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Navaho Legends is one of the earliest collections of Navajo oral traditions in English, and still the best. Originally published in 1897, Washington Matthews’s sensitive translation contains extensive versions of the Original Legend and two other tales. These richly detailed legends remain among the most complete sources of Navajo cultural, ritual, and ceremonial information.

This edition is fully faithful to the original, containing Matthews’s introduction, extensive notes, interlinear prayer translations, musical notations, and index, plus a new note on orthography by Robert Young.

The Mountain Chant is a nine-day Navajo healing ceremony, one of several major rites undertaken only in winter. Aside from curing disease, it brings rain and invokes the unseen powers for general benefit. Though perhaps practiced less often now than better-known ceremonies such as the Night Chant, it is by no means forgotten.

Fully faithful to the original book published by Washington Matthews over a century ago, this edition contains the story of the wandering hero upon whose exploits the Mountain Chant is based, a description of each of the nine ceremonial days, and original song text and translations.

"Each Navajo ceremony builds on a specific story, which in turn contributes to a network of interlocking narratives as poetically rich as the Homeric epics or the Arthurian cycle. Non-Navajos are only now beginning to fathom the extent of that poetic richness as we learn more about the nature of ceremonial Navajo, with its formulaic virtuosity, its rhythmic cadences, its deep allusiveness to enduring human values, and the spellbinding thrust of its stories."
- Paul Zolbrod, from the foreword

The Night Chant is one of the great nine-day, Navajo winter healing ceremonies. During its course, nearly all the important characters of the Navajo pantheon are mentioned in legends, depicted in sand paintings, and impersonated with the use of masks and other ritual objects. Originally published in 1902, Washington Matthews's The Night Chant contains one of the few extensive descriptions of this important ceremony.

 

Washington Matthews studied Navajo language and lifeways as an ethnologist and linguistics expert in the late-nineteenth century. His unique opportunities to observe ceremonies and record the roles of participants resulted in landmark studies of Navajo ritual and tradition. Matthews spent more than twenty years working with hatathli, or singers, to record the many songs and rites that comprise the intricate Night Chant. provides a detailed description of healing rites, songs, myths, and prayers for the ceremony, which is performed only during 'frosty weather.' This edition includes powerful contemporary observations in a foreword by John Farella.