6 On hero myths

On hero myths

The “Great Man” view of history

It is a truism that in the twentieth century impersonal forces, not individuals, make history. It was equally a truism that in the nineteenth century heroic individuals make history. The epitome of this nineteenth-century outlook was Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), whose biographies and histories were devoted to demonstrating the power that heroes had had or could yet have. Carlyle’s best-known book on heroes, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), celebrates 11 disparate figures grouped into six categories: the hero as divinity (Odin), the hero as prophet (Mahomet [Muhammed]), the hero as poet (Dante, Shakespeare), the hero as priest (Martin Luther, John Knox), the hero as thinker (Samuel Johnson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robert Burns), and the hero as ruler (Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon).

Carlyle opens his book with a statement that has come to epitomize the “Great Man” view of history:

For, as I take it, Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.

(Carlyle 1897 [1841], p. 1)

Heroes are saviors: “In all epochs of the world’s history, we shall find the Great Man to have been the indispensable saviour of his epoch, the lightning, without which the fuel never would have burnt” (Carlyle 1897 [1841], p. 13).

Yet for all the credit that Carlyle accorded heroes, they were for him as much at the mercy of history as in control of history. Carlyle praises heroes for above all their insight into the course of society rather than for the direction they impose on it. Unlike ordinary humans, who mistake appearance for reality, heroes see beyond appearance to reality: “A Hero, as I repeat, has this first distinction, which indeed we may call first and last, the Alpha and Omega of his whole Heroism, That he looks through the shows of things into things” (Carlyle 1897 [1841], p. 55).

Sometimes Carlyle does declare that heroes can alter history. For example, in his earlier French Revolution (1837), he writes of Mirabeau, whose death in 1791 was mourned by all of France, that “had Mirabeau lived, the History of France and of the World had been different” (Carlyle 1989 [1837], vol. 1, p. 444). But once Mirabeau dies, “the French Monarchy may now therefore be considered as, in all human probability, lost” (Carlyle 1989 [1837], vol. 1, p. 455). Carlyle castigates the hapless King Louis XVI less for failing to fend off revolution than for failing to recognize its coming. Conversely, Oliver Cromwell gets lauded less for bringing about the English Revolution than for grasping its imminence and acting in accordance with it.¹ Heroes do not ultimately impose their will on history. They subordinate themselves to history, the course of which is set by God.

Furthermore, the period determines the category of hero needed and even possible. For Carlyle, the hero as divinity could arise only in a pre-scientific age, presupposing as it does the “pagan” belief in the imminence of divinity in the physical world and in humanity. Although there have long been kings, kings as heroes are for Carlyle distinctly modern, needed as they are to overcome the wide modern divide between the spiritual and the material realms. By contrast, the hero as poet can arise in any age (see Carlyle 1897 [1841], p. 78). Still, heroes of thought as well as of action can save society, and Carlyle was writing to inspire thinkers to do so.

As stereotypical of the nineteenth century as Carlyle’s preoccupation with heroism was, Carlyle saw himself as a stalwart defender of heroism in a skeptical age:

I am well aware that in these days Hero-worship, the thing I call Hero-worship, professes to have gone out, and finally ceased. This, for reasons which it will be worth while some time to inquire into, is an age that as it were denies the existence of great men; denies the desirableness of great men. Show our critics a great man, a Luther for example, they begin to what they call “account” for him; not to worship him, but to take the dimensions of him—and bring him out to be a little kind of man! He was the “creature of the Time,” they say; the Time called him forth, the Time did everything, he nothing—but what we the little critic could have done too! … The Time call forth? Alas, we have known Times call loudly enough for their great man; but not find him when they called!

