‘I have a journey, sir, shortly to go;
My master calls me, I must not say no.’
Kent in King Lear, v.iii
In the distant land of Mordor, says Gandalf, the old wizard, there is a mighty volcanic mountain. Your task, he tells Frodo, the young hero, is to journey to that far-off place, carrying a priceless ring, and cast it into the Cracks of Doom. When Squire Trelawney and Dr Livesey look at the parchment map the young hero Jim Hawkins has found in a dead man’s chest, they see that it reveals the place on a far-off desert island where a fabulous pirate treasure is buried. They at once agree that they must sail in search of it. When Odysseus embarks with his men after the sack of Troy, his only desire is to return home to his far-off island kingdom of Ithaca and his beloved wife Penelope.
No type of story is more instantly recognisable to us than a Quest. Far away, we learn, there is some priceless goal, worth any effort to achieve: a treasure; a promised land; something of infinite value. From the moment the hero learns of this prize, the need to set out on the long hazardous journey to reach it becomes the most important thing to him in the world. Whatever perils and diversions lie in wait on the way, the story is shaped by that one overriding imperative; and the story remains unresolved until the objective has been finally, triumphantly secured.
Some of the most celebrated stories in the world are quests: Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The theme has inspired myths, legends, fairy tales and stories of all kinds, right up to such popular modern examples as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Richard Adams’s Watership Down or Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of The Lost Ark.
On the face of it, stories based on the plot of the Quest could hardly seem more disparate. Consider, for instance, the variety of the goals the hero is seeking. It may be some fabulous buried treasure, as in Stevenson’s Treasure Island or Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. It may be some other, rather more mysterious priceless object, such as the Golden Fleece or the Holy Grail sought by King Arthur’s knights, or the Golden Firebird, sought by the hero of one of the most famous of Slav folk tales, or the most sacred treasure in Jewish tradition, the ‘Ark of the Covenant’ in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It may be ‘home’, as in Odysseus’s wanderings after the Trojan War. It may be some new home, as was sought by Aeneas, or by the Jews in their exodus from Egypt towards the ‘promised land’, or by the fleeing rabbits in Watership Down. It may be the secret of immortality, as was sought by Gilgamesh in his journey to the end of the world – or simply the distant ‘freedom’ dreamed-of by the escapers in so many Second World War prison-camp escape stories. It may be the Celestial City, Paradise itself, as in Pilgrim’s Progress or the Divine Comedy.
Yet when we come to examine such tales more closely, we find that they reveal some startling similarities.
We begin with the reason why the hero and his companions set out on their journey in the first place. The Quest usually begins on a note of the most urgent compulsion. For the hero to remain quietly ‘at home’ (or wherever he happens to be) has become impossible. Some fearful threat has arisen. The ‘times are out of joint’. Something has gone seriously and terrifyingly wrong.
The story of Aeneas begins amid the roaring flames, billowing smoke and crashing masonry of his beloved Troy, as it is being sacked by the Greeks. Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress has a nightmare vision in which he sees that the city he lives in ‘will be burned with fire from heaven’. In Watership Down, one of the rabbits in Sandleford warren, the intuitive little Fiver, feels ‘some terrible thing – coming closer and closer’, and has a vision of the field where he and the other rabbits play ‘covered with blood’. After living many years in Egypt, the Jews are being subjected to a savage persecution, their lives ‘made bitter with hard bondage’, their sons murdered.
In the midst of this fear and suffering comes the Call. Amid the smoking ruins of Troy, the ghost of Aeneas’s lost wife Creusa looms up, ‘larger than life’, to tell him that across ‘a great waste of ocean’, in ‘the Western land’, he will find a new home. Christian meets Evangelist, who points out a distant ‘shining light’ and tells him that he must head for it. Fiver’s premonitions of some great disaster overshadowing Sandleford warren become so acute that a small band of rabbits meet in the field and decide to flee into the gathering dusk. Moses has a terrifying vision of God in the Burning Bush, telling him that the Jews must flee Egypt, and that they will eventually be brought up into ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’.
The Grail Quest begins with the arrival at King Arthur’s court of a strange knight. He proves to be the only knight who can sit safely in the Siege Perilous, the ‘Seat of Danger’, at the Round Table: and this seemingly miraculous arrival of the young hero Sir Galahad is seen as the signal for the long-promised quest for the Holy Grail, ‘to free our country from the enchantments and strange events which have troubled it so often and so long’. There is a terrible clap of thunder, the hall is lit by a ray of more than earthly light, and the knights are given an ethereal prevision of the Grail for which they are about to set off in search.
So subtly constructed is the Odyssey, with its flashbacks and shifts in the centre from which the narrative is related, that, as Homer arranges the story, we do not begin with Odysseus at all. The story begins with the terrible threat overhanging the kingdom of Ithaca, from which its king Odysseus has been absent for many years. Amid the riots and debauches of the suitors for the hand of his queen Penelope (who has all but given up hope that Odysseus will ever return), the Call comes in a visit by the goddess Athene to his son Telemachus. She sends him forth to search for his lost father, almost as if young Telemachus is himself the hero of the quest. It is not until some considerable time later that we finally join up with the real quest motivating the poem: that of Odysseus seeking to return home, which had of course begun long before, like that of Aeneas, in the smoking wreck of Troy.
