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Biography
Other usesRedirect2|Heroism|Heroic|the film|Heroism (film)|the racehorse|Heroic (horse)Redirect|HeroineRedirect|Good guy||The Good Guys (disambiguation)Distinguish|heroinA hero ( heroine is usually used for females) (lang-grc|????, h?ros), in Greek mythology and folklore , was originally a demigod , their Greek hero cult|cult being one of the most distinctive features of Religion in ancient Greece|ancient Greek religion .See http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext? doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3D%2347602 Heroes, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, 'A Greek-English Lexicon', at Perseus and Plato , ' Cratylus ' Later, hero (male) and heroine (female) came to refer to Character (arts)|characters who, in the face of danger and adversity or from a position of weakness, display courage and the will for self sacrifice —that is, heroism—for some Value theory|greater good of all humanity. This definition originally referred to warrior|martial courage or excellence but extended to more general morality|moral excellence.
Stories of heroism may serve as moral example s. In classical antiquity , hero cults that venerated deified heroes such as Heracles , Perseus , and Achilles played an important role in Ancient Greek religion. Politicians, ancient and modern, have employed hero worship for their own apotheosis (i.e., cult of personality ).
Etymology
Coined in English 1387, the word hero comes from the Greek language|Greek "????" ( heroes ), "hero, warrior", http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text? doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dh%28%2Frws ????, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon , on Perseus Digital Library literally "protector" or "defender" http://www.etymonline.com/index.php? search=hero Hero: Online Etymology Dictionary, entry "Hero" the postulated original forms of these words being *lang|grc|?????, herwos , and *lang|grc|??Fa, Herwa , respectively. It is also thoughtcn|date=May 2012 to be a cognate of the Latin verb servo (original meaning: to preserve whole) and of the Avestan language|Avestan verb haurvaiti (to keep vigil over), although the original Proto-Indo-European root|Proto-Indoeuropean root is unclear.
According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the Indo-European root is *ser meaning "to protect". According to Eric Partridge in Origins, the Greek word Heros "is akin to" the Latin seruare, meaning to safeguard . Partridge concludes, "The basic sense of both Hera and hero would therefore be 'protector'."
Classical hero cults
Main|Greek hero cultRefimprove section|date=July 2007When Cleisthenes divided the History of Athens|ancient Athenians into new deme s for voting, he consulted the Delphi#Oracle|Oracle of Delphi about what heroes he should name each division after. According to Herodotus , the Sparta ns attributed their conquest of Arcadia to their theft of the bones of Orestes (mythology)|Orestes from the Arcadian town of Tegea .
Heroes in myth often had close but conflicted relationships with the gods. Thus Heracles's name means "the glory of Hera", even though he was tormented all his life by Hera, the Queen of the Gods. Perhaps the most striking example is the Athenian king Erechtheus , whom Poseidon killed for choosing Athena over him as the city's patron god. When the Athenians worshiped Erechtheus on the Acropolis of Athens|Acropolis , they invoked him as Poseidon Erechtheus .
In the Hellenistic civilization|Hellenistic Greek East, dynastic leaders such as the Ptolemaic dynasty|Ptolemies or Seleucid Empire|Seleucids were also proclaimed heroes.Citation needed|date=September 2008
Analysis
The classic hero often came with what FitzRoy Somerset, 4th Baron Raglan|Lord Raglan (a descendant of the FitzRoy Somerset, 1st Baron Raglan|FitzRoy Somerset, Lord Raglan ) termed a "potted biography" made up of some two dozen common traditions that ignored the line between historical fact and mythology.Citation needed|date=September 2008 For example, the circumstances of the hero's conception are unusual; an attempt is made by a powerful male at his birth to kill him; he is spirited away; reared by foster-parents in a far country. Routinely the hero meets a mysterious death, often at the top of a hill; his body is not buried; he leaves no successors; he has one or more holy sepulchre s.
The first Hero:
Hero (mythical priestess), in Greek mythology, priestess of Aphrodite, goddess of love, at Sestos, a town on the Hellespont (now Dardanelles). Hero was loved by Leander, a youth who lived at Abydos, a town on the Asian side of the channel. They could not marry because Hero was bound by a vow of chastity, and so every night Leander swam from Asia to Europe, guided by a lamp in Hero's tower. One stormy night a high wind extinguished the beacon, and Leander was drowned. His body was washed ashore beneath Hero's tower; in her grief, she threw herself into the sea.
The validity of the hero in historical studies
Refimprove section|date=July 2007See|Philosophy of history|Great man theoryThe philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel|Hegel gave a central role to the "hero", personalized by Napoleon I of France|Napoleon , as the incarnation of a particular culture's Volksgeist , and thus of the general Zeitgeist . Thomas Carlyle 's 1841 On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History also accorded a key function to heroes and great men in history. Carlyle centered history on the biography of a few central individuals such as Oliver Cromwell or Frederick II of Prussia|Frederick the Great . His heroes were political and military figures, the founders or topplers of states. His history of great men, of geniuses good and evil, sought to organize change in the advent of greatness.
