Few books occupy so complicated a place in the history of a tradition's survival as this one. Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand Race, as Furnished by Their Priests and Chiefs was among the first substantial printed collections of Māori mythology, carrying the creation of the universe through the spread of Māori tribes across New Zealand's North Island into English for the first time at any real scale.

Its publisher and translator was Sir George Grey, then Governor of New Zealand, who recognized that understanding Māori language and tradition was essential to his own work of governance. But the book's deeper substance came from elsewhere: a significant portion of its material — by some estimates, at least a quarter of the whole — was drawn directly from the manuscripts of Te Rangikāheke, a chief of Ngāti Rangiwewehi who worked closely with Grey for several years, writing extensively on Māori language, genealogy, legend, and custom. Grey did not formally credit the scale of this debt in the original publication.

Despite these origins, Polynesian Mythology became, and for well over a century remained, one of the most widely read and often cited printed sources on Māori mythology.

Historical Context

Te Rangikāheke joined George Grey's household around 1849, initially to help teach him the Māori language, and remained closely associated with him for several years, receiving a modest stipend and lodging. Over this period he produced an extraordinary body of manuscript material — across twenty-one known manuscripts totaling roughly 670 pages, written in a clear, consistent hand, covering Māori language, genealogy, legend, tribal history, customs, and political commentary. Eight of these manuscripts dealt specifically with myth and tribal history, and three of them supplied most of the prose material for Grey's earlier Māori-language compilation, Ko Ngā Mahinga a Ngā Tūpuna Māori (1854), which Grey then translated and expanded into English as Polynesian Mythology the following year.

Grey drew on other Māori informants as well, including Hēnare Mātene Te Whiwhi (who contributed the legend of Kae and part of the Māui narrative), Hohepa Paraone of Te Ngae, the people of Mokoia, Hori Patara of Ngāti Toa, and Piri Kawau of Āti Awa, among further unnamed contributors. The result is, by its own construction, a composite: a patchwork drawn from multiple regional traditions rather than a single, authoritative account belonging to any one iwi.

The book's path to print was shaped by circumstance as much as design — an earlier collection of Grey's manuscripts was destroyed by fire around 1848, which appears to have strengthened his resolve to see the material properly published. When Polynesian Mythology appeared in 1855, however, Grey introduced what scholars have since described as "alterations, combinations and omissions" to Te Rangikāheke's original material, and did not acknowledge the scale of his debt to him in the published work — despite the two men's documented closeness, and despite Te Rangikāheke's own writings describing Grey's kindness toward him.

This imbalance has been substantially corrected by later scholarship. Since the 1950s, a number of Te Rangikāheke's original manuscripts — most preserved today in the Grey Collection at Auckland Libraries — have been separately transcribed, translated, and published in their own right, with proper acknowledgment of his authorship at last restored.