Surrounded by this atmosphere of menace and constriction, the Quest hero and his friends feel under intense compulsion to get away. Even so, they may face every kind of discouragement and opposition before they can depart. Aeneas and his friends only escape from Troy by the skin of their teeth. Christian is universally scorned when he tells of his fearful premonitions, and announces his intention to leave. The little group of rabbits with Fiver are subject to a violent effort to stop them getting away by the leaders of the warren (it is only later they discover what a near thing their escape has been – shortly after their departure the whole warren is gassed and gouged out by bulldozers). The suitors make a determined effort to stop Telemachus by force. While the longest struggle of all is faced by the Jews in Egypt, who only escape the clutches of the tyrannical Phaoroah in Egypt after the land has been smitten with seven plagues. But at last, led on by visions of a goal which has become more precious and desirable to them than anything in the world, the hero and his companions set out.1
We can say ‘the hero and his companions’ because a distinctive mark of the Quest is the extent to which, more than in any other kind of story, the hero is not alone in his adventures. The story does ultimately centre round the single figure of the hero. But more consistently than in any other type of story, we are also made aware of the presence and importance of the friends who accompany him.
In fact the relationship of the hero to his companions assumes one of four general forms: and since these basic types of relationship are also found, more sporadically, through stories of all kinds, they must be noted.
Firstly, the hero’s companions may simply be a large number of undifferentiated appendages, few if any of whom we even know by name. Such are the twelve boatloads of men who set out from Troy with Odysseus, Aeneas’s Trojans or the main body of the Jews who accompany Moses.
Secondly, the hero may have an alter-ego who has no real distinguishing mark except his fidelity. Christian, for instance, has Faithful; Aeneas’s close friend is ‘fidus Achates’; Frodo in The Lord of The Rings has the ‘faithful Sam Gamgee’2 (another instance of this relationship in a quite different type of story is Hamlet’s with his ‘faithful Horatio’).
Thirdly, the hero may have a subtler type of alter-ego whose role is to serve as a foil, displaying qualities the opposite of those shown by the hero. In the story of the Jewish exodus, for instance, Moses is shadowed in this way by his brother Aaron. Whenever Moses is being particularly faithful to his commission to lead the Jews into the Promised Land (as when he is up on Mount Sinai, receiving the ten commandments), Aaron is likely to be embodying infidelity and disloyalty (as in inciting the Jews to worship the Golden Calf). When the hero in the Epic of Gilgamesh sets out to slay the giant Humbaba, he takes with him his friend Enkidu; whenever Gilgamesh expresses courage and confidence, it is Enkidu who expresses the opposite emotions, fear and doubt. Equally, whenever the hero is in negative mode, it may be the alter-ego’s role to be positive: as when Christian is overcome with suicidal despair in the dungeons of Doubting Castle, and has to be reassured by Faithful’s successor as his companion, Hopeful. This kind of relationship where the chief companion embodies compensatory qualities missing in the hero (though often in an ‘inferior’ or not fully-developed way) is of enormous importance in stories, and we shall come across many other examples: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Lear and the Fool, Don Giovanni and Leporello, Wooster and Jeeves, to name but a few.
Fourthly, in the most fully-differentiated form of the relationship between the Quest hero and his companions, the latter are each given distinct characteristics which complement each other, and add up to a ‘whole’. In Watership Down, for instance, the hero and leader of the rabbits is Hazel. But he relies heavily on the physical strength of Bigwig, the rational planning capacities of Blackberry and the intuitive powers of Fiver; and without all their separate contributions combined, the Quest could not succeed. A strikingly similar balance can be seen in the group who set out on the Quest in King Solomon’s Mines. Their leader and the story’s hero is Allan Quatermain: his companions are the ‘bull-like’ Sir Henry Curtis, representing physical strength; the immaculate Captain Good, who represents rational calculation (it is he who saves them all by predicting a solar eclipse from his nautical almanac); while the intuitive principle is represented by their mysterious, regal Zulu companion, Umbopa, who seems to have more hidden knowledge of the goal they are heading for than he lets on, for reasons which eventually emerge.
The essential pattern of the journey in a Quest is always the same. The hero and his companions go through a succession of terrible, often near-fatal ordeals, followed by periods of respite when they recoup their strength, receiving succour and guidance from friendly helpers to send them on their way. In other words, after the initial feeling of constriction which dominates the start of the story, we now experience the journey itself as a series of alternating phases of life-threatening constriction followed by life-giving release. We shall now consider each in turn: first, the nature of the ordeals; then that of the hero’s allies, who rescue him and help him towards his goal.
The first problem facing the hero and his companions is the nature of the terrain across which they have to make most of their journey. Its essence is that it is wild, alien and unfriendly: a desert or wilderness (the Jews, Allan Quatermain); a forest (e.g., ‘the Waste Forest’, ‘vast and labyrinthine in its depths’, in which the Grail-seekers have most of their adventures); moorland or mountainous countryside (Christian, Frodo); a countryside full of dangers from animals and men (Watership Down); or the wild and treacherous sea (Odysseus, the Argonauts, Aeneas, Treasure Island).
Some of the perils they encounter therefore are simply those of the hostile terrain itself. Odysseus and Aeneas are caught in great storms at sea. The Jews and Allan Quatermain face terrible ordeals through lack of food and water, from which they are miraculously saved, in ‘thrilling escapes from death’, by the fall of manna or the discovery of a waterhole. No sooner has Christian left his ‘City of Destruction’ than he is almost sucked down to his death in the Slough of Despond.
But rather more specific obstacles than these stand between the hero and his goal, and these fall into four general categories.
