The Epic Hero [Hardcover]

Dean A. Miller (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2, 2000

From Odysseus to Aeneas, from Beowulf to King Arthur, from the Mahâbhârata to the Ossetian "Nart" tales, epic heroes and their stories have symbolized the power of the human imagination. Drawing on diverse disciplines including classics, anthropology, psychology, and literary studies, this product of twenty years' scholarship provides a detailed typology of the hero in Western myth: birth, parentage, familial ties, sexuality, character, deeds, death, and afterlife. Dean A. Miller examines the place of the hero in the physical world (wilderness, castle, prison cell) and in society (among monarchs, fools, shamans, rivals, and gods). He looks at the hero in battle and quest; at his political status; and at his relationship to established religion. The book spans Western epic traditions, including Greek, Roman, Nordic, and Celtic, as well as the Indian and Persian legacies. A large section of the book also examines the figures who modify or accompany the hero: partners, helpers (animals and sometimes monsters), foes, foils, and even antitypes. The Epic Hero provides a comprehensive and provocative guide to epic heroes, and to the richly imaginative tales they inhabit.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The range is vast and covers most of Western epic literature—Greek, Celtic, Nordic, Roman, Persian, and Indian... [Miller] has provided not only a wealth of information on the epic hero, but he shows why the hero presented in the epic mode has held human imagination for so long.

(Religious Studies Review )

Miller boldly but intelligently maps out a variety of aspects under which both epic heroism in general and particular can fruitfully be considered. He also discusses an almost intimidating range of material... For Miller, rather refreshingly, the real heroes are Homer's Achilles and his counterparts in, say, Icelandic sagas, not such tricksters, politicians, and priests as Odysseus, Hector, and Aeneas. Miller rightly refocuses attention, furthermore, not only on such well-documented elements of this warrior-hero as his ambivalence and liminality, but also on his enduring, if disturbing, appeal.

(B. D. A. Tipping Journal of Roman Studies )

Miller commands an impressive range of material, and his original synthesis offers valuable insights to students of ancient and medieval literature.

(Choice )

Why does an epic hero tend to act so arrogantly and destructively? Miller offers a convincing answer to this question, which arises with the emergence of modern consciousness, in light of the hero's functional social position an dhis essentially adolescent, flat interior... with thoughtful insight and thorough scholarship, Miller's book is a major piece of research that cannot be ignored in any future discussion of the epic and its ever-dazzling hero.

(Masaki Mori The Comparatist )

This study, rich and plentiful but also subtle and suggestive, will serve as a reference work for a broad range of researchers in contiguous disciplines (ancient studies, comparative religion, history, philosophy).

(François Ripoll Latomus )

Given his wide reading and his instinct for the telling detail, Miller's observations are truly pregnant; they stimulate the mind to incubate new connections.

(Norman Austin International Journal of the Classical Tradition )

Miller has made a fundamental contribution to scholarship that transcends everything so far published on this subject, including the works of Rank, Raglan, and, indeed, the late Joseph Campbell and his army of admirers. To put it simply, he has produced a masterpiece!

(C. Scott Littleton, Occidental College )

About the Author

Dean A. Miller is a professor emeritus of history and comparative religion at the University of Rochester.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 520 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press (March 2, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801862396
• ISBN-13: 978-0801862397
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,040,210 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Scholarly Frolic through the World of the Hero, August 12, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Epic Hero (Hardcover)

The first thing that hit me in this book was its exuberance. It reminds me of "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony" for its sheer joy in pressing ahead. Miller isn't afraid to let his sense of humor show, either. But, no mistake, this is a serious work of scholarship, deep and detailed.

The book starts off with an evolution of the hero, from the Greeks, through chivalry, the Renaissance, straight on to present day's concerns with the hero as he gets explained by anthropology, sociology, and psychology.

The next chapters deal with elements in the hero's life and adventures: his remarkable birth, strength as a youth, threatening family, problematic sex life and requisite death; his landscape, both exterior and interior, and his relation to the otherworld, to his quest, and to his king. Variations of the quest are laid out, including its structure in time (maturational, sequential, and the effect of the otherworld on times of day and year), and the hero's costars (helper, sovereign and woman).

In a chapter ironically titled "The Hero 'Speaks'" we find the many nonverbal ways the hero is expressed and described, from physique and coloration, to gesture, to weapon and armor, combat, and finally to actual speech, which is generally just as violent as his actions.

Next Miller takes up other characters the hero comes upon (or sometimes is), including the trickster, the smith, and the comic coward. He further discusses color and the hero, with an interesting passage on black, green, and other knights.

The hero exists on the edges of our experience; his relation to the shaman, to the gods, and the line between life and death, are discussed next.

The conclusion draws all this together into a series of graphs that show the connections of different hero types, the hero to royalty or to a trickster, and to the other characters in his life.

I read this book hoping for another point of view after reading Joseph Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand Faces" and other related books. I assume most readers who, like me, are not academics, will find this book for much the same reason. So some comments about the two works might be worthwhile.

Miller is not trying to draw all of human experience and mythology into some single linear form. As he says, he isn't interested in the monomyth. He limits his discussion to epics with Indo-European roots. This is a comforting strategy when set against Campbell's inclusion (and shaping) of many many cultures, with the problems that raises.

