Note 4 — Introduction.
Reading edition
Although the stories are described in the Museum publications as folk-lore, I doubted from the time of my first reading of them that they were folk-lore in the strict sense of the word; that is, I doubted their coming out of an unlearned and popular tradition. The greater number of them seemed to me to be deliberate compositions intended for a rather select audience. And then I found that a great master of Hawaiian tradition, Mr. William Hyde Rice, favored this opinion. In the Introduction to his Hawaiian Legends4 it is said: