Lord Raglan (1885–1964)

And here I thought cultural one-upsmanship was dead.

This book starts from a significant and valuable observation: That a great many tales of heroes have a great deal in common. For example, most heroes are brought up by someone other than their parents -- a fact that is true of everyone from Moses to Oedipus to Cyrus the Great to (in more recent tales, which were not known to the authors of this book) Frodo Baggins and Harry Potter. This point has been made by many scholars, most notably show more Joseph Campbell, and is freely accepted by all three contributors to this book; it need not be questioned.

What these three essays (especially the first two, by Rank and Lord Raglan) attempt to do is to study why folktales have this common element. This is a much better question.

It's too bad it gets such lousy answers.

Otto Rank tries to explain it in Freudian terms. In essence, he says that the Oedipus tale is as it is because we all have Oedipus complexes. As for where the rest of the details come from -- that's because we're all a bunch of paranoids.

For starters, of course, Freud's hypotheses are absurd. But it seems to me that Rank isn't even applying them correctly. Rags-to-riches stories don't appeal to us because we're paranoid; they appeal to us because we want to succeed!

Lord Raglan isn't as badly deceived by incompetent psychologists, but he has his nose so high in the air, it's a wonder he finds anything up there to breathe. He looks down on the primitive myths, completely failing to understand their purpose and treating them as pure fiction -- and bad fiction, and then denying that primitive peoples even have the brains to invent such things! I can't claim to know much about psychology, but I know folklore, and Raglan just doesn't get it. Often the best work in fact comes from the illiterates, the hunter-gatherers, the primitives -- what else do they have to do at night except tell stories?

To give one specific example of Raglan's complete wrong-headedness, on pp. 146-147, he attempts to place Robin Hood in the "hero" mold, giving the outlaw 13 of a possible 22 points. But six (arguably eight) of those alleged 13 points are either not explicit in the earliest references to Robin, or are the hack work of later broadside-writers. The Robin Hood of the folk both predates Raglan's version and is folkier -- but less like a hero.

The final essay, by Alan Dundes, is much better; at least it brings real insight into the myths themselves -- and covers a topic which many have feared to address. But it can't wipe out the bad taste left by the others. In one sense, Rank is surely right: hero tales around the world are alike because they strike some deep inner chord in all of us. But the reason they do so is not because we are sick, or neo-primitive, or suffer some sort of religious mania. It's because the hero tales exalt values which make for better, stronger, more stable societies. Heroes are heroes because they make us better, not because they make us inferior. show less

I believe Raglan demonstrably wrong in arguing that all heroes that fit his profile are unhistorical. It is demonstrable that historical figures tend to be fitted into the same legendary pattern. Also,some items in his list of hero traits do not fit most of his sample heroes; I believe they were included to strengthen his unstated parallel with the life of Christ.

The author reveals and links the parallel life-patterns of "great men" to each other to show how often what is believed about each of them seems to fit an archetype. In the patterns of association linked to all "heroic" men, he concludes that the greater the man, the more the myth and the fewer the facts.
Scholars have utilized Raglan's 22 archetypal "Incidents which occur with regularity in hero-myths of all cultures" to weigh historicity. For example, Professor Thomas J. Sienkewicz for show more his students in CLAS230 Classical Mythology at Monmouth College, Monmouth, Illinois; toms@monm.edu.
The higher a particular hero scores, the closer he is to the UR-archetype of the sacred hero-king of prehistoric religious ritual; a historical hero is likely to share rather few of the mythical characteristics. show less

Two classic works on the legend of the hero are included in this book. This important anthology includes pieces by Lord Raglan and Otto Rank. Alan Dundes provides an additional commentary to complete the compilation.