The sword from the rock : an investigation into the origins of epic literature and the development of the hero

Introduction. Part 1 - Sources of the epic. 1 Myth and ritual in Western Asia. 2 Interaction of peoples during the second millennium B.C.. 3 "Heroic ages" and the emancipation from ritual. Part 2 - Literary development of the hero. 4 Type A - The epic of creation and its derivatives. 5 Type B - Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, The Ramayana. 6 Type C - The Iliad and the Mahabharata. Epilogue: The European inheritance

'Miss Levy is concerned to clarify the relation between epic literature and the ritual with which it was originally involved. She distinguishes three subjects of epics. First there are the wars of gods against gods for the establishment of world order; the Babylonian Epic of Creation is the prototype. Secondly, there is the quest for something lost, by a god-descended hero, usually with a half-animal companion, as in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Ramayana, or the Odyssey; here the conflict is between man and the monsters of the half-world of enchantment. The third subject is the internecine warfare of heroes with heroes, their equals, against a background of historic legend, its greatest examples being the Iliad and the Mahabharata. The first two categories of epic are both related to the rites of re-birth through death....the last, a product of Indo-European migration, has escaped from ritual. Here the conflict is ultimately between human and divine in the hero's personality, his animal double having disappeared....'

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