11
King and Hero
In the long run these hopes were not realized. A hero’s exploits might be
celebrated in song for several generations or centuries, but in the end they
were displaced from the repertory by newer themes, or the people to whom
they had been of concern lost its identity or its taste for stories of old battles.
Not a single name of an Indo-European hero has come down to us, only
Greek heroes, Germanic heroes, Celtic heroes, and so on, and those only
because the medium of writing came in time to preserve them before the oral
traditions died.
The heroes of these surviving literatures, however, often have sufficiently
similar characteristics to encourage generalization and reference to a
traditional model. We should beware of setting up a stereotype, but we may
fancy that we can get a notion of the sorts of hero likely to have played a
leading role in Indo-European saga.
‘Hero’ is of course not a technical term but one of convenience. By it we
mean generally a man of supreme physical strength and endurance allied
to moral qualities such as fearlessness, determination, and a propensity for
plunging into dangerous and daunting enterprises. He displays his abilities
above all in fighting enemies of one sort or another.
In many traditions narratives about heroes also involve kings. A king may
himself be a hero, but in most cases the roles are distinct. The outstanding
hero –– one may think of Achilles, Hector, Jason, Heracles, Arjuna, Beowulf,
Cú Chulainn, Lancelot –– is usually not identical with the king. The king is
remembered for kingly virtues such as justice, prosperity, liberality, or his lack
of them; the hero for achievement, for overcoming adversity (whether on the
king’s behalf or inflicted by him). He may be the king’s champion; he may
save the kingdom from disaster; he may in the end marry the king’s daughter
and become a king himself.^1
(^1) Jeffrey Gantz, Early Irish Myths and Sagas (London 1981), 9, remarks: ‘Curiously, the kings
of the Irish stories are not battle leaders: either they betray vestiges of divinity (Cú Ruí, for
example) or they have a young champion as heir and rival.’ On the relationship of king and hero
cf. Miller (2000), 178–86.