Firstly the hero and his companions are likely to encounter ‘monsters’. The episode in the Odyssey, for instance, in which Odysseus and his men are trapped in the cave of the man-eating, one-eyed giant Polyphemus, and finally make their ‘thrilling escape’ by blinding the Cyclops and concealing themselves under his sheep, may be read in isolation just like a miniature version of the Overcoming the Monster plot. But, inevitably, because such episodes are here playing only a subsidiary role in the whole story, they cannot usually be told at great length, and are often passed over much more sketchily.
Aeneas and his men have a fearsome battle with the Harpies, loathsome beasts, half-woman, half-bird. The Argonauts also encounter the Harpies, are set on elsewhere by a race of six-handed giants and, on the island of Babycos, one of them has to face in single-combat the dreaded King Amycus, who has previously challenged and killed every passer-by. Allan Quatermain and his friends have scarcely set out than they have to kill an enormous, deadly bull-elephant. Christian has his encounters with the dragon-like Apollyon and the Giant Despair. The Jews are threatened first by the pursuing armies of the Egyptians, then by the giant ‘sons of Anak’. Frodo and his companions are threatened with death by a whole range of monstrous opponents, from the mysterious ‘Black Riders’ to the fearsome giant spider Shelob. While the Grail-seekers have on various occasions to fight tremendous battles in the forest with mysterious ‘Black Knights’, who are usually holding captive some beautiful maiden.
The second specific peril the Quest hero has to face is rather more deceptive and treacherous: the ‘Temptation’. This often, but not always, involves some beautiful and captivating woman. The essence of the Temptation is that it holds out the promise of some physical gratification. It may be sexually arousing. It may offer rich food and intoxicating wines. It may just offer the hero a time of ease and pleasure, in contrast to the hard and austere nature of the task he has been set. In fact to surrender to a Temptation may be as unambiguously deadly as confrontation with a Monster. But often the danger the hero runs is simply that he will be seduced and lulled into forgetting the great task he has undertaken, and will abandon his Quest under some beguiling spell. The most complete picture of the various forms the Temptation may take is given in the Odyssey:
(1) the beautiful but deadly Sirens who, like the Lorelei of German legend, lure sailors to their doom by their bewitching songs. Their only aim is to kill.
(2) the beautiful enchantress Circe, who imprisons all visitors to her island by turning them magically into animals (symbolising the way they have surrendered to their ‘animal’ appetites). But she does not kill them.
(3) Calypso, another beautiful enchantress, who falls in love with Odysseus and so captivates him that he stays seven years in her cave. But, although restive, he stays voluntarily.
(4) the simple, enervating captivation of the Land of the Lotus Eaters, which saps all will in an atmosphere of relaxed self-indulgence. This traps many of Odysseus’s men until they are forcibly dragged back to their ships.
For Aeneas, the chief temptation is of the Calypso type: his love affair with Dido, the widowed queen of Carthage, which is brought to an abrupt end when the messenger of the gods, Mercury, is sent by Jupiter to ask the hero ‘what can you possibly gain by living at wasteful leisure in African lands?’, and to order him peremptorily back on his quest. Much the same temptation ensnares the Jews when they are lured into committing ‘whoredom with the daughters of Moab’, and the Argonauts when they arrive on the island of Lemnos to find that the women have killed all their menfolk and are avid for new lovers. It is Heracles who on this occasion strides angrily round the island with his club, sternly recalling Jason’s men to their duty.
For the rabbits of Watership Down, the chief temptation turns out to be a cross between the Land of the Lotus Eaters and the deadly Sirens (the four aspects, or gradations of the Temptation are in fact more closely linked than might at first appear). They are made welcome at a strange warren which at first sight seems an ideal place for them to stay, with plenty of food, ample room and no apparent danger. But gradually (through the intuitive Fiver) they sense that there is something eerie and sinister about the life of ease lived by the sleek, well-fed but cowed rabbits in the new warren. They discover, to their horror, that it is in fact a kind of luxurious slave-camp, kept by the local farmer as a source of food: and that if they stay there they are sure to die. For Christian and Faithful, the town of Vanity Fair, offering ‘all the delights of this world’, proves to be much the same kind of deadly snare, in which Faithful loses his life, and from which Christian only narrowly escapes to continue the journey alone.
For the knights of the Grail, sworn to chastity, temptation is firmly of the Siren-type. When Sir Percival loses his horse, he meets ‘a timid maiden’ in the forest, who offers him another ‘huge and black’, which carries him off uncontrollably for ‘three days or more’. Coming to a black river, burning with fire, Percival crosses himself, whereupon the horse throws him: and he wakes up trapped, foodless, on a precipitous island in the middle of the sea. In the heat of the day a handsome ship approaches, and sitting in it, under an awning, is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. She erects a shady tent on the shore and invites Percival to an exquisite meal, with the most potent wine he has ever drunk: and then implores him to make love to her, saying ‘you have not hungered to possess me half as much as I have wanted you, for you are one of the knights I was most passionately set on having’ (as we have already seen, there is little new about the world of James Bond). As they are about to climb together into a great bed, Percival catches sight of the cross on his sword-hilt; he crosses himself, the tent vanishes in a puff of foul-smelling smoke, and the ship hurtles away at unnatural speed across the ocean, leaving a wake of fire rising from storm-tossed waves.