(Carlyle 1897 [1841], pp. 12–13)

For all of Carlyle’s emphasis on the role that the times play, he is still crediting heroes with great accomplishments.²

Even if Carlyle saw himself as bucking a trend, he was hardly the sole Victorian advocate of heroism, and the Victorian period has even been called an age of “hero worship” (see Hougton 1957, ch. 12). At the same time Carlyle was castigated by contemporaries, not merely by successors, for his stance. His most vitriolic critic was the pioneering sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), for whom the attribution of decisive events to the talents of individuals rather than to the fundamental laws of physical and social evolution is a hopelessly childish, romantic, and unscientific viewpoint (see Spencer 1874 [1873], esp. pp. 30–37; “The Social Organism,” reprinted in Spencer 1883 [1857], vol. 1, esp. pp. 388–392). Spencer ascribes the popularity of the Great Man approach to the “universal love of personalities,” to the satisfaction of “an instinct not very remotely allied to that of the village gossip,” and to the preference for explanations that are “easy to comprehend” (Spencer 1874 [1873], pp. 32–33).

Spencer argues that unless one deems the appearance of a great man a supernatural event, the appearance must itself be explained as the product of society at a certain stage of development. As he puts it in a passage that today sounds shockingly offensive,

True, if you please to ignore all that common observation, verified by physiology, teaches—if you assume that two European parents may produce a Negro child, or that from woolly-haired prognathous Papuans may come a fair, straight-haired infant of Caucasian type—you may assume that the advent of the great man can occur anywhere and under any conditions… . But if all biological science, enforcing all popular belief, convinces you that by no possibility will an Aristotle come from a father and mother with facial angles of fifty degrees, and that out of a tribe of cannibals, whose chorus in preparation for a feast of human flesh is a kind of rhythmical roaring, there is not the remotest chance of a Beethoven arising; then you must admit that the genesis of the great man depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown.

(Spencer 1874 [1873], pp. 34–35)

Rather than the cause of society, a great man is the product of society. In Spencer’s famous summary phrase, “Before he [the great man] can re-make his society, his society must make him” (Spencer 1874 [1873], p. 35). The changes that any great man makes are marginal and are only the direct causes of change. The underlying causes are the ones that produced the great man himself: “So that all those changes of which he is the proximate initiator have their chief causes in the generations he descended from” (Spencer 1874 [1873], p. 35). Mocking Carlyle, Spencer declares that if you wish to understand social change, “you will not do it though you should read yourself blind over the biographies of all the great rulers on record, down to Frederick the Greedy and Napoleon the Treacherous” (Spencer 1874 [1873], p. 37)—two of Carlyle’s favorite heroes.

Spencer’s metaphysical counterpart in the rejection of the influence of great men on history was the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831). While Hegel, unlike Spencer, praises the hero, he praises him for embodying the World Spirit in its predestined course of development. Hegel’s great man can be motivated by private gain yet still be serving society. Or, like Carlyle’s heroes, he can have “insight” into the times yet still be oblivious to the overall direction of the history that he is serving. As Hegel writes of Caesar,

In accomplishing his originally negative purpose—the autocracy over Rome—he at the same time fulfilled the necessary historical destiny of Rome and the world. Thus, he was motivated not only by his own private interest, but acted instinctively to bring to pass that which the times required. It is the same with all great historical individuals: their own particular purposes contain the substantial will of the World Spirit. They must thus be called “heroes.” … Such individuals have no consciousness of the Idea as such. They are practical and political men. But at the same time, they are thinkers with insight into what is needed and timely. They see the very truth of their age and their world, the next genus, so to speak, which is already formed in the womb of time.

(Hegel 1953, pp. 39–40)

While Hegel, writing before Carlyle, would have commended Carlyle for emphasizing the hero’s insight, he would have belittled him for making the hero the cause rather than the manifestation of change.

