The Once and Future Hero
Understanding the Hero in Quest Fantasy
Keywords:
characterisation, chronotope, dialogue, Quest FantasyAbstract
This paper examines the figure of the hero in Quest Fantasy novels, George R. R Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time. It employs Frye’s taxonomy for the categorization of genres and Bakhtin’s seminal ideas on the Epic and the Novel as references to analyse the characterisation of the Quest Fantasy hero in selected Fantasy texts and compares them with two Heroic works, Beowulf and The Poetic Edda. This analysis is based on the premise that Fantasy fuses elements of the Epic and the novel in a dialogic tension that is manifest in the setting and in the characterisation of the hero. It starts by looking at the general understanding of the hero figure, especially in the Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse tradition. It then discusses how shifts in the way contemporary Western societies understand the world requires a new view of the hero. This is followed by an analysis of the narrative chronotope and its effects on the characterisation of the Quest Fantasy hero, from its beginnings to its journey into the adventurous world.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2017 Fafnir

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Content in Fafnir is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC 3.0).
Beginning in November 2019, authors retain full copyright without restrictions. By publishing with Fafnir, authors grant a non-exclusive license to Fafnir to distribute the publisher’s version of the work, and give Fafnir permission to grant reprint and/or translation requests in accordance with our open-access policy and our Creative Commons license.
Prior to November 2019, copyright for all published material is held by Fafnir, but authors have full permission to use their work as they wish (i.e., self-archiving, reprint requests, using for other projects, etc.).
In both cases, re-use or re-posting of material published in Fafnir must acknowledge original publication and include a link to the publisher version.