Explicit defenses of Carlyle's position were rare in the second part of the 20th century. Most philosophers of history contend that the motive forces in history can best be described only with a wider lens than the one he used for his portraits. For example, Karl Marx argued that history was determined by the massive social forces at play in " class struggle s", not by the individuals by whom these forces are played out. After Marx, Herbert Spencer wrote at the end of the 19th century: "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....Before he can remake his society, his society must make him."Spencer, Herbert. http://www.questia.com/PM.qst? a=o& d=96277756 The Study of Sociology , Appleton, 1896, p. 34. As Michel Foucault pointed out in Philosophy of history#Michel Foucault's analysis of historical and political discourse|his analysis of societal communication and debate , history was mainly the "science of the Sovereignty|sovereign ", until its inversion by the "historical and political popular discourse".
The Annales School , led by Lucien Febvre , Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel , would contest the exaggeration of the role of subject (philosophy)|individual subjects in history. Indeed, Braudel distinguished various time scales, one accorded to the life of an individual, another accorded to the life of a few human generations, and the last one to civilization s, in which geography , economics and demography play a role considerably more decisive than that of individual subjects. Foucault's conception of an "archeology" (not to be confused with the Anthropology|anthropological discipline of archaeology ) or Louis Althusser 's work were attempts at linking together these various heterogeneous layers composing history.Clarify|date=June 2008 Among noticeable events in the studies of the role of the hero and Great men theory|Great man in history one should mention Sydney Hook 's book The Hero in History Hook, S. 19551943. The Hero in History. A Study in Limitation and Possibility. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
In the epoch of globalization an individual can still change the development of the country and of the whole world so this gives reasons to some scholars to suggest returning to the problem of the role of the hero in history from the viewpoint of modern historical knowledge and using up-to-date methods of historical analysis Leonid Grinin|Grinin, Leonid 2010. The Role of an Individual in History: A Reconsideration. Social Evolution & History, Vol. 9 No. 2 (pp. 95–136) http://www.socionauki.ru/journal/articles/129622/
Within the frameworks of developing counterfactual history , there are made attempts to examine some hypothetic scenarios of historical development. And the hero attracts much attention because most of those scenarios are based on the suppositions: what would have happened if this or that historical individual had or had not been aliveThompson. W. The Lead Economy Sequence in World Politics (From Sung China to the United States): Selected Counterfactuals. Journal of Globalization Studies. Vol. 1, num. 1. 2010. PP. 6–28 http://www.socionauki.ru/journal/articles/126971/
Heroic myth
The concept of a story archetype of the standard "hero's quest " or monomyth pervasive across all cultures is somewhat controversial. Expounded mainly by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces , it illustrates several uniting themes of hero stories that hold similar ideas of what a hero represents, despite vastly different cultures and beliefs.Citation needed|date=September 2008
Folk and fairy tales
Vladimir Propp , in his analysis of the Russian fairy tale , concluded that a fairy tale had only eight dramatis personæ , of which one was the hero,Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale , ISBN 0-292-78376-0Rp|p. 80 and his analysis has been widely applied to non- Slavic mythology|Russian folklore . The actions that fall into a such hero's sphere include: # Departure on a quest # Reacting to the test of a Donor (fairy tale)|donor # Marrying a princess (or similar figure) He distinguished between seekers and victim-heroes . A villain could initiate the issue by kidnapping the hero or driving him out; these were victim-heroes. On the other hand, an antagonist could rob the hero, or kidnap someone close to him, or, without the villain's intervention, the hero could realize that he lacked something and set out to find it; these heroes are seekers. Victims may appear in tales with seeker heroes, but the tale does not follow them both.Rp|36
The modern fictional hero
Hero or heroine is sometimes used to simply describe the protagonist of a story, or the Romantic interest (theatre)|love interest , a usage which can conflict with the superhuman expectations of heroism. William Makepeace Thackeray gave Vanity Fair (novel)|Vanity Fair the subtitle A Novel without a Hero . Northrop Frye , Anatomy of Criticism , p 34, ISBN 0-691-01298-9 The larger-than-life hero is a more common feature of fantasy (particularly sword and sorcery and High fantasy|epic fantasy ) than more realist works. L. Sprague de Camp , Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers : The Makers of Heroic Fantasy , p 5 ISBN 0-87054-076-9
In modern film|movies , the hero is often simply an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances, who, despite the odds being stacked against him or her, typically prevails in the end. In some movies (especially Action film|action movie s), a hero may exhibit characteristics such as superhuman Physical strength|strength and endurance that sometimes makes him nearly invincible. Often a hero in these situations has a foil (literature)|foil , the villain , typically a charismatic evildoer who represents, leads, or himself embodies the struggle the hero is up against. Post-modern fictional works have fomented the increased popularity of the antihero , who does not follow common conceptions of heroism.
