Your Hero Myth

Your hero myth will be due Tuesday, January 10. It should be at least two typed pages (at least 500-600 words) to have enough detail to cover the requirements. The hero may be male or female, but it must be human. The hero may live in the present, the future, or the past. The heroic deeds may involve battles and gods and the usual mythological events, or they may be more “normal” – the battles that any human faces during a lifetime: helping a friend, saving someone’s reputation, finding a lost child, etc. As you create your own myth about a hero of your choice, keep the archetypal path of the hero in mind. This path traditionally has some of the following elements:

1. a missing father: perhaps he is a god

2. a call to adventure: for Theseus it was his desire to find his father; for Perseus, it was his desire to find a suitable gift for his mother (Medusa’s head); for Prometheus, it was his continual desire to help man 3. a helper or helpers who show the hero the way and/or give him/her gifts (Athena and Hermes helped Perseus) 4. a threshold crossing which might be a journey by night, an abduction (kidnapping), being swallowed by a whale (Jonah or Pinocchio), falling down a well (Mother Holle) 5. tests of the hero’s worth: for Theseus it was the three evildoers he met on the way to find his father in Athens; for Perseus it may have been the taking of the shared eyeball of the three sisters, who then helped him further. 6. there may be more helpers on the other side of the threshold; sometimes the helpers are the ones whose test he passed (as with Perseus)

7. the finding of the “boon,” which may be an object (Medusa’s head, the elixir of life) or a marriage, or an accomplishment (the killing of the minotaur), which helps not only the hero but his whole society back in everyday life.

8. the flight or return home, which may involve some danger to the hero. 9. the bringing of the boon to the society in everyday life.

Have fun! Be careful of the usual errors: - spelling - punctuation - run on sentences - sentence fragments - formatting the paper (follow the MLA format for name, heading, etc) - tenses (don’t switch between past and present!)

Remember: - a dash – to set something off from the rest of the sentence – is two hyphens (which your computer will probably turn into a long dash) with a space on either side.