Māui legends: the fish, the sun and fire

Māui legends are the stories of Māui ‘the hero of Māori and Polynesian narratives’, the trickster hero who, in the best-known of them, Māui and the fish, hauled up the North Island, Te Ika-a-Māui ‘the fish of Māui’, from a canoe that became the South Island. With his brothers he snared and beat the sun to slow it down, and from his grandmother Mahuika he brought fire into the world. This guide tells those stories as Māori in New Zealand tell them, from Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, and Te Aka Māori Dictionary, with the places across Aotearoa that carry them, and says plainly where the Hawaiian telling differs.

Updated 7 November 2026 · 9 min read

Tap 🔊 to hear an example. Māori examples play Papa Reo, the te reo Māori voice made by Te Hiku Media from recordings of native speakers.

These are taonga, treasured traditions, and iwi tell them in their own ways; Te Ara records more than one version of each. Where this page names a teller or a tribe it is because the source does, and “one version” means there are others.

Who Māui is

Te Aka Māori Dictionary calls Māui a “well-known Polynesian character of narratives” who “performed a number of amazing feats”, and gives his full name as Māui-tikitiki-a-Taranga or Māui-tikitiki-o-Taranga. He is also Māui-pōtiki; pōtiki is Te Aka’s word for a youngest child. Te Ara calls him a demigod, and a trickster hero of Hawaiki, the homeland of the ancestors, “a figure known throughout Polynesia” and “famous for many deeds; amongst them, capturing the sun, fishing up islands, turning into a bird and pursuing his father into the underworld.”

He is not an atua ‘ancestor with continuing influence, god’ in the way Tāne or Tangaroa are; those are in Māori gods and the Māori creation story. Te Ara reads Māui as a model for people: “By capturing the sun, entering the underworld, or fishing up an island, Māui represents the character of the individual who can bring about change and development in a community.”

One spelling note: Māui has its long vowel at the start, and mauī ‘left’, the word for left, has it at the end; see directions in Māori.

Māui and the fish: Te Ika-a-Māui

Te Ara calls the fishing up of the North Island “one of the greatest stories of Māori literature”. In the version it tells, Māui’s elder brothers set off fishing and did not want to take him, so he hid in the canoe and did not show himself until they were out at sea. He talked them into rowing to the deepest part of the ocean, and there he cast a fish hook made from his grandmother’s jawbone. It sank and caught fast on the underwater house of Tonganui, a grandson of Tangaroa ‘atua of the sea’, and Māui hauled his catch up above the water. The land became Te Ika-a-Māui, the fish of Māui: the North Island.

Te Aka names the grandmother who gave him the jawbone as Muri-ranga-whenua (Te Ara writes Murirangawhenua), and says he used it both as the hook and to beat the sun. The Māori word for a jawbone is kauae.

Why the land is uneven

Te Ara gives the end of the story as Te Rangihaeata of Ngāti Toarangatira dictated it. Māui left to go home and told his brothers not to eat or cut up the fish while he was gone. They did not listen: they began cutting it up and eating it, hacking at the head, the tail, the gills and the fins, and Māui came back enraged. “This is why this land lies unevenly – there are mountains, plains, valleys and cliffs. If they had not fought over the fish, then the land would have retained its fish shape.”

The fish on the map

Te Ara explains that likening the North Island to a fish, and the South Island to a canoe, worked like a map: it helped people remember the shape of the land and where things were. In some traditions the fish is a pātiki ‘flounder’; in others a whai ‘stingray’. Its parts, as Te Ara places them, and the names that still carry them:

Part	Where (Te Ara)	The name
The head	Wellington, at the south of the island	Te Upoko-o-te-Ika-a-Māui, the head of Māui’s fish: Te Aka’s name for the Wellington area
The tail	Northland	Te Hiku-o-te-Ika, the tail of the fish: Te Aka’s name for Northland, especially its northern tip
The barb at the base of the tail	the Coromandel Peninsula
The fins	Taranaki and the East Coast
The backbone	between Taupō and Rotorua
The heart	Maungapōhatu, in the Urewera
The hook	the curve of Cape Kidnappers / Te Kauwae-a-Māui	Te Matau-a-Māui ‘Māui’s fish hook’: Te Ara’s caption gives it to Cape Kidnappers; Te Aka gives it as the name of Hawke Bay

Te Ika-a-Māui has been an official name for the North Island, alongside the English one, since 2013; what other place names mean is in Māori place names. Māui fished the land up; in many traditions it was Kupe, chasing a great octopus, who first found it: see Kupe: who discovered New Zealand?

Hikurangi: the Ngāti Porou telling

Not every iwi puts the canoe in the south. Te Ara records that Ngāti Porou of the East Coast say the first part of the fish to rise from the water was their sacred mountain, Hikurangi, and that Māui’s canoe, Nukutaimemeha, ran aground on it and is still there, turned to stone.

The canoe and the anchor: the South Island and Rakiura

In the telling Te Ara gives, Māui’s canoe became the South Island. Te Ara calls it Te Waka-a-Māui, the canoe of Māui; Te Aka lists it as Te Waka-o-Māui, another name for the island it gives as Te Waipounamu. The stern is the southern tip and the prow the north. When Māui hauled up the fish he stood on the Kaikōura Peninsula, which is called Te Taumanu-o-te-waka, the thwart or seat of the canoe, and Stewart Island, Rakiura, is the anchor. The parts of a canoe, and the great voyaging canoes, are in Māori waka.