Hero as self
Refimprove section|date=February 2007It has been suggested in an article by Roma Chatterji"Chatterji, Roma (1986). The Voyage of the Hero: The Self and the Other in One Narrative Tradition of Purulia, Contributions to Indian Sociology 19: 95–114 . http://dx.doi.org/10.1177%2F006996685019001007. that the hero or more generally protagonist is first and foremost a symbolic representation of the person who is experiencing the story while reading, listening or watching; thus the relevance of the hero to the individual relies a great deal on how much similarity there is between the two. One reason for the hero-as-self interpretation of stories and myths is the human inability to view the world from any perspective but a personal one.
Psychology of heroism
Social psychology has begun paying attention to heroes and heroism. A work by Zeno Franco and Philip Zimbardo Franco, Z., Blau, K. & Zimbardo, P. (2011). http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2011-07260-001/ Heroism: A conceptual analysis and differentiation between heroic action and altruism. Review of General Psychology, 5 (2), 99-113. points out differences between heroism and altruism, and they offer evidence that observers' perceptions of unjustified risk plays a role, above and beyond risk type, in determining the ascription of heroic status.
| last = Allison | first = Scott | authorlink = Scott Allison | title = Heroes: What They Do and Why We Need Them | location = Richmond, Virginia | publisher = Oxford University Press | year = 2010
cite book
| last = Burkert | first = Walter | authorlink = Walter Burkert | chapter = The dead, heroes and chthonic gods | title = Greek Religion | location = Cambridge, Massachusetts|Cambridge | publisher = Harvard University Press | year = 1985
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| last = Calder | first = Jenni | year = 1977 | title = Heroes. From Byron to Guevara | location = London | publisher = Hamish Hamilton | isbn = 241-89536
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| last = Campbell | first = Joseph | authorlink = Joseph Campbell | title = The Hero with a Thousand Faces | location = Princeton, New Jersey|Princeton | publisher = Princeton University Press | year = 1949
cite journal
| last = Chatterji | first = Roma | title = The Voyage of the Hero: The Self and the Other in One Narrative Tradition of Purulia | journal = Contributions to Indian Sociology | volume = 19 | year = 1986 | pages = 95–114 | doi = 10.1177/006996685019001007
Craig, David, Back Home , Life Magazine-Special Issue, Volume 8, Number 6, 85-94.
cite book
| last = Dundes | first = Alan | coauthors = Otto Rank, and Lord Raglan | year = 1990 | title = In Quest of the Hero | location = Princeton, New Jersey|Princeton | publisher = Princeton University Press
cite book
| last = Hadas | first = Moses | coauthors = Morton Smith | authorlink = | year = 1965 | title = Heroes and Gods | publisher = HarperCollins|Harper & Row
Hein, David (1993). "The Death of Heroes, the Recovery of the Heroic." Christian Century 110: 1298-1303. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_n37_v110/ai_14739320 or http://www.questia.com/PM.qst? a=o& d=5000242002
cite book
| last = Kerenyi | first = Karl | authorlink = Karl Kerenyi | year = 1959 | title = The Heroes of the Greeks | location = London | publisher = Thames & Hudson
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| last = Khan | first = Sharif | authorlink = Sharif Khan | year = 2004 | title = Psychology of the Hero Soul.
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| author = Lord Raglan | authorlink = Lord Raglan (author) | year = 1936/2003 | title = The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama | location = Mineola, NY | publisher = Dover Publications
Henry Liddell and Robert Scott (philologist)|Robert Scott . A Greek-English Lexicon http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext? doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057
cite book
| last = Rohde | first = Erwin | authorlink = Erwin Rohde | year = 1924 | title = Psyche
cite journal
| last = Smidchens | first = Guntis | title = National Heroic Narratives in the Baltics as a Source for Nonviolent Political Action | journal = Slavic Review | volume = 66,3 | year = 2007 | pages = 484–508 | doi =
External links
Wiktionary|hero
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tours/heroes/tour1.html The British Hero - online exhibition from screenonline , a website of the British Film Institute , looking at British heroes of film and television.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_20040506.shtml Listen to BBC Radio 4's In Our Time programme on Heroism
Stock characters Category:Mythological archetypes Category:Mythological characters Category:Fantasy tropes Category:Hero|* Category:Heroes by role| Category:Literary archetypes Category:Greek loanwords Category:Jungian archetypes
