The Hero

A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama

Lord Raglan

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780486317144
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

His mother is a virgin and he's reputed to be the son of a god; he loses favor and is driven from his kingdom to a sorrowful death — sound familiar? In The Hero, Lord Raglan contends that the heroic figures from myth and legend are invested with a common pattern that satisfies the human desire for idealization. Raglan outlines 22 characteristic themes or motifs from the heroic tales and illustrates his theory with events from the lives of characters from Oedipus (21 out of a possible 22 points) to Robin Hood (a modest 13).
A fascinating study that relates details from world literature with a lively wit and style, it was acclaimed by literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman as "a bold, speculative, and brilliantly convincing demonstration that myths are never historical but are fictional narratives derived from ritual dramas." This new edition of The Hero (which originally appeared some 13 years before Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces) is assured of a lasting popularity. This book will appeal to scholars of folklore and mythology, history, literature, and general readers as well.

PART ONE

Tradition

CHPATER I

THE BASIS OF HISTORY

Only the smallest fraction of the human race has ever acquired the habit of taking an objective view of the past. For most people, even most educated people, the past is merely a prologue to the present, not merely without interest in so far as it is independent of the present, but simply inconceivable except in terms of the present. The events of our own past life are remembered, not as they seemed to us at the time, but merely as incidents leading up to our present situation. We cannot persuade ourselves—in fact, we make no attempt to do so—that undertakings which ended in failure or fiasco were entered upon with just as much forethought and optimism as those which have profoundly affected our lives. We suppose our beliefs and mental processes to have been ever the same as they now are, and regard the story of our lives not as a crosscountry walk upon which we are still engaged, but as a path, cut deliberately by fate and ourselves, to the positions which we now occupy.

In our consideration of the story of others, our minds work in the same way. We judge every event by its consequences, and assume that those consequences must have seemed just as inevitable to those who took part in it as they do to ourselves. We find it difficult to believe that when the ship went down, those who were to be drowned felt just the same as those who were to be saved. We say that coming events cast their shadows before them, but what we really mean is that later events cast their shadows back over earlier ones. This lack of mental perspective, from which we all suffer, displays itself in the saying: “Call no man happy until he is dead,” which implies that a few hours or days of pain or misfortune can outweigh long years of happiness and success. All this is characteristic of our study of history. We regard the events of the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI as leading up inevitably to the French Revolution, though Voltaire and Gibbon saw no sign of an impending catastrophe. We regard Stonewall Jackson as having fought in a losing cause, though at the time of his death the Confederates were getting the best of it. In a word, even those of us who take a genuine interest in the facts of history tend, either by our mental limitations or by the defects of our education, to see them in a false perspective.

Before discussing history any further, I ought to follow what should be a universal practice by defining the term. History, then, is the recital in chronological sequence of events that are known to have occurred. Without precise chronology there can be no history, since the essence of history is the relation of events in their correct sequence. We might know something of the Battle of Marengo and something of the Battle of Waterloo, but we could not attempt to compose a history of Napoleon unless we knew which came first.

Why do people study and transmit historical facts? It cannot be with the sole object of studying and transmitting historical facts. Educated people study history for a variety of reasons—because they hope to find in it an explanation of the present and an indication of the future; because their curiosity is aroused by survivals from the past; because the classics were long regarded as the source of all knowledge, and a knowledge of the classics involves some knowledge of history; because the Bible and other religious works contain historical references; because they get a living by it; because for these and possibly for other reasons some knowledge of history has come to be regarded as part of the mental equipment of an educated person. Our interest in history, however, is inseparable from books. It is very remarkable that our dependence upon books is so little realized, even by teachers and writers, who live by books. An illiterate person, if he were interested in history, could learn it only from the lips of a historian, or from a person who could read a history book to him, and if he forgot a fact he could regain it only by having recourse to his teacher. The amount of historical knowledge that he could acquire would be limited by the fact that he would have no means of tabulating or classifying it, and could therefore have no idea of chronology outside the very limited range of his own experience. All history depends, as I have said, upon chronology, and no real idea of chronology can be obtained except by seeing facts tabulated in chronological sequence.

