Notes

This legend of Miru and Hine-rangi bears the stamp of great antiquity and is of much significance to the ethnologist, for it describes the contact between the remote ancestors of the Maori and a people apparently more advanced in culture. In a number of Maori-Polynesian traditions the underworld, in other words the home of a strange race, is mentioned as the place of origin of various arts and crafts, such as carving and tattooing, and of occult knowledge. Here the people of this strange land are described as fairies. Miru is sometimes spoken of as one of the guardian atua of the underworld or the place of departed souls. The name indeed takes us very far back in Polynesian origins. In Hindu mythology Meru is the abode of the god Vishnu, it is the top of a mountain of enormous height, the Olympus of the Indian people.

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