The
Myth of the Heroes and the Lost Art of the Epic
Joysree Das
Associate Professor
Shree Agrasen College
Dalkhola , Uttar Dinajpur , West Bengal , India
Abstract:
The
present paper is a review of the ancient literary art of storytelling in
poetry, the long narratives of the feats of heroes of a the ancient world, men
like Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Achilles, Rama and Krishna who were the embodiments of
certain heroic qualities and virtues which inspired men to be like them. The
paper attempts a review of all ancient epics and addresses the problem, why
epics are no more written in the modern world. Why has epic become a lost art
in the modern literary field of world literature?
Keywords:
Ancient world, Epic, Heroism, Lost art
An epic as a long
narrative, evolved in the ancient world, mainly during 2000 B.C. to 1000 A.D.
Gilgamesh – 2000 B.C.
Iliad – 630 B.C.
Odyssey – 675 B.C.
Aeneid – 19 B.C.
Ramayana – 500 B.C.
Mahabharata – 400 B.C.
Bible – 1200 B.C. – 126
A.D. / 96 A.D.
Beowulf – 1000 A.D.
The earliest of all
civilizations, Sumer in Mesopotamia, gave birth to the earliest known form of
writing, cuneiform, in which the epic of Gilgamesh, the world’s first epic
story was written, on clay tablets. It dates from around 2000 B.C. and
chronicles King Gilgamesh of Uruk’s reign during the third dynasty of Ur. Myth
or ‘mythos’ primarily means ‘story’. The epics of the ancient world are
outstanding for its compelling narratives.
Gilgamesh, the hero of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the mother of all epics, was probably a
historical figure, who lived in about 2600 BCE. As with all ancient epics, oral
narratives of his adventures with his servant Enkidu, was finally written down
in verse form in about 1300 BCE. At the beginning of the poem, we see Gilgamesh
as a tyrant, a tormentor of his people, who plead with the gods for redress.
They create Enkidu, a strong young man who lives in the wild with the beasts,
to contend with Gilgamesh. To tame Enkidu, Gilgamesh sends the prostitute
Shambat, who entices him and brings him to Uruk. There he challenges Gilgamesh
to a trial of strength and after wrestling hard, Enkidu was defeated. He bows
down to Gilgamesh with the words, “There is not another like you in the world.”
Gilgamesh and Enkidu become friends and set off on their
adventures. They go to the forests of cedars and fights with Humbaba, the giant
who guards the forest and kills him. On their return home, they meet Ishtar,
the goddess of love, who invites Gilgamesh to be her husband, but Gilgamesh
turns her down, because none of her relationships has lasted, she has ruined
each one of her lovers. Ishtar takes her revenge and Enkidu sickens and dies.
Gilgamesh is distraught with grief. Oppressed by the realization that he
himself must die, Gilgamesh sets out in search of the survivor of the floods,
Utnapishtim who was granted eternal life by the gods, and find out the secret
of eternal life from him. Gilgamesh meets Utnapishtim but finally realizes that
eternal life is not granted to mortal men. So he concentrates on building the
walls of Uruk. He personally will die, but these monuments will be his
immortality. When he dies, the people of Uruk lament for him:
“The
king has laid
himself
down and
will
not rise again…
He
had wisdom and a
comely
face, he will not
come
again; He is gone
into
the mountain, he
will
not come again;
On
the bed of fate he
lies,
he will not rise again
From
the couch of many colours
he
will not come again.”
The stories and episodes of the two Greek epics, Illiad and Odyssey recount the passions and adventures of the heroes of
Mycenae, who belonged to a rugged and vigorous warrior society in mainland
Greece from about 1600 to 1150 B.C. Modern scholars, are quite certain that the
epics are products of a long oral tradition. It was Homer, who in the 8th
century B.C. linked, shaped and polished the narratives at the time when it was
being written down. The core of the epic Illiad
is the Trojan War, which took place in the 1230s. The war was caused by the
elopement of Helen, the Queen of Sparta and Paris, one of the sons of King
Priam of Troy.
The deserted husband was
Menelaus, king of Sparta and brother of Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae and the
High King or overlord of all the Greeks. Under Agamemnon’s leadership, a Greek
fleet sailed for Troy to avenge Menelaus and bring back Helen. After a ten year
siege, the city was taken by a ruse. The Greeks pretended to sail away as if
despairing of victory, leaving a gigantic wooden horse on the shore. The
rejoicing Trojans hauled the horse into the city and in the dead of night,
Greek warriors came from their hiding place in the horse’s belly, opened the
gates to their comrades. Who were waiting outside, they sacked and burned Troy
and led the survivors away into slavery. The Illiad, does not narrate the entire story of the Trojan War, but
dwells on a single episode in which Agamemnon and Achilles quarrel. Achilles
withdraws from fighting and the Greek face defeat. The death in battle of
Achilles’ friend Patroclus brings the hero back into the field and there he
slays the Trojan champion Hector. Achilles’ own death and the destruction of
Troy are only hinted at.
