Folk Heroes and Legendary Figures

Every culture on earth keeps a shelf of larger-than-life names: men and women whose deeds have been told and retold until the telling has become as solid as the deed itself. The outlaw in the greenwood, the trickster at the crossroads, the virgin warrior on the battlefield, the giant who carved out a valley with a single sweep of his axe — these are the folk heroes. They are not gods, though they sometimes touch the divine. They are not ordinary mortals, though many of them began as ordinary men and women whose memory was afterwards enlarged by the long memory of the people.

This survey explores the world of the folk hero as it appears across continents and centuries. It opens with the question of what a hero actually is in folk tradition, moves through the great categories — warrior, trickster, sovereign, outlaw, saint, prophet — and ends with a look at how the folk hero survives in the modern world of cinema, television, video games, and comic books. Throughout, links point to deeper explorations of the Medieval European Heroes, the Trickster Figures, and the Legendary Women of the folk imagination, as well as to wider traditions of European Folklore and the parallel figures of Anansi in West Africa and Coyote in North America.

The Hero in Folk Tradition

The word “hero” comes to us from the Greek heros, a term applied in Homer and the subsequent Greek tradition to demigods and champions whose deeds lay on the boundary between mortal and divine. Yet the folk hero is a much older and much more democratic figure. Long before Homer sang, the campfires of pre-literate Europe, Africa, and Asia were warmed by tales of men and women who had done something extraordinary: killed a monster, fed a starving people, defied a tyrant, founded a city, or simply vanished in a way that left the rest of the village wondering.

The twentieth-century scholar Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), proposed that all such stories share a single underlying shape, the monomyth: a hero is called from ordinary life, crosses a threshold into a strange and dangerous world, undergoes trials, achieves a decisive victory or boon, and returns transformed. The model is powerful, and it has illuminated everything from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Star Wars. But it is also incomplete. Folk tradition is messier than Campbell’s clean arc. Its heroes are not always called and they do not always return. Some, like the English outlaw Robin Hood, are said to die bleeding at the hands of a treacherous prioress. Some, like the Norse trickster Loki, are bound beneath a rock until the end of the world, and even then their final fate is ambiguous.

The folk hero is, in a sense, the people speaking to themselves. The hero is the figure onto whom a community projects its highest hopes and its deepest anxieties: the strong arm that the weak have always needed, the cunning mind that the small must rely on when the great are hostile, the noble death that gives meaning to a hard life. Different communities project different things, and the catalogue of folk heroes is therefore as varied as humanity itself.

The Categories of Folk Hero

Folk heroes can be roughly grouped into a small number of recurring categories, each of which performs a different cultural function.

The Warrior

The warrior is the most obvious folk hero: a man or woman whose strength and courage win a war, defeat a monster, or defend a homeland. The Japanese yamato-damashii tradition remembers Minamoto no Yoshitsune, the brilliant young general of the late twelfth century whose short life became the subject of the great war epic The Tale of the Heike. The French remember Joan of Arc, the seventeen-year-old who turned the course of the Hundred Years’ War and was afterwards burned at the stake at Rouen in 1431, only to be remembered as the saviour of France. The English remember Beowulf, the Geatish hero of the Anglo-Saxon epic, who descends into a watery cave to slay the monster Grendel and his dam. The category is broad, and it can shade into the demigod: Sun Wukong of the Chinese tradition is a warrior-hero born from stone, who fights his way through the armies of heaven with his iron staff, and whose tale is told in the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West.

The Trickster

The trickster is the wise fool of folk tradition: a creature of mischief and cunning who breaks the rules, exposes the pretensions of the powerful, and — sometimes accidentally — creates the world as we know it. The Norse have Loki, the West Africans have Anansi, the Native American Southwest and Plains have Coyote, and the Pacific Northwest and Inuit have Raven. The Japanese have the fox Kitsune and the shapeshifting Tanuki, and the European Middle Ages had the fox of the Reynard cycle, whose beast-epic told the long comic story of a clever, greedy, cowardly, and ultimately triumphant rogue. The trickster’s function is to remind a community that rules are made by the powerful and that the powerless have their own weapons.