Of course the Temptation has much in common with the Monster, except that the latter threatens the hero by direct confrontation, while the former seeks to lure him to his doom by guile and seduction. The Sirens are only Predators in another guise. While the enchantresses who seek to imprison travellers by their spells, or the arts of love, are another version of Holdfast. Nevertheless, if they are mastered or overruled in some way, these Temptresses may completely change their nature, or rather their relationship to the hero. From being malign, destructive and a hindrance, they can become the most benign of allies. When Odysseus is given the magic herb by Hermes which enables him to withstand Circe’s spells, he can persuade her to release all her victims from their enchantment. And though he stays with her, feasting and making love for another year, she in the end releases him with all sorts of aid and vital guidance for his journey. Similarly Calypso, at the behest of the gods, sends him on his way with every kind of equipment and good advice. The Temptresses have in fact been transformed into that other kind of crucially important figure the hero meets on his journey, the ‘helper’, whom we shall be looking at shortly.
A third familar type of ordeal is the need for the hero and his companions to travel an exact and perilous path between two great opposing dangers. For the Argonauts these are the mighty ‘clashing rocks’, the Symplegades, between which they have to sail at exactly the right moment to avoid being crushed to death. For Odysseus the ‘deadly opposites’ are the great whirlpool Charybdis and the six-headed monster, the Scylla, which stand on each side of a narrow gulf. To avoid the first Odysseus steers his ship too near Scylla, who seizes six of his men; later he returns on his own and this time has a ‘thrilling escape’ from Charybdis. For Christian, the ‘straight and narrow way’ he has to follow is emphasised like this on several occasions, as when he has to pass between two fierce lions, or tread a delicate path through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, avoiding a deep ditch on one side and a treacherous bog on the other. Lancelot, in the Grail Quest, also has to pass between two lions. For the Jews, the journey between the ‘opposites’ is represented by the occasion when the Red Sea rolls back like a great ‘wall unto them, on their right hand and on their left’, leaving a dry passage for them to cross over safely; while, when the armies of Phaoroah pursue them, the ‘opposites’ show their deadly nature by rushing together again, like the Symplegades, engulfing ‘the chariots and the horsemen and all the host’. And there is no moment more hazardous for Allan Quatermain and his little party as that when, foodless and almost freezing to death, they have to cross the narrow, snowy pass exactly between two great symmetrical mountains, the Breasts of Sheba, which is the only way through from the desert to the lost land of Solomon which is their goal.
A final, rather different kind of ordeal which the Quest hero may have to undergo before arriving at his goal is a visit to the underworld, inhabited by the spirits of the dead. In some cases, this is simply a horrific experience, as for Christian on his passage through the Valley of the Shadow of Death:
‘we saw there hobgoblins, satyrs and dragons of the pit; we heard also in that valley a continual howling and yelling, as of people under unutterable misery... Death does always spread his wings over it ... dreadful ... utterly without order.’
In other instances, however, the journey through the underworld is not just a harrowing ordeal: it serves a deeper purpose, enabling the hero to contemplate the fate of those who have lived before, and also to consult them on matters vital to his future. When Odysseus is guided by Circe to the gate of the netherworld which lies beyond the River of Fear and the City of Perpetual Mist, on the very edge of the world, he meets the long-dead seer Teiresias, who gives him the advice which will enable him, alone of all his men, to reach his goal; predicting for the hero exactly how the rest of his journey and his life will unfold. When Aeneas finally arrives on the shores of Italy, his first duty (as he has been advised by a ghostly vision of his dead father Anchises) is to pay a visit to the maiden-priestess, the Cumaean Sibyl. Beside an echoing cavern in the mountainside, the Sibyl summons up the god of the oracle within:
‘suddenly ... her hair fell in disarray... her bursting heart was wild and sad, She appeared taller and spoke in no mortal tones.’
The prophetess gives him careful instructions as to how he can descend into the underworld (Aeneas first has to search ‘the endless forest’, with the aid of two doves, for the ‘golden bough’, which is protected in the dark of the forest by a little circle of light). They eventually make their their descent, witnessing every kind of monster and horror, and the shades of the damned enduring eternal punishment. Finally they come to the Land of Joy and the Fortunate Woods, where they find the wise old Anchises who, like Teiresias, reveals to Aeneas the nature of the ordeals he still has to face, his future life and the glorious prospects for his descendants when the new city of Rome has been founded. With this advice and guarantee of his eventual success, Aeneas is at last ready for the final stages of his Quest.3
In addition to all the negative figures the hero and his companions meet on the journey, they also, as we have seen, encounter some very different figures: the ‘helpers’ who give them positive assistance, ranging from periods of respite to crucial guidance. And among these two very important figures predominate, who are to be met with in countless guises, not just in Quest stories but throughout literature.
We have already begun to meet them in the characters of the old seers Teiresias and Anchises on the one hand, and that of the Sibylline priestess on the other. These are the figures of a benevolent, usually wise old man, and a beautiful young (though often mysteriously ageless) woman.
At the most basic level, the old man and the young woman may simply provide hospitality, rest, food, nursing care and other material assistance, as Odysseus receives from the kindly King Alcinous and his daughter, the Princess Nausicaa, when he is washed up exhausted on their island, after being shipwrecked. A similar pair appear to help Allan Quatermain and his friends when they arrive in the lost land of Solomon: the old man Infadoo who warns them of many dangers, and the beautiful Foulata.
In fact the ‘old man’ and the ‘young woman’ are of ever greater significance to the hero the nearer they come to being invested with supernatural powers. Their role is not so much to intervene in the action as to act as guides and advisers, drawing on supernatural wisdom and prescience. Perhaps the supreme example of such a pair of guides in literature are the venerable sage Virgil and beautiful Beatrice who lead Dante on his journey up to Paradise in the Divine Comedy.
