Mythological Roots of the American Frontier Hero

Abstract

This chapter takes a look at the nature of the mythological hero and the benefits this hero can provide to society and culture. This analysis uses the mythological hero archetype and cycle described by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.1 In this description, the hero’s adventures take the form of a journey in quest of a boon. Analyzing religious symbolism, myth, and folktales, Campbell delineated a basic “monomyth” underlying the hero story, “one composite adventure [of] the tales of a number of the world’s symbolic carriers of the destiny of Everyman” (36). The hero of this archetypal myth is typically an average man2 who undertakes, or is forced by circumstances to make, a quest. This quest is a cyclical journey (the “hero cycle”), which begins in the everyday world, moves through the supernatural realm, and finally returns to the everyday world. The hero is “a person of exceptional gifts” (37), which the hero employs to his advantage in his adventures. The hero cycle begins when the hero receives a “call to adventure” and leaves home, often reluctantly. He crosses a “threshold of adventure” into a dangerous and supernatural underworld (245). This underworld is “a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which help him (helpers).” During his stay in the underworld, the hero acquires a “boon,” which he has stolen from the gods or other supernatural beings he has encountered, or which he has won from them through either trickery or his superlative skill (one of his exceptional gifts).KeywordsEveryday WorldHorse LiverRiver CrossingEnglish ArmyNative American GroupThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.