When I was in my early teens, and even earlier, I had two main heroes: King Arthur and Robin Hood. My mother tried to dissuade me from regarding Robin Hood as a hero. “He was a thief, a lawbreaker,” she said. I couldn’t argue that fact, yet it seemed a simplistic, black-and-white approach.
To me, the question of hero vs lawbreaker was multi-faceted. It involved fairness, not an attribute highly valued in medieval times. There was no concept of social justice. Right was might. King John must have his taxes and the Sheriff of Notingham was within his rights to string up anyone who interfered.
My attitude then was totally in keeping with what Joseph Chilton Pearce describes in Evolution’s End. At the age of twelve or so, being fair is a critical issue. Rules are drawn up in accordance with this principle of fairness. I could clearly see the inequity in the social structure and laud the person who tried to impose fairness, even though he had to break the (unfair) rules to do so.
(As an aside, in the Robin Hood tales and historical records generally, King John is portrayed as a villain and King Richard as a hero. Yet if you dig deeply into the records, John was actually a better king and ruled England better than Richard, who spent little time there and virtually bankrupted the country. No fairness there, either.)
When I got older, I added new heroes, people who possessed the attributes I wanted to have. One was a young man in the grade above me, super intelligent. I’m reasonably intelligent myself but he was so smart it blew me away. Mark Llewelyn, wherever you are, you never knew it but you were my hero.
Da Vinci was another. Again, brilliant in so many fields. I longed to be just like him. Then Ghandi, for his ideals and commitment to them, no matter the cost. Then, when I discovered real physics, not the pap they feed you in high school, I added Stephen Hawking. I still have his Cambridge Lectures on tape. Does that date me or what?
I won’t bore you with all the rest.
Heroes fill an important function in our lives. They embody an ideal we long to embrace. It’s painful to discover they have feet of clay, or in other words, have human failings. We want them to be above all that. I was genuinely shocked to learn Jim Bowie was unscrupulous, a cheat, a forger and a slave-trader. He had made my list because of his bravery and exploratory spirit, which turned out to be a figment of Hollywood’s imagination.
So have my heroes infused me with their qualities? To a degree, perhaps. I still value justice above law, as did Robin Hood. I try to live by a code of honour that includes the ideals espoused by King Arthur. Like Da Vinci, I am interested in and know something about a great number of things. Like him, too, I am lazy and something of a dilettante. Like Hawking, I find science fascinating and can’t learn enough about it, although I don’t have the mathematical background to understand everything. I still value Ghandi’s ideals but lack the courage sometimes to stand up for them. I am perhaps an anti-hero, a hero that didn’t pass the test.
In writing, what used to be termed “the hero” is now called “the protagonist” or “main character”. Perhaps that’s fair. Our heroes have to be human, have human failings, make mistakes just like the rest of us. And let’s be honest, some protagonists are anything but heroic. They make for a good story, but few of them become the stuff of legend.
That doesn’t mean they don’t influence the reader or imprint on him or her, especially a young reader. Michael Williams, author of Dragonlance, gave a moving webinar on their power to do just that. He told of signing a ragged copy of one of his books, presented by a disabled vet, who told him that book had been all over the world with him. He’d read it when he was twelve and absorbed the moral code of Sturm Brightblade. In an impossible situation, when he’d been shot down and was severely wounded, his options were few. He asked himself “What would Sturm do?” and then proceeded to do the heroic impossible. Williams had tears in his eyes when he told that story. That’s the power of a hero.
Your turn: Who were your heroes, and why? Leave a comment below.
I'm not very good at heroes. They so often turn out to have feet of clay.
I found my heroes in literature, mostly. Easier to project yourself in a story when there are lines to ponder and images to conjure. The Three Musketeers, Arsene Lupin (French is my first language), adventurous and swashbuckling, not especially honest, but honorable, according to their rules. So not that different from your heroes.