Maori culture remains highly oral, with chants, storytelling and oratory central to ceremonial and daily life. This was doubly so when Europeans arrived and first recorded the traditions and legends normally passed down verbally. Different tribal groups often had different sets of stories, or at least variations on common themes, but European historians with pet theories to promote often distorted the stories they heard and even destroyed conflicting evidence, creating their own Maori folklore. This generalizing trend served the purpose of creating a common Maori identity, and many of the stories have been accepted back into the Maori tradition, leaving a patchwork of authentic and bowdlerized legends. Nonetheless, there are fixed themes common to most