This was brought home to me when I was showing my five-year-old son round the amphitheatre at Caerleon, and telling him something of the Romans in Britain. He looked rather puzzled, and asked: “Were you there then, Daddy?” When we read of the Irish blacksmith who said that his smithy was much older than the local dolmen; it was there in his grandfather’s time, and he died a very old man—or of the English rustic who said that the parish church (thirteenth century) was very old indeed; it was there before he came to the parish, and that was over forty years ago—we are apt to suppose the speakers exceptionally stupid or ignorant, but their attitude towards the past is similar to that of the Australian black who began a story with: “Long, long ago, when my mother was a baby, the sun shone all day and all night,”¹ and is the inevitable result of illiteracy.

It would be almost impossible to make an illiterate person realize that the date A.D. 1600 had any meaning at all. Calendar sticks are used by tribes of both Africa and America to keep a record of events within living memory, but there is no means by which such a record could be preserved longer. Bundles of sticks convey nothing except to those who tie them together, and if you were to tell your illiterate that a stick represented a year, and then count out 335 sticks, he would be little the wiser. And if you were to tell him that Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare both lived then, he would find it difficult to believe you, since if Shakespeare were really connected with some ancient monarch, which since a play of his was performed quite recently seems highly improbable, it should be King Lear, whom he tells us all about, rather than Queen Elizabeth, whom he hardly mentions.

The fact that chronology depends upon reading and writing seems quite unknown to historians. Thus, according to Professor Chambers,² “it is probable that, even in heathen times, despite the absence of written records, the succession of monarchs and the length of their reigns may have been committed to memory with considerable exactness.” Yet he suggests no motive for committing such facts to memory, nor any possible machinery for transmitting them, and he asks us to believe that the Anglo-Saxons of the Settlement had conceptions of chronology which were quite foreign to their descendants even a thousand years later. The editor of the Paston Letters tells us³ that “the mode in which the letters are dated by their writers shows clearly that our ancestors were accustomed to measure the lapse of time by very different standards from those now in use. Whether men in general were acquainted with the current year of the Christian era may be doubted; that was an ecclesiastical computation rather than one for use in common life. They seldom dated their letters by the year at all, and when they did it was not by the year of our Lord, but by the year of the king’s reign. Chronicles and annals of the period which give the year of our Lord are almost always full of inaccuracies in the figures; and altogether it is evident that an exact computation of years was a thing for which there was considered to be little practical use.” That the exactness of chronology which Professor Chambers postulates for the illiterate Saxons of the fifth century was quite foreign to the literate English of the fifteenth indicates that his postulate is nothing more than an ill-considered guess.

That English illiterates have in fact no sense of chronology at all has been noted by several writers. “The folk have no sense of history,” says Mr. Fox Strangways;⁴ “there would be nothing improbable to them in St. George meeting Napoleon in the same ballad.” Sir E. K. Chambers tells us that in the Mylor (Cornwall) folk-play the battles of Agincourt and Quebec, and the capture of Porto Bello by Vernon in 1739, have all been mixed up together.⁵

“There is another characteristic of the folk-play,” says Mr. Tiddy,⁶ “which has an interesting connection with popular taste. The absence of any historic sense . . . cannot be passed over. For us it is quite impossible to realize the state of mind to which a century, let alone five hundred years, means nothing at all; and yet that is the normal condition even of the majority of those who have been subjected to the modern elementary education. Thanks to this state of mind our village ancestors a century ago could pit St. George against Bonaparte without the least sense of incongruity; and even without the evidence of Chaucer we should have good reason to believe that our ancestors of the Middle Ages were liable to the same kind of absurdity. To the folk, it might almost be said, ‘a thousand years are but as yesterday.’”

These plays are acted and ballads recited by members of what is at any rate a semi-literate community. The ideas of St. George and of Agincourt, if not derived originally from books, have certainly been reinforced by book-learning. In a semi-literate community all the members, including the illiterate, not merely benefit from the existence of books, but learn to understand something of the meaning and purpose of books and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Part I: Tradition
• Part II: Myth
• Part III: Drama
• Bibliography
• Index