The linguist and ethnographer John Swanton took dictation from the last great Haida-speaking storytellers, poets and historians in 1900–1901. Together they consciously created a great treasury of Haida oral literature in written form. In this first volume of his trilogy, Bringhurst brings these works to life in the English language and sets them in a context just as rich as the stories themselves one that reaches out to dozens of Native American oral literatures, and to mythtelling traditions around the world. This is the first volume in the triology of Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers. This magnificent trilogy represents a decade of work from Robert Bringhurst, one of North America's most respected poets, linguists and cultural historians.