The Sovereign and the Founder

The founder-hero is the legendary figure who, in the deep time of a nation’s story, established its capital, named its people, drew its first law, or drove out its enemies. Romulus and Remus, the twin sons of Mars and the Vestal Rhea Silvia, founded Rome. Aeneas, the Trojan refugee, became the ancestor of the Roman people in Virgil’s Aeneid. In West Africa, Sundiata Keita, the “Lion King” of Mali, founded the great Malian empire in the thirteenth century and is remembered in the griot tradition as the model of the wise and just ruler. In the Slavic world, the bogatyrs of the Russian byliny — Ilya Muromets, Dobrynya Nikitich, Alyosha Popovich — defended the land of Rus against the foreign and the monstrous. The sovereign-hero is not always a king in the strict sense: he or she is the figure from whom order itself is said to flow.

The Outlaw

The outlaw stands outside the law by necessity rather than by choice, and is remembered as a kind of inverted sovereign. The English have Robin Hood, the Scots have Rob Roy MacGregor, the Germans have the robber-barons of the Rhine legend, the Slavs have the hajduk, the Latin American tradition has the bandolero. The outlaw is a mirror in which the small can see a tall image of themselves. He robs from those who have too much, gives to those who have too little, and yet is also a man of violence, sometimes of cruelty. The category is morally complicated, and that is part of its appeal.

The Saint and the Prophet

The folk saint is the figure whose holiness outruns the calendar of the Church: a local wonderworker whose miracles are told in the dialect of the village rather than the Latin of the cathedral. Joan of Arc was tried as a heretic and condemned, but the people of Lorraine had already begun to call her saint long before Rome did. The Celtic world is rich in folk-saints: Brigid of Kildare, Patrick with his shamrock and his snake, Columba of Iona, the wandering David of Wales, the lonely Kevin of Glendalough. Folk saints often have pre-Christian origins, and many of them were once gods in an older religion. The folk prophet is rarer but equally important: a William Blake in England, a Mani in Persia, a Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet, in the early nineteenth-century Ohio Valley.

The Demigod and the Giant

In some traditions, the folk hero is part divine. The Greek Heracles is the son of Zeus by the mortal Alcmene, and his twelve labours form the spine of his cult. The Polynesian Maui is a demigod who fished up the North Island of New Zealand from the depths of the sea, snared the sun to slow its passage across the sky, and tried — and failed — to crawl through the body of the death goddess to win immortality for humankind. The American Paul Bunyan is a giant, a logger of impossible stature whose blue ox Babe carved out the Great Lakes with a single step. The demigod and the giant stand on the older layer of folk tradition, when the world was being made and the lines between the human and the divine were more easily crossed.

History, Memory, and Amplification

Many of the most famous folk heroes began as real human beings whose lives were subsequently transfigured by the long memory of their peoples. The historical Arthur, if he existed at all, was probably a British or Romano-British war-leader of the late fifth or early sixth century who won a battle or two against the encroaching Saxons. The Arthur of later Welsh and French tradition is something quite different: the crowned king of all Britain, the wielder of Excalibur, the founder of the Round Table, the husband of Guinevere, the lover of Lancelot, the companion of Merlin. The original may have been a chieftain of perhaps five hundred warriors; the figure who came down to Malory and Tennyson and T.H. White was the high king of a chivalric dream.

The same is true of Robin Hood, who may have been a household man of the Earl of Lancaster, or a Robert of Loxley remembered in the official rolls, or perhaps a wholly composite figure. The Robin Hood of A Gest of Robyn Hode (c. 1450) is a yeoman of the greenwood, generous to the poor and merciless to the sheriff. The Robin Hood of the nineteenth-century American writer Howard Pyle is a Saxon nobleman robbed of his inheritance by the Norman conquerors. Both Robins are real in the only sense that matters for folklore: real because their communities told and retold the stories until they became part of the inheritance of all who heard them.

The process of amplification is not unique to Europe. Sundiata Keita, founder of the Mali Empire, was remembered in the griot tradition as a child who could not walk until he grasped an iron rod and dragged himself upright, and as a king whose justice was the model for every later Malian ruler. The Chinese Hua Mulan, the young woman who took her father’s place in the army and returned after twelve years of war unrecognised, may have begun as a real soldier and ended as the universal figure of filial devotion. The American folk hero of the twentieth century, Paul Bunyan, was almost certainly invented by the loggers of the north woods in the 1880s and 1890s; within a generation, his blue ox Babe had cleared entire counties in the popular imagination. The folklorist’s term for this process is amplification: the slow growth of a figure’s stature, abilities, and significance, by which a chieftain becomes a king, a yeoman becomes an earl, and a child who could not walk becomes the founder of an empire.

