The Myth of the Birth of the Hero,
by Otto Rank

The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama, Part II,
by Lord Raglan

The Hero Pattern and
the Life of Jesus, by Alan Dundes

With an Introduction by Robert A. Segal

In Quest of the Hero makes available for a new generation of readers two classic works on hero legends: Otto Rank’s Myth of the Birth of the Hero and the central section of Lord Raglan’s The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama. Amplifying these is Alan Dundes’s fascinating contemporary inquiry, «The Hero Pattern and the Life of Jesus.» Examined here are the patterns found in the lore surrounding historical or legendary figures like Gilgamesh, Moses, David, Oedipus, Odysseus, Perseus, Heracles, Aeneas, Romulus, Siegfried, Lohengrin, Arthur, and Buddha.
Rank’s monograph remains the standard application of Freudian theory to hero myths. In The Hero the noted English folklorist Raglan singles out the myth-ritualist pattern in Sir James Frazer’s many-sided Golden Bough and applies that pattern to hero myths. Dundes, the eminent folklorist at the University of California at Berkeley, applies the theories of Rank, Raglan, and others to the case of Jesus.
In his introduction to this selection, Robert Segal, author of the major study of Joseph Campbell, charts the history of theorizing about hero myths and compares the approaches of Rank, Raglan, Dundes, and Campbell.

Robert A. Segal, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Louisiana State University, is the author of Joseph Campbell: An Introduction (NAL) and The Poimandres as Myth: Scholarly Theory and Gnostic Meaning (Mouton de Gruyter).