Navaho Myths, Prayers, and Songs: Navajo Religious Texts, Myths, Prayers, and Ceremonial Songs
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Book Overview
Navaho Myths, Prayers, and Songs is Washington Matthews's concise collection of Navajo religious narratives, ceremonial prayers, songs, and translated texts. Edited by Pliny Earle Goddard and first published by the University Press in Berkeley in 1907, the volume presents materials connected with Navajo language, religion, mythology, and ceremonial tradition, including translated prayers and songs associated with ritual practice. HathiTrust identifies the work under Navajo language and Native North American religion, which is the right bibliographic frame for this A&D edition.
Matthews was one of the important nineteenth-century recorders of Navajo ceremonial and linguistic material, and this short volume preserves examples of mythic narrative, prayer, chant, and song in a form useful to readers of Native American religion, folklore, anthropology, and Indigenous studies. The older spelling "Navaho" reflects the title and period of publication; modern cataloguing and discovery should also account for "Navajo," since that is the form most readers and libraries will search.
For readers of Native American religion, Navajo mythology, Indigenous oral tradition, ceremonial song, comparative folklore, and early ethnographic writing, Navaho Myths, Prayers, and Songs remains a compact historical source: limited by its period and editorial frame, but valuable as a public-domain record of sacred narrative, ritual language, and translated tradition.
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