Women in the Folk Hero Tradition

The folk hero is often imagined as male, but the women are there, sometimes at the centre of the tradition. Joan of Arc is the most famous medieval example; in the East, Hua Mulan holds the same place in the Chinese heart. The Anglo-Saxon noblewoman remembered as Lady Godiva gave her name to the legend of the naked ride through Coventry. The Iceni queen Boudicca burned Camulodunum and very nearly drove the Romans out of Britain in the year 60 or 61. The Norse remembered shield-maidens like Brynhildr and Lagertha, and the Valkyries who chose the slain upon the battlefield. Greek tradition remembered Atalanta, the virgin huntress who would not marry any man who could not beat her in a footrace, and Antigone, the sister who defied the king to give her brother a proper burial.

The functions of the female folk hero are not always the same as those of the male. She is sometimes the warrior, like Mulan or the Valkyrie. Sometimes she is the wise woman, like the Celtic Morgan le Fay, who in some versions of the Arthurian cycle is the king’s healer and in others his destroyer. Sometimes she is the dangerous beauty: the Baba Yaga of Slavic tradition, the Morgan of the later French romances, the siren of the Odyssey. And sometimes she is the woman who disobeys the king and wins: Antigone, Mulan, the Japanese Tomoe Gozen, the West African Mammy Wata. Across cultures, the female folk hero represents the power that the official order has tried to silence, and that the folk tradition has refused to forget.

A Global Comparison

The folk hero is a worldwide phenomenon, and the comparison between traditions is one of the most fruitful in the whole study of folklore. The European Robin Hood has structural cousins in the Japanese Ishikawa Goemon, the hajduks of the Balkans, and the gaucho outlaws of the Argentine pampas. The Norse Loki stands beside the West African Anansi and the Native American Coyote as the great tricksters of world tradition. The English King Arthur is one of a long line of sleeping kings, a figure common to Celtic and Germanic tradition. The Polynesian Maui who fished up the islands is the structural cousin of the Dogon ancestor who, in the Mali of West Africa, set the world in order with a word.

The Chinese tradition has a particularly rich catalogue. Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, was born from a stone and acquired magical powers, fought his way through heaven, was imprisoned under a mountain for five hundred years, and was finally released to accompany the monk Xuanzang on the journey to India. Guan Yu, the general of the late Han period, became the god of war and brotherhood, worshipped in temples from Hong Kong to San Francisco. Hua Mulan took her father’s place in the army and returned unrecognised. The Eight Immortals of the Daoist tradition are a kind of folk-hero pantheon, each of them a master of a particular magical art. The Japanese tradition remembers Yamato Takeru, the prince-warrior who subdued the eastern barbarians, and Momotarō, the boy born from a peach who set out with a dog, a monkey, and a pheasant to fight the ogres of Onigashima.

The Indian tradition is no less rich. The Mahabharata remembers the five Pandava brothers, and especially Arjuna the archer, who has a long conversation with the god Krishna on the nature of duty and the soul before the great battle. The Ramayana remembers Rama, the exiled prince who followed his wife Sita into the forest, fought the demon king Ravana, and returned to rule his kingdom in an ideal age. Draupadi, the wife of the five brothers, is one of the great complex female figures of world tradition: a woman of fierce intelligence, married to five men at once, humiliated in public, and the cause of the great war.

The African tradition has its own pantheon of heroes. Sundiata Keita founded the Mali Empire. Shaka kaSenzangakhona forged the Zulu kingdom in the early nineteenth century. The epic of Mwindo, told by the Nyanga people of the Congo, recounts the adventures of a hero born from his mother’s nose who travelled to the land of the dead and returned. The West African Anancy tales, in which the spider outwits the powerful and the foolish, form a vast reservoir of folk wisdom.

In the Americas, the Native American tradition remembers the culture-bringing trickster Coyote and the demiurge Raven. Paul Bunyan felled the forests of the upper Midwest. Pecos Bill lassoed a tornado. John Henry drove a steel spike against a steam drill and won, but died with the hammer still in his hand. The Latin American tradition remembers the gaucho Martín Fierro of Argentina, the bandits of the Brazilian sertão, and the revolutionary figures of the wars of independence.