Te Ara prints a map of these names oriented as Māori traditionally saw the country, with the North Island below the South Island: the fish beneath the canoe that caught it. Why that puts south at the top is in directions in Māori.

Māui slows the sun

Te Ara tells that after the world was made the sun crossed the sky so fast that days were too short: there was not enough time for people’s daily work, or for enough sleep. Māui and his brothers made strong ropes and travelled to the place where the sun rises from the underworld. They built a low wall to hide behind and laid the ropes out as nooses. When the sun came up they leapt out, threw the ropes over it and held it, and Māui beat it until it cried for mercy. Since then it has moved slowly, and the sun’s rays, Te Ara says, are the remains of the ropes.

His weapon was the same jawbone of Muri-ranga-whenua. Te Ara’s caption for Chris Slane’s drawing calls the sun Tamanui-te-rā and says Māui forced him “to travel slowly across the sky”. Te Ara’s story on the sky gives other names for the sun too: Te Rā-tūoi, the lean sun, in winter, and Te Rā-kura, the red sun, in summer. The everyday word is rā ‘sun; day’.

Fire from Mahuika

Te Aka defines Mahuika as the atua from whom Māui obtained fire. In the account Te Ara gives, Mahuika was his grandmother, and Māui got fire from her fingernails and planted it in trees such as kaikōmako, rimu and tōtara, the woods that were used in traditional fire making. Te Ara also holds Sir George Grey’s nineteenth-century telling, in which Māui obtained fire by tricking his grandmother, and Te Aka quotes an 1886 newspaper describing land reshaped by the fire of Mahuika, “who was tricked by Māui-tikitiki-o-Taranga.” Te Aka’s entry for Hine-kaikōmako, the personified kaikōmako tree, calls her the keeper of the spark of Mahuika.

Another tradition. Te Ara records that the Mātaatua tribes of the Bay of Plenty tell it differently: the sun, Te Rā, sent his son Auahi-tūroa, a comet, to give fire to people, and Auahi-tūroa married Mahuika, who bore five children, Te Tokorima, the five fingers. Fire is often called Tama-a-Auahi-tūroa, son of Auahi-tūroa. The everyday word for fire is ahi.

Other deeds, and how Māui died

Irawaru, the first dog. Te Aka records that Irawaru began life as a man and was turned into the first dog by Māui; Te Aka’s example sentence is Ka whakakurītia e Māui a Irawaru ‘Irawaru was turned into a dog by Māui’. How Māui’s wives then called their brother, the dog, is told in Māori pet names.
A bird, and the underworld. Te Ara lists turning into a bird and pursuing his father into the underworld among his deeds.
His death. Te Ara’s story on death customs tells that Māui tried to destroy Hine-nui-te-pō, who receives the dead, and so overcome death for everyone. He took the form of a lizard to pass through her body while she slept, but the tīrairaka ‘fantails’ watching him laughed, she woke, and she crushed him, which brought death to humankind. Te Aka quotes a 1911 telling in which Māui tells his brothers-in-law not to laugh at him. Before he died, Te Ara says, he had asked her to let people die as the moon wanes and rises again, and she refused.

The Hawaiian Māui, and the Disney one

Māui is a Polynesian figure, so other islands tell of him too. Te Ara says the theme of land rising from the sea is shared across Polynesia in “the stories of the legendary trickster Māui fishing up various islands of Polynesia”, and the US National Park Service, at Haleakalā on the Hawaiian island of Maui, says the Māui myths “are known to many cultures throughout the pacific”, his most famous deeds being fishing up islands, obtaining fire and snaring the sun. The details differ. Here is the sun story side by side:

	Aotearoa (Te Ara)	Hawaiʻi (National Park Service, Haleakalā)
Why the sun had to slow	Days too short for people’s work and sleep	Too short to cook food or finish a prayer, and for Māui’s mother Hina to dry her kapa, bark cloth
Who helped Māui	His brothers	His mother Hina, who gave him cords, and his grandmother on the mountain, who gave him another cord and a stone for an adze
Where	The place where the sun rises from the underworld	Haleakalā, “the house of the sun”, by a wiliwili tree
How	Nooses of rope; Māui beats the sun with his grandmother’s jawbone	Māui snares the sun’s legs, ties the cords to the tree and strikes it with the adze
The ending	The sun moves slowly; its rays are the ropes	The sun begs for its life and promises to go slower

And the fishing story is told about the islands of each place: in New Zealand the fish is the North Island and the canoe the South Island, names no other telling has. How te reo Māori and Hawaiian compare as languages is in Māori vs Hawaiian.

The Maui of Disney’s Moana is a film character, and the stories on this page are not taken from the film. The film does have a full te reo Māori version, Moana Reo Māori; see Māori movies.

Māui in the things you see

The hei matau ‘fish-hook pendant’ carved in bone or greenstone is, in Te Papa’s description, a symbolic representation of the hook Māui used to haul up the North Island; see Māori symbols and their meanings. The creatures of the same storytelling world, from taniwha to patupaiarehe, are in Māori mythical creatures.

Going further

Our free te reo Māori course starts with the everyday words these stories are told in, from ika ‘fish’ and waka ‘canoe’ to rā ‘sun’ and ahi ‘fire’, with every example recorded by Papa Reo.