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#Monsters And Heroes

The hero-vs-beast pattern; taming or slaying the monstrous.

Ink rubbing of an Eastern Han stone relief from the Wu Liang Shrine — the great Fusang mulberry at centre with the sun-crows perched in its branches, the archer Yi at upper right drawing a bow up into the tree, and the solar goddess Xihe with a dragon-horse chariot below.
Chinese

Houyi Shoots the Ten Suns

Ten suns climbed into the sky at once and the world began to cook: the crops charred, the trees died, and the people had nothing left to eat. So the sage-emperor Yao sent for an archer.

6 minHuainanzi
Black line image of the war-monster Chiyou as a horned, shaggy hybrid figure standing frontally, a blade brandished in each raised hand and a third weapon planted point-down at his side, with a long tail and clawed hoof-like feet, on a plain white ground; a rendering of a Han-dynasty stone-relief motif.
Chinese

Chiyou, the War Monster

Dig in the fields of the old north country and you may turn up a skull hard as bronze, or a tooth two inches long that no hammer will break: the bones, people said, of the horned god of war the Yellow Emperor could kill but never quite be rid of.

6 minClassic of Mountains and Seas
Neo-Assyrian carved stone relief: a four-winged, helmeted and bearded storm-god strides forward brandishing thunderbolts, the deity who in the tradition slays the chaos-monster Tiamat.
Mesop.

Tiamat, the Primeval Sea

She was the salt ocean before the ocean had a shore, the mother of every god, and the body a younger god would one day split open to roof the sky. This is Tiamat as a being: her names, her monstrous brood, and how her carcass became the world.

8 min*Enūma Eliš*
Japanese woodblock print of the storm-god Susanoo, wild-haired and bearded in a white robe over a red under-robe, striding through foaming waves with his arms flung wide and a sword gripped in his lowered left hand, in the moment of slaying the eight-headed serpent Yamata-no-Orochi at the River Hi in Izumo.
Japanese

Susanoo, the Storm God

Born from a washed nose, he wept the green mountains bare and was cast out of two worlds before he ever drew a sword on the eight-headed serpent: the most turbulent of the Japanese gods, expelled troublemaker turned culture-hero of Izumo.

6 minKojiki
Japanese colour woodblock print of the hero Yamato-Takeru standing amid burning grass, a young man in a white robe patterned with pine-sprigs and hung with strings of curved jewels, drawing the blue-green Herb-Quelling sword Kusanagi across his body to cut back the flames sweeping up around him from the moor.
Japanese

The Three Sacred Treasures

A mirror forged to trap the sun, a sword drawn from a monster's tail, and a string of curved jewels: how three objects became the proof that Japan's emperors were born to rule.

7 minKojiki
An 18th-century Icelandic manuscript illustration of the binding of Fenrir: at right the crowned god Týr, sword raised in one hand, his other hand thrust into the jaws of the great wolf, which bites down on it; the wolf Fenrir crouches at centre; at left a second crowned god of the Aesir holds a spear and a curved fetter; a handwritten caption box sits at the upper right.
Norse

Tyr, God of the Oath

The boldest of the Aesir laid his sword-hand in a wolf's jaws to bind a doom he could not defeat, and lost it: the god who kept a pledge he knew was false.

5 minSnorri Sturluson
A lithograph of Thor regaining his hammer: at the forced wedding the god seizes Mjöllnir from the giant Thrym, the bride's veil still about him, Loki at his side.
Norse

The Theft of Mjöllnir

A giant buries the thunder-god's hammer eight leagues down and names his ransom: the goddess Freyja for his bride. So the strongest of the gods is bound into a bridal veil and sent to a wedding he means to end with a killing.

6 minPoetic Edda
A monochrome wash drawing of the binding of Fenrir: the great wolf's jaws gaping wide around the god Týr's outstretched hand as the unbreakable fetter holds.
Norse

The Binding of Fenrir

A wolf the gods reared at home, two iron chains he snapped like kindling, and a ribbon of six impossible things: how the Aesir caught the beast fated to kill Odin, and what it cost the one god brave enough to feed him.

