Māui Slows the Sun

In the old days, the sun ran across the sky too quickly. He sprang up from his hole in the east in the morning and rushed down to his hole in the west by noon, and the day was so short that no one could finish the work they had begun. The food in the cooking pits had no time to soften. The fishing nets had no time to dry. The fields could not be hoed. The people went hungry, because by the time their food was nearly cooked, the sun was gone and the long cold night was on them.

Māui watched this and said to his brothers, "Let us catch the sun. Let us tie him with a rope so he cannot run, and beat him until he agrees to walk slowly. Then the days will be long enough."

His brothers laughed at him. "How can a man catch the sun? The sun is fire. The sun is too far off. No one can come near him." But Māui had already done many things they did not believe a man could do. He had pulled up the great fish that became the North Island of Aotearoa. He had stolen fire from his ancestress in the underworld. He had made his own jawbone into a magical weapon. The brothers, after their grumbling, agreed to help him.

Māui said, "We must make many ropes." His brothers said they had no ropes long enough or strong enough. Māui took the flax of the harakeke plant and showed them how to plait it into thick cords, weaving the fibers in a new way. They wove ropes of all kinds: ropes that loop, ropes that snare, ropes that bind. They wove for many days until they had heaps of them.

Then they set out at night for the place where the sun rose, far to the east. They walked many nights and slept in the day, hiding from the sun under leafy branches, because Māui did not want the sun to see them coming. They came at last to the great pit at the edge of the world, where the sun climbed up every morning into the sky.

Around the pit they made a heavy net of their ropes, with great loops set in the path the sun would take. They hid behind a clay rampart, holding the ends of the ropes. Māui took up his weapon, the magic jawbone of his grandmother Murirangawhenua. They waited.

The sun came rising up out of his pit, hot and bright as he always was, in a hurry, his great limbs pushing through the rim of the world. The brothers pulled the ropes. The loops went tight around his arms and his legs and his neck. The sun struggled and roared. He shone so fiercely that the ropes nearest him began to scorch and smoke. But the ropes Māui had made were stronger than any rope had been before, woven by hand for this very work, and they held.

Māui leaped out from behind the rampart with the jawbone in his hand and ran at the sun and beat him. He beat him on the head and the limbs. The sun cried out: "Why do you hurt me? Why do you do this? I am Tama-nui-te-rā, the great Son of the Day. Let me go."

Māui said: "I will not let you go until you promise to go slowly across the sky. The people are starving because the day is too short. From now on you will travel slowly. You will not run."

The sun, beaten, weakened, agreed. Māui loosened the ropes and let him climb up into the sky. From that morning the sun has gone slowly. The day became long enough for cooking, for working, for fishing, for tending the gardens. The people had food, and they had time to do their work, and they no longer suffered from the long nights.

But the sun was hurt by Māui's beating. He moves now with a limp. That is why he goes more slowly than he once did, and why the day is the length we know. And in his travel he is still tired, and at the end of the day he sinks into his pit in the west and sleeps before he climbs back up the next morning.

This is what the old people say.