symphonies to silent films and cementing the image of the Native American as an almost fairy-tale figure in the imaginations of readers worldwide. BAL 12112; Grolier American 66.



Octavo (178 x 111mm). 12 pp. ad catalogue at end dated November 1855 (gathering 9 sprung). Original brown blindstamped cloth with title gilt on spine (caps damaged, boards worn); modern half morocco box. Provenance: Mary Gardiner Horsford, 1824-1855 (presentation inscription from the author).



[With:] LONGFELLOW, Henry Wadsworth. Autograph quotation signed ("Henry W. Longfellow"), fair copy of one stanza from "Hiawatha," Cambridge, 3 November 1881. [Written above an:] Autograph Letter Signed ("Henry W. Longfellow") to Edward W. Bok, Cambridge, 3 November 1881. One page, 222 x 176mm (some dustsoiling and toning, losses at corners not affecting text, horizontal crease somewhat weak).

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