In the stories we are considering here, the supreme example of a ‘wise old man’ must be the mysterious figure who from start to finish guides the Jews on their hazardous journey to the promised land, the ‘Ancient of Days’, Jahweh himself. Not only does he appear to Moses at crucial moments of the story to reprimand, advise and warn him, but he gives many ‘signs’ to the Jews that they are on the right path, such as the miraculous ‘pillar of fire’ which leads them on through the trackless wilderness. It is no accident that in all attempts which have ever been made by artists or film-makers to personify this figure (as in paintings showing the handing down of the tablets of stone to Moses on Sinai), he is always represented as an immensely patriarchal, bearded, wise old man.
The outstanding example of a young but ageless feminine figure is she who assists Odysseus, the ‘flashing-eyed goddess of wisdom’ Athene, ‘tall, beautiful and accomplished’; who watches over and guides her protégé through every peril, and fights for his cause in the counsels of the gods against the hero’s chief oppponent, the vengeful Poseidon (a similar, through less intimate role is played for Aeneas by Venus, the goddess of love).
In the Quest for the Grail, the part of the ‘wise old man’ is played by the succession of hermits and holy men, whose chief role is to interpret to the heroes the meaning of the great tests and ordeals they have just undergone, and to give warnings for the future. Similarly, at various points in the story, mysterious young women of unblemished virtue appear to guide the heroes on their way – particularly important being the beautiful maiden who at last appears to summon the three supreme heroes, Galahad, Percival and Bors, onto the ship which will take them over the sea to begin the closing stages of the Quest.
In Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian is given supernatural guidance along his path by the grave ‘wise old man’ Evangelist, and by the three angelic ‘Shining Ones’. He is also given more mundane assistance and hospitality by the three ‘grave and beautiful damsels’ who live in the Palace Beautiful: and it is they at last who point out to Christian on the horizon the Delectable Mountains, the final gateway to his mysterious goal.
In modern storytelling there is no more memorable an example of these archetypal figures than the two who play such a crucial role in guiding Frodo on his mighty Quest in The Lord of the Rings, the all-seeing old wizard Gandalf and his ally, the beautiful, ethereal, visionary queen Galadriel.4
At last the heroes of our Quest stories come to the edge of the great goal towards which, through so many perils and ordeals, they have been journeying so long. Odysseus at last reaches his island of Ithaca. Aeneas reaches Italy where he is to make his new home. Jason arrives in Colchis, home of the Golden Fleece. After forty years in the wilderness, the Jews at last cross over the river Jordan and arrive in ‘the promised land’. The rabbits reach Watership Down, which they decide is the perfect place to settle and to make their new home.
We now discover one of the most surprising things about the Quest plot. Most people, if one talks about a ‘quest’, will say ‘Oh yes, a story about a journey’ (the very word ‘quest’, from the Latin quaere, to seek, after all means ‘a search’) But in fact the journey in a Quest only makes up half the story.
It has taken Odysseus twelve books of the Odyssey to get back to Ithaca: but there are still twelve books to go before the story is finally over. Aeneas has reached Italy by the sixth book of the Aeneid: but the poem has twelve books in all. When the Jews reached their promised land ‘flowing with milk and honey’, or the rabbits reach Watership Down, there is still a huge part of the story left to unfold. In almost all the quests we have been looking at (and in many others), the journey turns out to have been only the first part of the tale. The second part, which begins when the hero is actually within sight of his goal, sees him having to face a final great ordeal, or series of ordeals, which may take as long to describe as everything which has gone before. It is this final struggle which is necessary for the hero to lay hold of his prize and to secure it.
The entire second half of the Odyssey, for instance, describes what follows when Odysseus arrives incognito back on his island, to find his kingdom in near-total disarray, overshadowed by the arrogance, greed and dissipation of the infesting army of suitors. We see him travel across the island to arrive at his palace, disguised as a beggar, treated by the suitors like dirt. His queen Penelope has finally despaired of ever seeing him again, and decreed that she will marry anyone who can bend Odysseus’s mighty bow, and shoot an arrow through a row of axe-heads. The suitors all try and fail miserably. Finally Odysseus reveals himself in all his kingly majesty (in a way we have not seen at any time before in the story). He seizes the bow, passes the test with ease (‘the test which only the true hero can pass’), and he and his son Telemachus then turn on the suitors and massacre them. Thus is he finally reunited with his loving Penelope, and thus does he triumphantly reclaim his kingdom.
No sooner has Aeneas returned from his visit to the underworld in the Aeneid than the Trojans recognise that they have in fact at last arrived at the very place, the mouth of the River Tiber, where the gods intend they should settle. And at first all seems set for a quick and happy ending to the story. They are warmly welcomed by the local king Latinius, because prophecy has long foretold that strangers would arrive, bringing great honour to his land: and that their leader would marry his daughter, the beautiful Princess Lavinia, who has been vainly wooed by every prince in Italy, above all by the great Turnus, king of the nearby Rutulians.
But when the Princess is promised to Aeneas, black jealousy seizes Turnus’s heart: and gradually the storm clouds gather for Aeneas’s last and most terrible ordeal. The entire second half of the poem is taken up with describing how the tribes gather from all over the surrounding countrsyide, to hurl the Trojan interlopers back into the sea; the mustering of two great armies; the first skirmishes; a tremendous battle, which the Trojans survive only by the skin of their teeth; and finally the titanic single combat between Aeneas and his ‘dark rival’, which at first it seems the hero will lose. But it ends at last, with his protective goddess Venus hovering over him, in his total victory.