The twentieth century has spawned still stronger skepticism toward the impact of heroes, even in the face of the seemingly all too real impact of dictators like Hitler and Stalin.³ Defenders of heroism nevertheless remain. Perhaps the best known is philosopher Sidney Hook (1902–1989), author of The Hero in History (1943). Hook argues for a sensible middle ground between crediting heroes with everything, which he assumes Carlyle is doing, and crediting them with nothing. Unlike Carlyle, Hook is concerned only with heroes of action. He distinguishes between “eventful men,” whose actions happen to change history, and “event-making men,” whose actions are intended to change history. Eventful men have no special insight, and someone else in their place might have done the same. By contrast, Hook’s event-making men, like all of Carlyle’s heroes, alone have the insight to make the decisions they do. Despite his use of the term “men,” Hook includes women in both groups—for example, Catherine II of Russia as an event-making woman. Because only event-making persons act on the basis of their talents, only they deserve the epithet “hero”: “This distinction tries to do justice to the general belief that a hero is great not merely in virtue of what he does but in virtue of what he is” (Hook 1955 [1943], p. 154).

While granting that Carlyle was writing as a moralist and while faulting those who take him to have asserted that “all factors in history, save great men, were inconsequential” (Hook 1955 [1943], p. 14), Hook still maintains that, “literally construed, Carlyle’s notions of historical causation are clearly false, and where not false, opaque and mystical” (Hook 1955 [1943], p. 14). Hook thus grants that “the Spencerians, the Hegelians, and the Marxists of every political persuasion” have been right to reject his “extravagance” (Hook 1955 [1943], p. 15). But Hook contends that their denial of any role to heroes has been equally “extravagant.”

On the one hand Hook concedes that movements like the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Industrial Revolution were more than the handiwork of great men. Similarly, he concedes that no one could have prevented World War I: “no matter what individuals had occupied the chancellories of Europe in 1914, the historical upshot of commercial rivalries, Germany’s challenge to British sea power, chauvinist resentments in western Europe, the seething kettle of Balkan intrigue, would very probably have been much the same” (Hook 1955 [1943], p. 18).

On the other hand Hook asserts that individuals can make a difference. It was not inevitable that World War I would be fought the way it was. It was not inevitable that Hitler would be successful as Chancellor: “he was victorious not merely because of the widespread economic misery produced by the crisis. His political skill in unifying the right, ranging from Junker to industrialist to the frightened middle classes, together with Hindenburg’s support, played an important part” (Hook 1955 [1943], pp. 115–116).

Hook credits Lenin with the success of the Russian Revolution: whatever social unrest already existed in Czarist Russia, Lenin “capitalized” on it. Hook refuses to reduce individual decisions to expressions of the times. Decisions evince the character of the agents.

Hook thus proposes a compromise between the extremes of Carlyle and of Spencer. But he is actually close to Carlyle, for whom heroes may not create a new world ex nihilo but do act in accordance with the times. Carlyle does, however, venture far beyond Hook in his admiration for heroes, an admiration that amounts to worship.

Heroes and gods

Carlyle outright declares that heroes are not merely celebrated but “worshiped”: “in all times and places, the Hero has been worshipped” (Carlyle 1897 [1841], p. 15). Still, he seemingly does not mean literal worship. His heroes are not gods. Of the 11 discussed in On Heroes, the sole exception is Odin, who after death was deified by his followers. Carlyle attributes the deification partly to the boundlessness of his followers’ reverence: Odin’s followers “knew no limits to their admiration of him” (Carlyle 1897 [1841], p. 25). But more mundanely, he attributes the transformation to the loss of records that would have kept Odin tethered to humanity: “Why, in thirty or forty years, were there no books, any great man would grow mythic, the contemporaries who had seen him, being once all dead” (Carlyle 1897 [1841], pp. 25–26). For Carlyle, subsequent heroes have remained mere humans because records have survived. Consequently, “the Hero [as prophet] is not now regarded as a God among his fellow-men; but as one God-inspired, as a Prophet.” The hero as divinity is gone forever: “in the history of the world there will not again be any man, never so great, whom his fellowmen will take for a god” (Carlyle 1897 [1841], p. 42).

