Fitzroy Richard Somerset Raglan

"Lord Raglan argues his case ably and well."--"Nature. ..." vivid and provocative."--"The Times [London] "Literary Supplement. ..." well planned, packed with fact, and effectively written."--"Saturday Review of Literature His mother is a virgin and he's reputed to be the son of a god. But he loses favor and is driven from his kingdom to a sorrowful death. Such heroic figures from myth and legend, the author contends, are invested with a common pattern that satisfies the human desire for idealization. Lord Raglan outlines 22 typical motifs from heroic tales, illustrating his theory with events from the lives of Oedipus, King Arthur, Robin Hood, and other legendary characters. A fascinating study that will appeal to a wide audience as well as to scholars of folklore, mythology, and history.

In Quest of the Hero makes available for a new generation of readers two key works on hero myths: Otto Rank's Myth of the Birth of the Hero and the central section of Lord Raglan's The Hero. Amplifying these is Alan Dundes's fascinating contemporary inquiry, "The Hero Pattern and the Life of Jesus." Examined here are the patterns found in the lore surrounding historical or legendary figures like Gilgamesh, Moses, David, Oedipus, Odysseus, Perseus, Heracles, Aeneas, Romulus, Siegfried, Lohengrin, Arthur, and Buddha. Rank's monograph remains the classic application of Freudian theory to hero myths. In The Hero the noted English ethnologist Raglan singles out the myth-ritualist pattern in James Frazer's many-sided Golden Bough and applies that pattern to hero myths. Dundes, the eminent folklorist at the University of California at Berkeley, applies the theories of Rank, Raglan, and others to the case of Jesus. In his introduction to this selection from Rank, Raglan, and Dundes, Robert Segal, author of the major study of Joseph Campbell, charts the history of theorizing about hero myths and compares the approaches of Rank, Raglan, Dundes, and Campbell.