Trickster and Hero: Two Characters in the Oral and Written Traditions of the World
Harold Scheub
Language: English
Pages: 232
ISBN: 0299290743
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Scheub delves into the importance of trickster mythologies and the shifting relationships between tricksters and heroes. He examines protagonists that figure centrally in a wide range of oral narrative traditions, showing that the true hero is always to some extent a trickster as well. The trickster and hero, Scheub contends, are at the core of storytelling, and all the possibilities of life are there: we are taken apart and rebuilt, dismembered and reborn, defeated and renewed.
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heroic actions of the orphan in the Introduction same circumstances. Trickster’s actions would have social value simply because they would be placed against social values as they exist outside the narrative. In a Xhosa storyteller’s version of a baboon’s circumcision, for example, the humor of the narrative is augmented by the knowledge of the members of the audience of how sacred the rite of circumcision really is. Add to Ture’s activities an image set in which his actions can immediately
the hero: the initial battle is that between Sundiata and Danharan (between Sogolon and Sassouma). This leads to Sundiata’s exile and his rite of passage: his movement to the readiness to be king. The essential battle is that between Sundiata and Soumaoro: that will determine the future kingdom of Mali. Then Sundiata will move from the liminal region to the ethereal, and thence to the earthly. If this is a heroic epic, why is Sunjata not at center stage at all times? He is at center stage as he
the time that Bowra wrote his book (), Part Three: The Hero, with the Trickster at the Center however, there were materials that might have given him pause, an excellent version of the Malagasy epic Conte d’ Ibonia, for example, published in in French translation and presumably available to him.35 Ironically, in this version of the Malagasy epic, panegyric and imaginative heroic narrative interweave: the section in which Ranakombe considers names for his son rhythmically
fit that mold. “The hero,” he argues in Hero and Chief, is more than an audacious and vigorous youth . . . ; he is a performer of perplexing deeds. . . . He is a producer of wonder . . . as common people are not. . . . The hero is constantly plunged into difficulties and hardships . . . ; he is tested and tormented . . . ; he is capable of escaping dangers . . . and of safeguarding himself. . . . He possesses the plenitude of manhood . . . ; he is conscious of his power; his only aim is to be
initial resolutions of the six sequences follow similar patterns: in the first set, Mwindo captures his father; in the second, he burns Kasiyembe’s hair, and thus injures and subdues him; in the third, he kills Muisa; in the fourth, he destroys the aardvark’s cave (but because the aardvark did not attempt to harm Mwindo, the hero does no harm to him other than to curse him); in the fifth image-set, he wins the gamble and thereby brings Sheburungu down; and in the sixth, he destroys the dragon and