Aptly, Carlyle uses the term “mythic” synonymously with “divine”: “were there no books, any great man would grow mythic.” For even if most heroes are not divine, those heroes whose stories constitute myths are. Hero myths are stories about divine heroes—divine in effect, whether or not formally. To be sure, in the academic study of myth it is conventional to distinguish mere heroes, however glorious, from gods. It is even commonplace, especially among folklorists, to categorize the stories about most heroes as legends rather than myths.⁴ Yet contrary to convention, heroism can blur the line between the human and the divine—not by demoting gods to humans but by elevating humans to gods. More precisely, heroism, when recounted in myth, retains the distinction between the human and the divine but singles out the hero for making the leap from the one to the other.

Usually, the gap between the human and the divine is deemed insurmountable, especially in Western religions. The most egregious sin in the West is the attempt by humans to become gods, epitomized by the vain efforts of Adam and Eve and of the builders of the Tower of Babel. The hiatus between the human and the divine applies as fully to polytheistic religions as to monotheistic ones. For ancient Greeks, those who dared to seek divinity were killed for their hubris. Those who directly challenged the gods were often consigned to eternity in Tartarus.

Still, the West permits exceptions. In the ancient world the grandest exception was Heracles (Hercules), who, while born to Zeus, was still mortal, accomplished superhuman feats of strength, outmaneuvered death in his last three great feats, and was rewarded with immortality by Zeus for his yeoman service. Yet for some ancient writers such as Herodotus, Heracles’s very stature meant that he had been born a god. Greeks did establish cults to worship human heroes, but only after their deaths, when heroes had transcended ordinary constraints.⁵ The grandest exception to the divide in the West between humanity and divinity is, of course, Jesus. Yet even his capacity to be at once fully human and fully divine is taken to be a paradox, a paradox difficult to maintain in practice. Throughout its history Christianity has often veered between making Jesus merely an ideal human being, as in the Victorian period, and making him a sheer god, as in ancient Gnosticism.⁶

Rather than trying to dissolve the gap between the human and the divine, hero myths transform humans into virtual gods by conferring on them divine qualities.⁷ The qualities can range from physical attributes—strength, size, looks—to intangible ones—intelligence, drive, integrity. One measure of the humanity of Carlyle’s heroes is the limit of their power: to the extent that they cannot alter history, they are merely human. The difference between humans and gods may be of kind: often, gods can fly, can change shape, and live forever. Or the difference may be of degree: typically, gods are bigger, stronger, sexier, and smarter than humans. But so great is the difference of even degree that it still puts divinity beyond the reach of most. If anyone can aspire to become a Hollywood star, the few who make it are not coincidentally called gods. Classic Hollywood stars were drawn from the handsomest and the most beautiful. Even today, with a wider array of types, the biggest box office draws look the part. Thus it comes as a shock to learn that Mel Gibson is not very tall.

Carlyle himself acknowledges the divine aura of his human heroes. While “it was a rude gross error, that of counting the Great Man a god,” yet “it is at all times difficult to know what he is” (Carlyle 1897 [1841], p. 42). While claiming that we have advanced beyond the “pagan” practice of deifying humans, he acknowledges that we no longer do so only because our conceptions of God “are ever rising higher” rather than because “our reverence for these [heroic] qualities … is getting lower” (Carlyle 1897 [1841], p. 84). Of Napoleon, he asks, “Is he not obeyed, worshipped after his sort, as all the Tiaraed and Diademed of the world put together could not be?” (Carlyle 1897 [1841], pp. 84–85). Of Burns, he writes that listeners felt “that they never heard a man like this; that, on the whole, this is the man! In the secret heart of these people it still dimly reveals itself … that this rustic, with his black brows and flashing sun-eyes, and strange words moving laughter and tears, is of a dignity far beyond all others, incommensurable with all others” (Carlyle 1897 [1841], p. 85).

