Archetype of the Hero

[It might seem this topic doesn't relate to politics, but stick with me. It and the next one will be tied up by a third.]

As someone who writes, I am interested in the archetype of the hero. One of the best books on the hero as archetype is probably by Joseph Campbell, "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" about the hero's journey. What are the characteristics that makes someone a hero? Books and movies are full of heroes and anti-heroes. What must a hero do to be so declared? Can a hero lose his mantle?

Taking two films, available on DVD, '300' and 'Beowulf,' I thought it would make possible a look at two types of hero. These films illustrate the modern slant on heroism as well as the mythology that leaves us these stories and names many many years after the hero's death.

In the film, 300, a story of ancient Sparta, the hero is King Leonidas, a man set in a world that was beautiful, mystical, brutal, and tragic, where men were trained from childhood to be warriors, to give their all for their cause and their people.

300 is a fictionalized version of the Battle of Thermopylae when the Persians were invading Greece and a small band of Spartans, led by Leonidas, stood off a huge army for three days.

Leonidas is the kind of hero who doesn't second-guess what he does. He knows how to love his woman, his child, his men, and his country. He has a strategic sense of what matters and stays focused on it at all cost.

What Leonidas does for his honor is more important than anything else. He has no doubts because the training has been ingrained his entire life. It does not come and go from him. He doesn't stumble into hero-hood. He knows the cost of what he is doing. He is a highly skilled warrior, but being a warrior is a tool for the greater goal in his mind-- protecting his culture. Personally, he wants glory but the right way through honor.

Beowulf, in one of our modern westerns, would be the professional gunmen who comes to town to rid it of the bad guys. Beowulf, if he existed, which is possible, was into that gig when English literature was still being barely written down. He was a monster and giant slayer who didn't mind enhancing his reputation to increase his pay.

Heroes do heroic deeds and some are noble in their doing of them; some get a little ignoble but rise eventually to being true to the hero creed. Beowulf fell into the latter category. He was into it for himself, wanted the reputation of being a hero, but in the end was willing to sacrifice himself for the good of others.

It takes a mythological deed (or many of them) to be a hero whose story is still being told a thousand years later. Heroes of that stature generally have spent their lifetimes being heroic. There are heroes who do these kind of deeds and deserve heroic recognition, but they won't be talked about for a thousand years.

The archetype of the hero is strength, willingness to do what needs doing, the ability to carry out what is required, living by a code, and sometimes, when it's an anti-hero, doing it in spite of himself/herself.

The word, hero, is bandied around often, books are full of heroes who aren't mythic; but when they are, like Ulysses, Hercules, Alexander, and others down through history, they won't be forgotten by tribes far removed from their own.

In looking at the mythology of heroes, they all wanted their names to be held proudly. Money wasn't their only goal. Sometimes they would even refuse money as they knew there were things that mattered more. Above all was a reputation that would withstand the test of time. You could become a king and still go down in history as a monster.

Like Alexander, Leonidas, of 300, was based on a real king of Sparta in 480 B.C. The character of Beowulf, in the fictional fragments (8th to 11th century), in the old English, may have been fiction, as were possibly King Arthur, Ulysses, and Hercules, but based on actual historic personages. Exaggerating for artistic or political purposes obviously isn't new.