The Middle East and the Mediterranean have their own deep well. Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, went in search of immortality and returned with the bitter knowledge that mortals must die. Odysseus wandered for ten years on the wine-dark sea. The Shahnameh of the Persian Ferdowsi remembers the heroes of old Iran, especially Rustam and his son Sohrab, whose tale of unknowing parricide is one of the great tragedies of world literature. The Thousand and One Nights remembers Sinbad the sailor and Ali Baba the woodcutter and the slave-girl Shahrazad, whose stories saved her life for a thousand and one nights.

The Hero as a Mirror of Social Values

A folk hero is never just an individual. The figure is shaped by the community that tells the story, and the shape of the hero therefore tells us something about the community. Robin Hood is English in his restraint, his sense of fair play, and his disinclination to kill even the sheriff who is trying to hang him. William Tell is Swiss in his quiet determination, his marksmanship, and his refusal to bow to a foreign hat. The Cid is Spanish in his loyalty to a Christian king and his long campaigns against the Moors. Sundiata is Malian in his sense of justice, his Muslim piety, and his foundation of an imperial order that was admired for centuries. Sun Wukong is Chinese in his irreverence toward heaven, his devotion to his master, and his uneasy place between the human and the divine.

The folk hero can also be a touchstone for the values a community is losing. The Trickster Figures of the world — Loki, Anansi, Coyote — are most fully developed in cultures where the everyday life of the community involves a great deal of negotiation with the powerful, whether that powerful is the colonial administration, the village chief, or the gods of the upper air. The hero is the figure through whom the small can imagine a victory.

The Survival of the Folk Hero

The folk hero has not gone away. He or she has moved, in the modern world, from the camp-fire to the cinema, from the village green to the video console, from the broadside ballad to the graphic novel. Howard Pyle’s 1883 The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood made the outlaw into a model of nineteenth-century chivalric virtue. T.H. White’s The Once and Future King of 1958 turned Arthur into a meditation on the uses and abuses of power. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon of 1983 retold the cycle from the point of view of the women, and helped to bring about a generation of feminist retellings. The Disney fox of 1973 made Robin Hood a children’s hero for a new century, and the Ridley Scott film of 2010 returned him to the brutal world of the early thirteenth century.

The Norse Loki has been rehabilitated, with some violence, by the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where he appears as a complicated anti-hero of great charm. The Anansi stories have become a major presence in African and African-diasporic literature, in the work of writers like Amiri Baraka, Neil Gaiman, and Ayi Kwei Armah. The Coyote of Native American tradition has been reclaimed by Native writers including Thomas King, Gerald Vizenor, and Stephen Graham Jones. The Polynesian Maui appears in the Disney film Moana of 2016. The Japanese Momotarō, the boy born from a peach, has been the hero of a great many films, animated works, and video games. The Greek Heracles has his own television series. The Russian Ilya Muromets has his railway station in Moscow and his Metro station, and his name has been carried by submarines, satellites, and bomber aircraft.

The folk hero has also found a new home in the festival. Midsummer, May Day, Samhain, and the various national days all carry their folk heroes with them, and the celebration is incomplete without the re-telling of the old stories. The oral storytelling traditions of the West African griots and the Norse skalds have not so much died as changed their medium: the griot is now on the radio, the skald is now on the streaming service. The folk hero survives because the human need that produced him survives: the need for a figure who is larger than us, who can do what we cannot do, and who can remind us, in a world that often seems too large, that the small have their own kind of power.

The Hero and the Sacred Tree

One of the most striking cross-cultural features of the folk hero is the connection to a particular tree, hill, river, or other landmark. Robin Hood is associated with the Major Oak of Sherwood Forest. The Yggdrasil of Norse myth is the great ash tree at the centre of the world, and Odin hung upon it for nine nights to win the runes. The oak tree of Domrémy is the place where, according to local tradition, the young Joan of Arc first heard the voices of her saints. In the Russian tradition, the bogatyrs gather beneath the oak at the crossing of three roads before they set out on their adventures. The hero and the landscape are inseparable, and the story of the hero is in part the story of a people and the ground they stand on.

See Also

• Medieval European Heroes
• Trickster Figures
• Legendary Women
• European Folklore
• Celtic Folklore
• Norse Folklore
• Anansi the Spider
• Coyote Trickster Tales
• Yggdrasil the World Tree
• Samhain Origins