He also doesn't limit the discussion to what fits. Some heros, for example, will have childhoods that make it obvious they're something special, but some don't fit that mold, and may be entirely unpromising.

The problem (well, my problem) with Campbell is the limitation of the monomyth; not only is the story line constricted, its psychological meanings are too concerned with Freud and Jung. When you hear someone say that in myth, water represents X, suddenly this becomes a game of finding the correct meaning for the symbol, makes *everything* a symbol, and leaves me feeling like I've been watching a fortuneteller explaining away dreams. Surely by now we can subscribe to a different view of psychology, symbolism and meaning.

Miller, by refusing to create a central character and storyline that will explain all his examples, lets the literature be as vibrant as it wants to be, as problematic and multivalent. I found myself wishing at times that instead, he would create multiple spines for stories, a limited but useful number. This would sacrifice accuracy, but would offer more anchors for the discussion. I suppose I came to his book expecting a multimyth rather than monomyth, but that's not his intention. Then again, he gives the apparatus for constructing that kind of multimyth on one's own, so maybe that need can be fulfilled after all.

This is a lively, bountiful book, scholarly, aware of the possible pitfalls, and exuberant in its pursuit of the hero in all his epic forms.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't look further..., November 27, 2003

By 

"melzener" (Germany) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Epic Hero (Paperback)

If you're searching for the definitive compendium about all aspects of epic heroism, this is the one book to buy. The author quotes famous as well as lesser-known epic stories, drawing mainly from Norse, Welsh, French, Balkanian and Persian sources among others, profoundly analyzing and interpreting the cultural specialities of their protagonists as well as their striking similarities, sometimes pronouncing obscure and even humorous aspects and episodes. The book is academical and down-to-earth with a lot of footnotes and cross-references, don't expect an esoterical, over-simplifying Campbellian take on the subject matter. Thankfully, Miller keeps a certain ironic distance which results in a more entertaining read than I expected. For writers, especially in the movie business, "The Epic Hero" can be a real treasure, a source of immense inspiration - not from the structural point of view, but regarding the many details, themes and characters Dean A. Miller puts on display here in his great effort. I consider it the perfect companion (though not a surrogate due to its different scholaric approach) to Christopher Vogler's "The Writer's Journey" of which it sometimes appears to be an accidental yet very valuable continuation.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Impressive but incomplete, March 28, 2009

By 

BPop "World Literature Teacher" (Nashville USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Epic Hero (Paperback)

Miller's scholarship is indeed impressive; so too his command of such a wide variety of source material. Anyone interested in heroic literature will find this a truly enjoyable, if occasionally challenging, read. His approach leads to many refreshing insights, but also to at least one significant omission.

The first chapter, "The Hero from on High," is especially informative for the non-specialist. Students and teachers of World Literature will find a table of heroic narratives categorized by epic, saga, folktale, and romance particularly helpful. Similarly instructive are the discussion of previous approaches to the topic and the overview of the approach he employs throughout the remainder of the book. Those with even a passing familiarity with some of the many sources will surely enjoy the ensuing chapters as much as I did.

Two issues raised initially are worth noting, however. The first is Miller's resistance to reduce his sources to a singular "monomyth" model. On the one hand, I found more than a little irony in the fact that Joseph Campbell looms as a "stalking horse," as Miller calls him, against which Miller works. On the other hand, as a previous reviewer noted, Miller insists on letting "the literature be as vibrant as it wants to be," and I found the exceptions to the rule, so to speak, to be most interesting indeed.

The second issue, though, the theoretical framework for Miller's approach, proves a bit more problematic. Clearly, this is a work of comparative literature, as opposed to comparative linguistics in the vein of Watkins ("How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics") or West ("Indo-European Poetry and Myth"). But I cannot figure out whether this is an analysis of the corpus of Indo-European texts or of the traditional canon of Western European literature.

For example, I can understand the exclusion of the West African hero Sundiata (a.k.a. Sunjata or Son-Jara) and the Chinese folk epic "Journey to the West" (or as most readers know it, Waley's "Monkey") on the grounds that they are neither Indo-European nor Western (i.e. European). Similarly, I can even understand the omission of the great Indian (i.e. Indo-European) epics ("Ramayana" and "Mahabharata") since they had little impact on the heroic literature of Western Europe.

What I cannot understand, however, is the fact that there are no references at all to the heroic literature of Mesopotamia. If this is a work of Indo-European poetics, then the Indian epics should of course be included. If not, and the focus is limited to Western Europe, how can one deny the influence of the Near East on early Greek literature, especially the epics (cf. Penglase, "Greek Myths and Mesopotamia" and West, "The East Face of Helicon")?

Seriously, how can one exclude Gilgamesh from any discussion of the epic hero, especially when he would fit rather nicely into the patterns Miller identifies in the bulk of his analysis? Tellingly, Miller uses the word "Eurocentric" synonymously with the phrase "Indo-European" in his introduction. To his credit, he does so openly and honestly; his integrity is displayed in both the acknowledgement of his limitations and the rigor of his research.

While I appreciate Miller's honesty and integrity, and as much as I thoroughly enjoyed this book (I truly did), I do think that the inclusion of the Gilgamesh epic would have not only satisfied my own desires but also shored up the theoretical framework for his approach. Even so, such an omission should not dissuade anyone interested in heroic literature from reading this book.