The Epic Hero

521 Pages·2000·3.68 MB·English

by  Professor Dean A. Miller PhD

THE EPIC HERO

THE EPIC HERO
Dean A. Miller
THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
BALTIMORE AND LONDON
© 2000 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved.Published 2000
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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The Johns Hopkins University Press
2715 North Charles Street
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www.press.jhu.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Miller,Dean A.
The epic hero / Dean A.Miller.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8018-6239-6 (alk.paper)
1.Epic literature—History and criticism—Theory,etc. 2.Heroes
in literature. I.Title.
PN56.E65M55 2000
809′.93352—dc21 99-39582
CIP
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
CONTENTS
Introduction:The Book of the Hero vii
1 The Hero from on High 1
2 The Heroic Biography 70
3 The Framework of Adventure 133
4 The Hero “Speaks” 188
5 Foils,Fools,and Antiheroes 242
6 Tertium Quid:Aspects of Liminality 296
7 The Final Hero:Beyond Immortality 345
Notes 389
Index 487

INTRODUCTION:
THE BOOK OF THE HERO
The fame of warriors is built on the destruction of humankind.
—Edward Gibbon,The Decline and Fall ofthe Roman Empire
The first question from any prospective reader will surely be,Why write
another book on the hero? Suspicions may immediately be raised as to the
essential mental maturity of someone who chooses so grand or grandilo-
quent a subject at any time,anda fortiori in our bland and gentle age of
reputed equality,fraternity,and pacificocentrism.The path to this book,
insofar as I can trace its rational development,led onward from my post-
graduate training in Byzantine (late Roman or East Roman) imperial his-
tory and civilization,a training that forced me to investigate and ponder on
that most brilliantly articulated and symbolically rich premodern political
phenomenon,the office of the Byzantine emperor,the basileos kai autokratôr
Rhomaiôn.This supercentralizing,powerfully autocratic persona and posi-
tion had a predictably confrontational relationship with another locus of
power and influence in that traditional society,a Byzantine aristocracy inti-
mately joined yet opposed to the emperor and his massive and intricate the-
ology/ideology.1One aristocratic phenomenon leads to another;I moved
my focus from the Gestalt and thoughtworld of one nobility to the strange
but potent sociocultural patterns of other aristocracies,especially to war-
rior aristocracies as these might be described generally or generically.In
addition,we are all captivated by a mystery,and the first mystery of the aris-
toi,wherever located,is their invariant assumption of an inborn and nat-
ural superiority,a superiority one might call moral or ethical except that
these specific terms are never (or very rarely) articulated.Of course,behind
the potently projected dream of an aristocratic dominance lurks the brutal,
material fact of the superior force of the weapon wielder and war maker,
viii INTRODUCTION
the warrior;while before him—the aristocrat—is projected the image of
the hero,the warrior ideal,encased in the special epic description of his ad-
ventures and his fate,known,feared,and admired in so many guises and so
many cultures.There is surely some very large part of the mental—that is,
the cognitive-imaginal and perceptual—history of humankind to be dealt
with here.
It seemed to me that the book of the hero needed to be written,and that
I would have something original,or at least pertinent,to say on the heroic
subject,who would be “the”absolute hero,in his clearest and starkest out-
line.Yet because numerous studies already exist,some readers may assume
that I felt they were either deficient or incomplete in some way,or did not
address the problem in a coherent manner,or were simply wrongheaded in
theoretical approach or in extended narrative detail.In fact,almost every-
thing available that might bear on the traditional hero,every attempt at a
listing and analysis of his featured adventures and salient characteristics,
has had some value,and I have indeed used,and gratefully used,a consid-
erable amount of the available stoff,whether I agreed with its author’s con-
clusions or not. Some of my adaptations of the older approaches to the
hero are laid out here.
QUESTIONS AND APPROACHES
The broadest treatments of the hero and the hero’s acts,rooted in Thomas
Carlyle and the early nineteenth century but more familiar to us today under
the names of Otto Rank,Lord Raglan,Joseph Campbell,Erich Neumann
(and in another vector, the Soviet folklorist-linguist Vladimir Ysaevitch
Propp),are always fascinating but,I confess,have been less important to
me as directive and invariant guide marks (despite the fact that my own
approach is certainly broad-gauge).These earlier,large-scale declarations
tend to be too grandly deductive for my taste (this is particularly true of
Raglan and Campbell),and theirhero is too strictly cast in and limited by
the image of the hero of myth:the hero mythically expressed and mythi-
cally circumscribed,a transcultural or omnicultural,ahistoric,synchronous,
and, at his deepest core, symbolic phenomenon.The monolith and the
monomyth do not attract me.In the main I limit my focus on the hero to
the traditional Indo-European model,as he appears in sources derived from
Indo-Europe,Indo-Asia,and this core area’s cultural extensions.2I chose
this areal focus because our heroic data are so frequently based in it and
emerge from it:because they are set and maintained,willy-nilly,as part of
our unavoidably Eurocentric tradition,which is our archê;because a good
INTRODUCTION ix
deal of valuable scholarly attention has been paid over time to individual
heroic-epic episodes and their details;and because a theoretical guide into
some of these data’s recesses,convolutions,and complexities was already
close to hand.
My appreciation of the theoretical acuity and the weight and caliber of
the labors of the late Georges Dumézil and of some of his students emerges
frequently in the following pages,and especially my gratitude for his con-
cept of an Indo-European idéologie,expressed in,but not only in,his the-
ory of trifunctionality and its archaic reverberations throughout the old
Indo-European-speaking cultures.From time to time in the past twenty
years I have published my own explorations into territory mapped by Du-
mézil,with special attention to his fonction guerrière, his Indo-European
Second or Warrior Function as it is emergent within the Dumézilian re-
construction of a key tripartitive idea resident and continually renascent,
or“reprinted,”within the artifacts of the Indo-European thoughtworld.3
Much of my previous work has been integrated into or is caught and held
in the immediate background of the present study,and so I suppose that a
Dumézilianflavor is readily apparent here.Dumézil’s theoretical structure
is precise and elegantly calculated yet generous and not restrictive,and he
asks what I think are acutely pertinent questions and always permits oth-
ers to ask them as well.I also respect and admire his warning about that
adjective,and that idea,“Indo-European”:“Le mot ‘indo-européen’n’est
qu’une convention savante pour parler d’un objet d’étude,d’une réalité pré-
historique dont la recherche—archéologique,linguistique,mythologique—
s’efforce de restituer le plus grand nombre d’éléments.”4Dumézil,having
devised the trifunctional model for this Indo-European système,recognized
that too rigorous an insistence on its invariability as an Indo-European
marker could consitute a theoretical prison,and such scholars as the Rees
brothers,N.J.Allen,and Emily Lyle have taken a Dumézilian viewpoint
and marked offpathways of their own;Jaan Puhvel has also reread and re-
formed or modified Dumézil along new lines.This great French scholar
had no school,and didn’t want one.
The matter and method of deciding what questions are put to the mate-
rial selected and collected in pursuit of the typological hero seem to me
most vital.Obviously I think that the right questions have not been asked
with enough rigor,severity,or frequency,especially in respect to a signifi-
cant definitional problem: the relationship of a central, even archetypic
model of thehero to the constellation of heroes,in their sometimes subtly
differentiated modal operations,and guises.There is even space and time
available to pay some attention to that anachronism,the “national”hero,by