Myths and heroes.

BAC ORAL MYTHS AND HEROES

What I’d like to do is to discuss about the notion of myths and heroes.

It goes without saying that when someone talks about myths and heroes we all think about the ancient Greece or the roman empire.

But to clarify the terms I’m going to give you a quick definition. A myth is a traditional story, one which explains the early history, a cultural belief, a practice of a group of people, or explains a natural event. A commonly believed but false idea. A hero is a person who is admired for bravery, great achievements, or good qualities.

However there are several kinds of heroes such as Antique Heroes, Everyday heroes, superheroes, Fantastic heroes etc. We can come up with two groups of myths and heroes. In the one hand the ones that allow you to dream, owners of magic and mystery. In the other hand we can find the real heroes of our society who allow to follow behaviours or values.

This is why this subject leads me to wonder what is the impact of myths and heroes in our society and why are they so important nowadays?

Since the prehistory the human being wonders about the nature which surrounds him, the reason why for every natural event, thought, action or misunderstanding. This is how the first myths started. Populations gave a picture, names, actions, behaviours and talents to an unknown aspect of their life, and thanks to the oral transmission, the message and the development of the legends changed.

The point is that every myth and every hero has a message to send to the reader, (or to the listener): a moral. For example in the Apollo and Daphne myth, we learn that we cannot underestimate anyone on their physical aspect, or in the Pandora myth we learn to respect the privacy of others.

Likewise superheroes, or fantastic heroes are able to influence the society because even if we see movies or read books to escape from the reality, the characters of these pieces of work send us messages with conducts and ideals that are likely to be imitate. For example the Harry Potter books taught us to face our fears: however scary they may seem, sometimes we have to face our fears to get what we want. Poor Ron had to ‘follow the spiders’ to find the cure for Hermione after her run-in with the Basilisk and Harry had to deal with his terror of Dementors. Ginny had to face her fear of actually talking to Harry to actually get him to notice her, and Mrs. Weasley faced her biggest fear of all – losing a member of her family. Sometimes the only way is the hardest way, and it’s times like these that we find out what we’re really made of.

Thanks to all these remarkable behaviours, nowadays heroes like firefighters, police officers, or soldiers are inspired and honoured to protect and defend our society. Furthermore, they’re trying to be the source of inspiration for the population and more likely to the young people to copy and respect the values of the societies of our world.

To conclude we can say that since the ancient times, history was marked by people who defended the populations, named heroes, that caused an impact in all the known cultures. It goes without saying that everyone wants to be a hero sometimes, but nevertheless nowadays not only the police officers or the soldiers are considerate as heroes. Everyone can be a hero in our society, we may not save the world, but we can be the superhero of someone else by just being kind or by doing simple tasks like recycling or give food or clothes to charity.

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