Of Dante and Shakespeare, he asks, “Have we not two mere Poets, if not deified, yet we may say beatified? Shakespeare and Dante are Saints of Poetry” (Carlyle 1897 [1841], p. 85). For Carlyle, hero worship is the source of all religion, including Christianity: “Hero-worship, heartfelt prostrate admiration, submission, burning, boundless, for a noblest godlike Form of Man—is not that the germ of Christianity itself?” (Carlyle 1897 [1841], p. 11).

Modern heroes

Some heroes, or kinds of heroes, fit only certain periods. For example, it is hard to imagine an aristocratic hero like Don Juan surviving into the twentieth century. Other heroes do survive, either because their appeal continues or because they are protean enough to adapt to the times. Heracles, the greatest of ancient heroes, was by no means confined to the crude image of him as Rambo-like—all brawn and no brains—but on the contrary has been depicted

in one century as the great, tragic sufferer, in another as the paragon of superhuman physical prowess and bravado, in another as the ideal nobleman and courtier, in another as the incarnation of rhetoric and intelligence and wisdom, in another as the divine mediator and a model of that way of life whose reward can only be heavenly, in another as a metaphysical struggler, and in yet another as a comic, lecherous, gluttonous monster or romantic lover, and in still another as the exemplar of virtue.

(Galinsky 1972, pp. 1–2)

In the twentieth century, as in prior centuries, not only have traditional heroes been transformed, but also new heroes and new kinds of heroes have emerged. If distinctively nineteenth-century heroes were the romantic hero (Byron’s Childe Harold) and the bourgeois hero (Flaubert’s Emma Bovary), then distinctively twentieth-century heroes include the ordinary person as hero (Miller’s Willy Loman), the comic hero (Roth’s Alexander Portnoy), the schlemiel as hero (Singer’s Gimpel the Fool), and the absurd hero (Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon). Far from divine, the contemporary hero is hopelessly human—mortal, powerless, amoral. The present-day hero is often lowly even within the human community—more the outsider than the insider, more the loser than the winner, more the villain than the savior. The contemporary hero is not a once-great figure who has fallen but a figure who has never risen. Sisyphus, not Oedipus, let alone Heracles, epitomizes contemporary heroism. Yet Sisyphus is still to be commended for never giving up. Persistence replaces success; survival replaces achievement. Old-fashioned heroic virtues like courage and duty give way to new ones like irony and detachment. Today’s hero, for example, is heroic in persisting without success.⁸ Because contemporary heroes scarcely reach the stature of gods, their stories scarcely constitute myths.

Yet it would surely be going much too far to argue that traditional heroism has died out. Present-day heroes in sports, entertainment, business, and politics are admired for their success, not for their mere persistence, and the acclaim conferred on them often reaches the same divine plateau as in times past. At most, one can argue that alongside the traditional notion of heroism as success has arisen the notion of heroism as persistence.

Myth and history

The connection between myth and history is blurry. To begin with, a traditional kind of hero might have lived but be credited with exaggerated deeds or attributes. A brave soldier might become fearless; a kindly soul might become saintly. Strength typically becomes omnipotence; knowledge becomes omniscience. Indeed, mere bravery, kindliness, strength, or knowledge would not suffice. Heroic qualities must be magnified to a more than human point.

Yet the magnifications need not be taken at face value. Americans can want to believe that George Washington was utterly truthful without fully accepting it. Brits may want very much to think that Princess Diana was wholly selfless without quite accepting the claim. Heroism permits and even requires make-believe. It may be fashionable to assert that in the wake of the contemporary exposé of public figures, no heroes remain, but in actuality, celebrities have lost little of their glitter. They remain heroes not in the face of their flaws but in defiance of their flaws, which are discounted. Heroes may have feet of clay, but they can still dance.

Heroes can be celebrated even when their historicity is doubted. Need Jesus have performed all of the miracles attributed to him for his life to remain a model for Christians? Need Oedipus have even lived for him to be a tragic hero not merely for ancient Greeks but also for twentieth-century Westerners?