Again, when the Argonauts arrive in Colchis to claim the Golden Fleece, the evil King Aetes tells Jason that he must face three tests, far worse than anything the Argonauts had met on their journeyings. First he must yoke two monstrous, brazen-hoofed, fire-breathing bulls, which live in an underground cavern, and plough a great field. Then he must sow the field with dragon’s teeth, from which will spring up an army of fierce warriors, and slay them. Finally, if he survives all this, he must somehow slip through the defences of the fearsome, unsleeping dragon which is coiled round the tree on which the shining fleece hangs, guarding it night and day.
It seems like mission impossible. But fortunately for Jason, just as happened when Theseus arrived in Crete to challenge the Minotaur, he has already won the love of a ‘helper’ of supernatural powers, the tyrant’s beautiful daughter, the Princess Medea. Just as Ariadne provided Theseus with the magic thread, so Medea provides Jason with a magic salve, which enables him to withstand every onslaught of the mad bulls. When he has sown the field with dragon’s teeth, and is confronted with the mass of armed warriors, he is again saved from seemingly inevitable death, this time by his own ingenuity, when he throws a rock into the middle of them, so that they all turn on each other. Finally, when Medea learns that her enraged father is treacherously planning to murder Jason and all his companions while they are sleeping, she secretly leads him by night to the sacred grove where the Golden Fleece hangs, armed with a magic drug which renders the dragon unconscious. At last he can seize his prize.
When the Jews arrive in the Promised Land (without Moses or Aaron, whom God has decreed should die before the goal is reached, for allowing their faith in his protection to waver), they face a series of ‘final ordeals’ just as great as those confronting the other Quest heroes: a series of tremendous battles with the tribes who already live there, beginning with the great siege of Jericho, and culminating in their victory over ‘the Thirty One Kings’.
Halfway through the story of the Holy Grail, when it is clear that only three knights, Galahad, Percival and Bors, are worthy to undertake the final stages of the Quest, there is a kind of complete scene-shift to mark the second part of the story from the first. We leave ‘the Waste Forest’ and travel with the three heroes across the sea, in a miraculous ship steered by a beautiful maiden. When the heroes disembark, they face their last great series of ordeals, including the bloodiest battle of the story, the capture and destruction of a grim castle where many Princesses have been slain. All this prepares them for the mystical climax when they arrive at another mysterious castle, to see the Holy Grail itself borne in by angels, with a vision of Christ’s presence hovering above them.
When Allan Quatermain and his friends finally cross over the great mountain barrier, they have similarly reached the halfway point of their story. They have at last left behind the torturing heat of the desert, and they find themselves looking down on the breathtakingly beautiful, lush countryside of Solomon’s lost kingdom, ringed by blue mountains. They are greeted by the natives as gods, and led along a great, ancient highway to the capital, where they find that the country is under the evil sway of the tyrranical King Twala, and his hideous old hench-woman, the witch Gagool, hundreds of years old.
They discover that their mysteriously regal companion on the journey, Umbopa, is in fact the true king of this land, returning to claim his throne from the usurper Twala; and again, like other heroes, they have to face three ordeals. In the first they fall into Twala’s power, while attempting to rescue the beautiful Foulata, a local girl who has become attached to them. By cunning use of the almanac predicting a lunar eclipse, they terrify Twala’s followers and make ‘a thrilling escape from death’. Second is the great battle between the followers of Twala and those of Umbopa, which culminates in the tyrant’s death. Thirdly, the climax to the whole story, is their journey with Gagool into the series of vast, mysterious caves in the heart of the mountains, which turns into a combination of ‘visit to the underworld’, ‘overcoming the monster’, ‘liberating the treasure from the dark enclosing space’ and ‘thrilling escape from death’ all in one. In one cavern they find the petrified corpses of the kings of the land, sitting round a stone table. In the last they come across the legendary treasure of Solomon, the richest hoard of diamonds the world has ever known, shining in the darkness. At this point, Gagool, the ‘guardian of the treasure’, creeps back ‘like a snake’ and ‘with a look of fearful malevolence’ swings shut the great stone door – but in the process crushing herself to death. The heroes are trapped in the eternal darkness and prepare to die. Only in the nick of time, like Aladdin trapped in his treasure cave, do they miraculously find a way out: threading their way, like Theseus, through the labyrinth of secret passages which lead them at last up and out into the cool, fresh air of the mountainside.
When the little band of male rabbits arrives on Watership Down, they are at much the same halfway point of their story as Aeneas and the Trojans when they arrive in Italy. They have reached their goal, but they must now face the task of finding some female rabbits with whom they can found a lasting community; and the rest of the book tells of their tremendous struggle with the fearful Efrafa, a warren some way off which is run like a totalitarian prison by the grim tyrant General Woundwort, where it just happens that a group of young female rabbits are imprisoned, led by the beautiful and intelligent Hyzenthlay. There is a ‘thrilling escape’, when these young ‘rabbit princesses’ are liberated. General Woundwort, as Avenger, comes hot in pursuit with a band of Efrafan thugs, to ‘reclaim his own’. There is a great battle back on Watership Down, with Hazel and his friends seemingly trapped in the ‘dark enclosing space’ of their warrren. But just when all seems lost, Hazel ingeniously manages to enlist the help of a nearby farm dog, which puts Woundwort and his army to rout. The new warren is at last safely and securely established.