The war provided the setting for conflicts between a
large cast of heroic figures – Agamemnon and his brother Menelaus, the great
warrior Achilles and the boastful Ajax, the wily and cunning Odysseus and wise
Nestor on the Greek side. Among the Trojans are the aged King Priam, Deiphobus
and Helenus. The hero of Illiad is
Achilles, the bravest of the brave, young and handsome and a heart full of
passion that both loves and hates.
The hero of Homer’s other great epic the Odyssey is Odysseus, shrewdest of the
Greek leaders at Troy. After years of war and wandering he returned to his
palace at Ithaca, to find it occupied by suitors who hoped to marry his wife
Penelope and take over his kingdom. Odysseus killed them all and reclaimed his
wife and kingdom. The heroes of these ancient epics are stronger, more
beautiful than ordinary mortals, but share their passions and are doomed to
die. They are children of gods and goddesses who have procreated with men and
women. Gilgamesh is the son of a mortal father Lugalbanda, King of Uruk and an
immortal mother, the goddess Ninsun.
Achilles is the son of Peleus, a Greek king and Thetis, a sea goddess.
Aeneas, one of the Trojan heroes is the son of Anchises and Venus, the goddess
of love. Virgil in his epic Aeneid (19
B.C.) follows the epic hero’s escape from Troy, wanderings on the sea and
landing in Latium, modern Rome to build up a new Troy.
The two Indian epics The
Ramayana (500 B.C.) and The
Mahabharata (400 B.C.), figure two heroes, Rama and Arjuna, and narrate
their long journeys, courage and skill in war. Both are brave fighters, Rama
defeating the demon Ravana of terrible strength and Arjuna winning over his
lifelong rival Karna, who was also a skilled warrior and son of the Sun god,
and his half brother. Arjun himself was the son of the king of the gods, Indra.
The Bible (1200
B.C. – 96 A.D.) acts as a bridge between the ancient and the modern world.
While some of the Old Testament, stretches back to the times of Gilgamesh (like
the story of the Flood) the New Testament tells the story of a man named Jesus,
who is not a demigod but a human being made of flesh and blood. In his modern
epic Paradise Lost, Milton pays his
homage to this new epic hero in the words:
“Of
Man’s first Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of
that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought
Death into the World, and all one woe
With
loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore
us, and regain this blissful seat…”
Jesus is the ‘one greater Man’,
the epic hero of the modern world.
Beowulf, the hero of the epic Beowulf, is last in the line of heroic figures beginning with
Gilgamesh. The setting of the poem is the Danish island of Zealand and South
Sweden, land of the Geats. The oral narrative, which was finally written down
by an anonymous poet in Old English in the 8th century, was of
Scandinavian origin. The hero - Beowulf, hears that a man eating monster called
Grendel has been terrorizing Heorot, the hall of Hrothgar, king of the Danes.
He sails to Denmark kills Grendel and then Grendel’s mother. Rewarded by
Hrothgar, Beowulf sails home and fights for his own king, Hygelac, against the
Swedes. Later he himself becomes king of the Geats and after a reign of fifty
years, saves his people by killing a fire breathing dragon. Mortally wounded in
the fight, he dies. The poem ends with the Geats lamenting around his barrow,
just as the king Gilgamesh was lamented for by his people when he died:
“Then
the warriors rode around the barrow, twelve of them in all,
…
they said that he was of all the world’s Kings
the
gentlest of men, and the most gracious,
the
kindest to his people, the keenest for fame.”
We can come to the conclusion that the narratives of the
epics were orally recited and when written down finally, certain tropes and
conventions were followed, the most outstanding of which was the trope of the
epic hero – brave, skilled in fight, adventurous and in search of fame and
preserving his honour above everything else. Once written down, the epics were
fixed, the oral tradition withered, the literature that replaced it was of an
unexampled variety and expressive but no individual poet was ready to face the
tremendous task of writing down a narrative in epic form, an art created by
oral narrators through ages and generations. Only Milton (1608 – 1674) was
tempted to take some episodes from the Bible, and weave them into an epic
narrative Paradise Lost but after
him, the epic became a lost art.
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