Even indisputably fictional figures can serve as heroes. Cultural heroes like Sherlock Holmes and James Bond are idolized and emulated. They can even supersede real heroes exactly because they harbor no offscreen vices that must be overlooked. They simply personify virtues. Ironically, fictional heroes are even treated as if real: “When Conan Doyle killed Holmes off in The Final Solution, some London businessmen took to wearing mourning bands while, in 1954, the BBC broadcasted a special programme in honour of Holmes’ hundredth birthday, featuring interviews with his old school friends, teachers, etc.” (Bennett and Woollacott 1987, p. 14).

Holmes and Bond hold the same status for adults as fairy-tale figures do for children. They “occupy the space” between illusion and reality, between subjectivity and objectivity, between the inner world and the outer one. In the phrase coined by the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, they act as “transitional objects,” linking the one domain to the other. The need for them is never outgrown:

It is assumed here that the task of reality-acceptance is never completed, that no human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality, that the relief from this strain is provided by an intermediate area of experience … which is not challenged (arts, religion, etc.). This intermediate area is in direct continuity with the play area of the small child who is “lost” in play.

Winnicott 1991 [1971], p. 13)⁹

Classicist Paul Veyne begins his Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? (1988) as follows:

Did the Greeks believe in their mythology? The answer is difficult, for “believe” means so many things. Not everyone believed that Minos, after his death, continued being a judge in Hell or that Theseus fought the Minotaur, and they knew that poets [i.e., the tellers of myths] “lie.” However, … in the minds of the Greeks, Theseus had, nonetheless, existed… . As for Minos, Thucydides, at the cost of prodigious mental effort, uncovers the same core at the heart of this subject: “Of all those we know by hearsay, Minos was the earliest to have a navy.”

(Veyne 1988, p. 1)

Veyne shows that few Greeks rejected altogether the historicity of hero myths.

Furthermore, during the ancient period the line between the historical and the mythical kept shifting. One early strategy was to place heroes in a prior, sacred, “once upon a” time—a time distinct from the present, where heroes were no longer to be found. A later strategy was to remove the supernatural element from heroes. But heroes they remained, and the removal of the supernatural served only to bolster their historicity. Consequently, Veyne states that during the whole period from the fifth century BCE to the fourth century CE, “absolutely no one, Christians included, ever expressed the slightest doubt concerning the historicity of Aeneas, Romulus, Theseus, Heracles, Achilles, or even Dionysus; rather, everyone asserted this historicity” (Veyne 1988, p. 42).

Among those who insist on a clear-cut divide between history and myth, the most resolute has been the folklorist Lord Raglan, author of The Hero (1936). His proof that heroes are mythic is that they are not historical. Pitting the biographies of indisputably historical heroes like Alexander the Great and Napoleon against the biographies of “mythic” heroes like Thesesus and King Arthur, he argues that the kinds of events that occur in the lives of mythic heroes find no counterpart in the lives of historical ones, which serve as the standard against which to test disputed cases:

Another remarkable fact is that the hero of tradition [i.e., of myth] never wins a battle. It is very rarely that he is represented as having any companions at all, and when he has, he never trains them or leads them. The warrior kings of history, whether civilized or barbarian, have won their renown as leaders. When we think of them, we think of serried ranks, of the Argyraspides, of the Tenth Legion, of the Guard which dies but does not surrender, and the impis which think it better to go forward and die than to go back and die. But there is nothing like that in the stories of the heroes of tradition… . All his victories, when they are actual fights and not magical contests, are single combats against other kings, or against giants, dragons, or celebrated animals.

(Raglan 1936, p. 194)

Raglan concludes either that mythic heroes never lived at all or, at the least, that they never did the deeds for which they are extolled.