Thus does the great Quest come to an end, and we then we see perhaps the most surprising thing of all about this type of story, The heroes of all these very dissimilar tales have in fact arrived, by remarkably similar stages, at a remarkably similar goal. Odysseus has regained his Queen and his kingdom. Aeneas has won his Princess and his kingdom. Jason has won his Princess and, through her, succeeds to the kingdom of Corinth (the Golden Fleece itself by this time having come to be seen as purely symbolic of the ‘treasure’ that has been won). The Jews have won and established their new kingdom. The Grail heroes carry their great treasure, the golden Grail, to the city of Sarras, where Galahad becomes king, succeeding an evil tyrant, and is then received into the kingdom of heaven. Allan Quatermain and his friends, having established Umbopa as the rightful king over the lost and now found land of Solomon, in place of an evil tyrant, return home with their fabulous treasure. The rabbits of Watership Down, united with their ‘princesses’, have established their new kingdom – to the point where, in the closing pages, their ‘King’ Hazel can look round at a new generation of young rabbits playing in the sun, knowing that the future is assured. He is then called by a mysterious stranger, whose ears shine in the darkness of the burrow with ‘a faint silver light’, off to a rabbit heaven.
Of the Quests we have looked at in any detail, the only one which might not seem to follow this pattern is Pilgrim’s Progress. But even Christian meets his most nearly fatal ordeal on the very edge of his goal, when he nearly drowns, amid hideous visions of ‘hobgoblins and evil spirits’, in the deep, dark river which surrounds the hill on which the Celestial City stands – and is then received to the sound of trumpets into the kingdom of heaven. And as if Bunyan subconsciously realised that, to make his story complete, Christian should there be united with a ‘Princess’, he promptly set about writing the second, much less well-known part of his tale, which tells of how his hero’s wife Christiana makes her own long and hazardous journey to join him.
The real point about the ending of all these stories is that in essence it is so familiar. The real goal of the Quest emerges as remarkably similar to that happy ending we have seen in our previous types of story: the final coming together of hero and heroine, man and woman, and the succession to, or establishing of a kingdom. In each case it is this, in part or whole, which enables the Quest to end on an image of completion. And in each case what this also conveys to us is the sense that life, which in the opening stages of the story seemed so threatened, has in some profound sense been renewed. Odysseus has redemeed and brought his kingdom back to life, after the long, sterile years of the suitors’ tyranny. Aeneas’s city of Troy is dead: but on the Tiber it lives again, as new Rome, and will do so far into the glorious future. Jason returns home to redeem Iolcos from the sterile tyranny of his step-father King Pelias, and then sets up his own new dynasty in Corinth. As the Jews toiled across the dead wilderness there was no more regular promise of the new life that was to come than Moses’ repeated striking of ‘living waters’ out of the rock: and from the years of harsh slavery in Egypt, where their sons, the promise of new life, had routinely been murdered, they are at last set free in the lush land ‘flowing with milk and honey’, where life abounds and is assured for the future.
And so on, with the Grail Quest, Pilgrim’s Progress, King Solomon’s Mines, Watership Down. In each case the story ends on a great renewal of life, centred on a new secure base, guaranteed into the future. And we can see at last (although it was by no means clear while the story was still unfolding) that this was what the Quest had really been about all along.
A third way in which stories naturally shape themselves in the human imagination centres on the pull of the hero towards some distant, all-important goal. However much he becomes drawn into particular episodes along the way, we always know that these are merely subordinate to his overriding purpose, and that until that goal has been reached and properly secured, the story cannot be satisfactorily resolved. The basic Quest story unfolds through a series of stages like this:
1. The Call: Life in some ‘City of Destruction’ has become oppressive and intolerable, and the hero recognises that he can only rectify matters by making a long, difficult journey. He is given supernatural or visionary direction as to the distant, life-renewing goal he must aim for.
2. The Journey: The hero and his companions set out across hostile terrain, encountering a series of life-threatening ordeals. These include horrific monsters to be overcome; temptations to be resisted; and, probably the need to travel between two equally deadly ‘opposites’. These each end with a ‘thrilling escape’, and the ordeals alternate with periods of respite, when the hero and his companions receive hospitality, help or advice, often from ‘wise old men’ or ‘beautiful young women’. During this stage the hero may also have to make a ‘journey through the underworld’, where he temporarily transcends the separating power of death and comes into helpful contact with spirits from the past, who give him guidance as to how to reach his goal.
3. Arrival and Frustration: The hero arrives within sight of his goal. But he is far from having reached the end of his story, because now, on the edge of the goal, he sees a new and terrible series of obstacles looming up between him and his prize, which have to be overcome before it can be fully and completely secured.
4. The Final Ordeals: The hero has to undergo a last series of tests (often three in number) to prove that he is truly worthy of the prize. This culminates in a last great battle or ordeal which may be the most threatening of all.
5. The Goal: After a last ‘thrilling escape from death’, the kingdom, the ‘Princess’ or the life-transforming treasure are finally won: with an assurance of renewed life stretching indefinitely into the future.
We have so far illustrated the Quest story by looking at some of the best-known and most profound examples in the world; although the inclusion of King Solomon’s Mines and Watership Down showed how this theme may equally well be found in less serious forms of storytelling.