6 minSnorri Sturluson
Fuseli's dark oil painting of the muscular nude Thor standing braced on the gunwale of Hymir's boat, his hammer raised high overhead, hauling up the fishing line at whose end the great Midgard-serpent Jörmungandr rears its scaled coils from the black sea below; the red-faced giant Hymir cowers in the stern.
Norse

Jörmungandr, the World Serpent

Odin flung a newborn snake into the sea to be rid of a prophecy, and it grew until it ringed the whole earth and bit its own tail: the boundary of the world, and the one foe fated to kill Thor even as Thor kills it.

5 minSnorri Sturluson
An oil painting of Thor in his goat-drawn chariot, red-bearded and mail-shirted, swinging his hammer Mjöllnir against a mass of charging giants under a storm sky.
Norse

Thor, God of Thunder

The strongest of the gods wakes to find his hammer gone, and the only way to get it back is to put on a bridal veil: a portrait of the Aesir's giant-killer at his most terrifying and his most absurd.

6 minPoetic Edda
Raphael's fresco The Parnassus: Apollo seated at centre on Parnassus playing a stringed lyre, surrounded by the nine Muses and the great poets of antiquity, beneath a vaulted sky.
Greek

Apollo, God of Light and Prophecy

The newborn who burst his swaddling bands to claim the lyre, the bow and the truth of Zeus, then killed a dragon to found the oracle that spoke for him.

5 minHomeric Hymn 3
Diana the huntress striding through a dark wood, a gold mantle slipping from her shoulders, reaching back to draw a white-fletched arrow from the quiver at her side while a red recurve bow hangs in her lowered hand. A lean white hound courses at her feet, and a lake glimmers through the trees behind her.
Greek

Artemis, the Huntress

The small child who climbed onto her father's knee and asked for a bow, eternal maidenhood and all the mountains in the world, then took them.

5 minHomeric Hymn 27
A Roman fresco in the Third Style: the Cyclops Polyphemus, a giant seated in a landscape, receives the cup of wine as the sea-nymph Galatea rides a dolphin across the sea at the panel's edge, under a violet-blue sky.
Greek

Odysseus and the Cyclops

He beat a giant with a lie and a sharpened stake, then threw it all away for the pleasure of hearing the monster learn his name.

7 minHomer
An engraving of a colossal, heavily muscled Hercules standing frontally, the Nemean lion-skin worn as a hood over his head and draped down his left side, the knotted olive-wood club resting over his right shoulder; small background vignettes show his combats with Antaeus, Cacus and Achelous in a classical landscape.
Greek

Heracles, the Greatest Hero

The strongman son of Zeus strangled serpents in his cradle and cleaned the world of monsters, but the labour that made him a god began in the ruin of his own house.

6 minPseudo-Apollodorus
A severed, snake-haired head with wide staring eyes and mouth open in a scream, blood streaming from the neck, dark serpents writhing outward from the scalp against a green convex ground ringed by a gilt border — Caravaggio's Medusa, painted on a ceremonial parade shield, showing the Gorgon's face in the instant after decapitation.
Greek

Medusa and the Gorgons

A face no one could look at and live, and a hero who beat it by refusing to look. The only mortal monster in a family of immortal ones, killed in her sleep.

5 minHesiod
A nude young hero in a winged cap holds aloft the severed, snake-haired head of Medusa in his raised left hand and a curved sickle in his lowered right, his own gaze cast down and away from the trophy; the Gorgon's decapitated body slumps beneath his feet on an ornate pedestal against a plain pale wall — Benvenuto Cellini's bronze Perseus with the Head of Medusa in the Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence.
Greek

Perseus, Slayer of Medusa

Locked in a bronze cell, cast to sea in a chest, sent for a head no man could look at and live. The hero who won by never looking, and killed his grandfather by accident.

6 minPseudo-Apollodorus
A white marble statue of a nude, laurel-crowned Theseus lunging forward with a club raised overhead in one hand, gripping the horned head of the bull-headed Minotaur with the other as the beast collapses beneath him over a fallen youth, set against a soft-focus ground of bare trees and pale stonework.
Greek

Theseus, Hero of Athens

A prince who chose the killers' road, unwound a thread through the dark to end a monster, and forgot a single sail. The founder Athens made in its own image, remembered for what he built and what he abandoned.

6 minPlutarch