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Indlæser... The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909)af Otto Rank, Alan Dundes, Lord Raglan
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Bliv medlem af LibraryThing for at finde ud af, om du vil kunne lide denne bog. Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog. POINTS OF INTEREST: The new born hero is the young sun rising from the waters, first confronted by lowering clouds, but finally triumphing over all obstacles. (page 4) [Brodbeck, Zoroaster, Leipzig, 1893, p. 138] “Sargon, the mighty king, King of Agade, am I. My mother was a vestal, my father I knew not, while my father’s brother dwelt in the mountains.” (page 12) Three seminal essays from the past century concerning patterns and motifs of archetypal heroic emergence and actions, focusing on Greek and British-Celtic examples. Includes discussions of Freudian analysis and (limited) Campbell's theories. Contents: Rank's essay The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (from the German, 1959); Raglan's essay The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama, Part II (English, 1956); Dundes's essay The Hero Pattern and the Life of Jesus (1976). ingen anmeldelser | tilføj en anmeldelse
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First published in German in 1909, Otto Rank's original The Myth of the Birth of the Hero offered psychoanalytical interpretations of mythological stories as a means of understanding the human psyche. Like his mentor Sigmund Freud, Rank compared the myths of such figures as Oedipus, Moses, and Sargon with common dreams, seeing in both a symbolic fulfillment of repressed desire. In a new edition published thirteen years after the original, Rank doubled the size of his seminal work, incorporating new discoveries in psychoanalysis, mythology, and ethnology. This expanded and updated edition has been eloquently translated by Gregory C. Richter and E. James Lieberman and includes an introductory essay by Robert A. Segal as well as Otto Rank's 1914 essay "The Play in Hamlet." No library descriptions found. |
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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 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. ( )