Heros, Honour and Epics

Monday’s lecture the topic was about Heroes, Epics and Honour. I looked up both honour and hero on the Merriam-Webster On-Line Dictionary. I also looked up chivalrous, why I have looked up that word as well will be revealed to you in a few moments.

Honour has several meanings, a few of which are:
- A keen sense of ethical conduct
- One’s word given as a guarantee of performance
- A good name or public esteem

A hero is listed as being:
- An illustrious warrior
- A man admired for his achievements and noble qualities
- One that shows great courage
- The central figure in an event, period, or movement

Chivalrous is explained to be:
- marked by honor, generosity, and courtesy
- Valiant (possessing or acting with bravery or boldness)

I realize that the prof discussed the definitions of these words I just wanted to post them here as a further illustration of their lack in our present society. This lack of honour and heroes leaves us baffled as to what they are, how are we to find them, and wondering if they even exist?!

To me honour involves those things listed above but also deals with conduct in battle, a sentiment that was echoed in tutorial. In my previous post, the fact that there is no longer honour in our type of battle is what I was trying to express...there is nothing respectable or fair in picking off people with machine guns or bombs! The prof’s example about the British using long distance archers to kill the French was perfect! It is a prime example of how combat has changed from being melee (hand to hand) to long distance (bows and arrows, guns, bombs). With that change of how wars were fought came a change of ethics. Now almost anything goes in warfare…with the exception of intentionally killing women, children and attacking hospitals but even that happens sometimes.

To me another adjective that accompanies honour wherever it goes is chivalrous. As the definition mentioned it includes acts of honour and bravery together. Interesting? Since we no longer have honourable combat or chivalrous acts, how could we possibly still have heroes? Those two aspects are central to the classification of a hero and therefore we can conclude that heroes are a historical myth!

My proof for stating that heroes are historical myth comes from my medieval history class, where coincidentally we are talking about the evolution of culture, circa 11th and 12th century. One of the cultures that emerged is that of men of war. The central characteristics of these men of war were honour and chivalrous behaviour…is not that neat how it all seems to come together! Due to these characteristics being exemplified in certain individuals, a number of the outstanding warriors became known as heroes. That brings us to the topic of epics. When these warriors became known as heroes, there came a certain amount of notoriety associated with it because people would talk about him and all of his brave deeds. Eventually this talk, turned into lyric poetry which was to be performed on stage with the accompaniment of music. This oral tradition all created a genre referred to by my medieval history professor as courtly romances which were long prose narratives about young knights going on a quest for adventure to validate his sense of masculinity. Sounds kinda like parts of the Iliad?!

At any rate, to me there is a lacking of honour, heroes and chivalrous behaviour in our modern day world. This is troubling because as we can tell from the both the history books and the literary masterpieces we are truly missing out on something stupendous.

sv