The Istoriaphile’s Corner

Certain literary academic types like to search for the roots of stories.  Get a bunch of them together and pretty soon you’ll start hearing terms like “origin myth” and “archetype” being bandied about. (Well, that’s what you hear when you serve them tea and coffee. Serve booze and you may get something entirely different)   That’s because these thinkers spend a lot of their lives trying to understand humanity and culture through its literature and art.  Stories and characters are created to answer needs in the human psyche and some needs are so deeply rooted we don’t completely understand how or why they exist.  But because they exist, each generation makes up its own stories that revive or reinvent these characters and their adventures.  The stories gain or lose shades of complexity that correspond to aspects of the era it was hatched in but certain characters (or archetypes) reappear from one generation to the next and in stories from very different cultures.  Look anywhere in the pages World Literature and you’ll find the Wise Old Mentor or the terrifying Shade. You’ll also find my personal favorite there: the Trickster, the wildest, most entertaining Hero in the pack. Separating the Heroes…