But it is in fact not so easy to sift out the historical from the mythical. For example, the nineteenth-century quest for the historical Jesus foundered not only because it was hard to determine which purported deeds and teachings were historical but also because the Gospels are a mix of would-be history and myth. As C. G. Jung puts it, “In the gospels themselves factual reports, legends, and myths are woven into a whole. This is precisely what constitutes the meaning of the gospels, and they would immediately lose their character of wholeness if one tried to separate the individual [i.e., the historical] from the archetypal [i.e., the mythic] with a critical scalpel” (Jung 1969 [1958], p. 88).

Historical events as well as persons can become mythicized. In a famous work written in 1907, the classicist F. M. Cornford argued that Thucydides, commonly deemed the first scientific, realistic, secular historian, actually wrote myth. The causes of the Peloponnesian War presented by Thucydides are not the decisions of Athenian and Spartan leaders, acting on the basis of self-interest, but Fate. His History of the Peloponnesian War should be read as an Aeschylean tragedy, with Athens itself as the tragic hero. Thucydides is not merely a moralist exposing the effect wreaked by the competing interests between city-states and within them but a myth maker presenting the consequences of superhuman Fate. Thucydides may pride himself, especially vis-à-vis Herodotus, on writing history, but he is really writing myth—or, better, history as myth. Hence the title of Cornford’s book: Thucydides Mythistoricus. Thucydides cannot escape myth.¹⁰

Notes

1For this corrective of the stereotypical view of Carlyle, see Rosenberg 1974, pp. 188–193; Goldberg 1993, pp. lviii–lx.

2Carlyle’s concern with outward accomplishment sharply distinguishes his conception of heroism from that of Friedrich Nietzsche. The achievement of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, or “overman,” is personal, not societal. Rather than praising the Übermensch for changing his society, Nietzsche praises the society that produces him: see Nietzsche 1966 [1954], especially pt. 1.

3For the classic twentieth-century critique of heroism, see Bentley 1957 [1944]). Bentley attacks what he calls “heroic vitalism” for its anti-democratic outlook. For a standard attack on Carlyle for promoting fascism, see also Grierson 1933. For a standard defense of Carlyle against the charge, see Cassirer 1946, pp. 190–191, 216–223. On the association of Carlyle with leftwing as well as rightwing political sentiments, see Goldberg 1993, pp. lxv–lxxxvi.

4According to this distinction, myths take place in a primordial past and describe the creation of the physical world by gods, animals, or “culture heroes.” Legends take place in a less distant past within the present physical world, and they “tell of migrations, wars and victories, deeds of past heroes, chiefs, and kings, and succession in ruling dynasties” (Bascom 1965, p. 4). See also Dundes 1970, pp. 164–165.

5See Farnell 1921; Larson 1995.

6On the changing conceptions of Jesus, see Pelikan 1985 and, classically, Schweitzer 1961 [1910].

7By contrast, classicist Cedric Whitman, limiting himself to ancient Greek heroes, maintains that they embodied “the heroic paradox” of seeking divinity, specifically immortality, yet accepting their human mortality: “to return to the motivation of the heroic: we mentioned as one element the urge toward divinity, a kind of wish to be a god or to be godlike… . On the other hand, there is also a passionate knowledge, a desperate self-knowledge, among all these heroes, that they are mortal and that they are destined to die” (Whitman 1982, pp. 21–22).

8On the romantic hero, see Reed 1974. On the bourgeois hero, see Giraud 1979 [1957]. On the ordinary person as hero, see Miller 1949, pp. 1, 3. On the comic hero, see Smith 1981. On the schlemiel as hero, see Wisse 1971. On the absurd hero, see Galloway 1970 [1966]. On the difficulty of heroism in the modern world, see Levin 1950; O’Faolain 1956. In response, see Kern 1958.

9For a broader analysis of play, which, rather than segregating play from reality, seeks the “play element” in culture, including myth, see Huizinga 1949, esp. chs. 7–8.

10On the main theories of hero myths, see Segal 1999, pp. 117–134.

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