Even in so slight and charming an example as Jean de Brunhoff’s Babar and Father Christmas, we see features of the archetypal structure at work. The little elephant-children in Babar’s kingdom are very unhappy as they wonder why they are never visited by Father Christmas. King Babar decides to rectify matters by going in search of Father Christmas himself. On his journey he has three successive encounters with ‘helpers’, who give him advice: some mice, a flock of sparrows, finally a Professor whom, as we see him sitting below a bust of Socrates, we take for a ‘wise old man’. This sage at last puts Babar on the right track and the hero sets out on the closing stages of his Quest, accompanied by his faithful companion, a dog. They enter a great snow-covered forest and come to a mountain where they face three ordeals. Firstly the dog is pelted with snowballs, and nearly suffocated by a small army of dwarves. Then the dwarves confront Babar himself, but he pushes them over with his trunk. Finally a violent blizzard blows up. Babar and the dog dig a hole in the snow for shelter, but they are so cold and tired that they are on the verge of giving up hope – when they have a ‘thrilling escape from death’. The snow gives way under them, and they fall into a huge, brightly-lit underground cavern, a treasure house of toys, where they are warmly welcomed by the twinkling and venerable Father Christmas himself. He agrees to visit Babar’s kingdom, which brings such joy to the children that, as he flies away, he promises to return every year (renewal of life assured indefinitely into the future!).
Another light and entertaining tale rather less obviously shaped by the Quest is Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). The story’s suspense hangs entirely on whether the hero, Phineas Fogg, can reach his distant goal in time to win a hefty bet. The fact that the goal of his Quest happens to be to arrive back exactly where he started is in this sense immaterial. Naturally much of the book consists of his journey, complete with ordeals and thrilling escapes, the most dramatic of which is in India where, with the aid of his servant and ‘faithful companion’ Passepartout, Fogg literally liberates a Princess, Aouda, the beautiful young widow of an Indian prince, just as she is about to be consumed by the flames of her husband’s funeral pyre. The three travel onwards, shadowed by the detective Fix, who wants to arrest Fogg for having master-minded a huge robbery at the Bank of England. They arrive back in England just in time, when disaster strikes. Within sight of his goal, Fogg faces three unexpected ordeals. First he is arrested by Fix and imprisoned. In the nick of time it is discovered that he is perfectly innocent: but he has now missed the last train which could carry him back to London in time to win his bet. He hires a ‘special’ train, but it is held up on the way and arrives in London minutes too late. It seems all is lost, and next morning Fogg begins to make preparations for suicide. Then Passepartout happens to hear someone mention the date. Of course! By going round the world from west to east they had gained a day; and they now have just ten minutes for Fogg to get to his club to claim victory. The hero makes it with three minutes to spare. He has won his ‘treasure’: although, as the author is careful to emphasise, the real treasure he has gained from his journey is the ‘Princess’. Just when all seemed lost, they had finally declared their ‘sacred love’ for each other, and can now get married.5
Although the Quest is such a distinctive type of story, it obviously has features in common with the two types of plot we looked at earlier, not least in terms of its basic structure. We saw how, at their deepest level, both Overcoming the Monster and Rags to Riches stories unfold by a kind of three-fold rhythm. They begin on a note of constriction, followed, when the hero or heroine respond to the ‘Call’, by a phase of expansion, as spirits and hopes are lifted. This leads eventually to a more serious constriction, leading to a phase when the hero or heroine are gradually being brought to a state of readiness for the final decisive confrontation with the dark forces which have so long oppressed them. When this arrives, providing the climax to the story, constriction reaches its height. Then comes the reversal, the triumphant liberation which paves the way to the happy ending.
We see the same fundamental rhythm at work in the structure of the Quest. There is the initial feeling of constriction which persuades the hero and his companions that they must leave. We then have a sense of enlargement as they set out into the world on their journey: although this contains within it lesser alternations of constriction and release, as each ordeal is followed by respite. We then come to the more serious constriction as the hero comes within sight of his goal, and has to face the final ordeals. Gradually the story works up to its climax, when he is pitted in a last decisive battle against the dark forces which have stood between him and his goal all along. At last we share his liberation from all opposition, as the darkness is overthrown, the goal secured and the story ends on the image of life gloriously renewed.
All the plots we have looked at so far share this same essential structure. Something else they have in common is that the dominant figures opposed to their heroes or heroines – the monsters, tyrants, witches, wicked stepmothers and rivals, from whose malevolence the sense of threat and constriction mainly emanates – are invariably dark figures; while the heroes and heroines themselves display qualities which put them unmistakably on the side of ‘light’. They may in the earlier stages of the story show certain weaknesses and inadequacies (this is an important element, to which we shall return). But the whole underlying purpose of the action is to show us the hero or heroine maturing to the state where they are finally ready for that decisive confrontation with the archetypal power of darkness which can bring their complete liberation.
Nevertheless, just as we earlier saw a ‘dark’ variation on the Rags to Riches story, so there are ‘dark’ versions of the Quest. Perhaps the most obvious example in all literature is Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). The central figure, Captain Ahab, sets out on his obsessive quest across the oceans of the world to find the almost supernatural great white whale. Ahab looks on Moby Dick, as other quest heroes look on the Holy Grail or the Golden Fleece or the Firebird, as a prize of infinite value, worth any effort or sacrifice to seek out. Certainly the mysterious, numinous whale is an archetypal symbol for the essence of life. But there is nothing life-enhancing or light about the spirit in which Ahab pursues his goal. His only desire is to destroy it. He is not on the side of life but opposed to it. This is why the voyage which makes up his quest is so strained and sinister, fraught with omens of disaster. And when he does finally find the whale, it is of course Ahab himself who is slain. The reasons for this we shall explore more fully in Chapter 21. But once again, by those inexorable rules which govern the way in which stories unfold, all the clues as to why Ahab’s quest can only end in disaster are there in this very sombre tale.