Heroes on the Road: Quests, Voyages and Ordeals in Myth

Gilgamesh goes looking for Utnapishtim, the flood survivor granted eternal life, and the quest ends with a rejuvenation plant stolen by a serpent. The page records that Utnapishtim first tests him to stay awake six days and seven nights, and that he fails. The lesson drawn is that a lasting legacy, not deathlessness, is what a mortal king can secure.

Heracles serves King Eurystheus for twelve years after Hera drives him mad, and the labors escalate from local monsters to the edges of the known world. The twelfth sends him into the underworld to bring back Cerberus alive. Later Stoic readers took the whole sequence as an allegory of virtue won through toil.

Perseus is sent on an errand meant to be impossible, to bring back the head of Medusa, the one mortal Gorgon. He is armed by the gods and kills her by looking only at her reflection, and Pegasus springs from her blood. The Bibliotheca tells it, but Archaic Greek art showed the beheading centuries earlier.

Theseus volunteers as one of the fourteen youths Athens must send to Crete, and Ariadne's thread lets him find his way out of the labyrinth after he kills the Minotaur. The quest then turns tragic, because a forgotten black sail convinces his father Aegeus that he is dead. Sources disagree about what became of Ariadne afterward.

Jason sails to Colchis for the Golden Fleece with a crew of the greatest heroes of Greece, past the clashing rocks of the Symplegades. King Aeetes sets a further task, yoking fire-breathing bronze bulls and sowing dragon's teeth, and Medea's help is what carries him through. Homer already treats the voyage as a familiar tale, so the tradition is older than the surviving epic of Apollonius of Rhodes.

Rama is exiled for fourteen years with Sita and Lakshmana, and Ravana abducts Sita after a golden deer, the demon Maricha in disguise, draws Rama away. With Hanuman and the monkey forces Rama builds a causeway to Lanka and wins her back, only to have her fidelity publicly tested. The story exists in many regional retellings rather than one fixed text.

Beowulf crosses the sea to clear Heorot of Grendel, whom the poem traces to the line of Cain, then kills Grendel's mother in her underwater lair. Decades later, as an old king, he dies killing a dragon. The poem is set among Geats and Danes but was composed and preserved in Anglo-Saxon England.

The boy Setanta kills the smith Culann's guard dog, takes its place and becomes the Hound of Culann. He chooses arms early despite the warning that an early-armed warrior will be great but short-lived. When the adult warriors of Ulster lie under a curse of weakness, he defends the province alone and is first described in the riastrad, his battle frenzy.

Vainamoinen, stranded in Pohjola, wins his way home by promising that Ilmarinen will forge the Sampo for the witch-ruler Louhi. The heroes later sail back to take it, and in the pursuit it is shattered in the sea, leaving only fragments. Before the final battle Vainamoinen lulls Pohjola to sleep with a kantele he made from a jawbone.

Hunahpu and Xbalanque are summoned to Xibalba after their noisy ballgame offends its lords, who killed their father. They survive the deadly trial houses by cunning, not force, defeat the death gods and rise as the sun and the moon, or in some readings the sun and Venus. The Popol Vuh survives because the friar Ximenez copied a K'iche' manuscript that is now lost.

Pele flees her sister, the sea goddess Namakaokahai, and sails east, digging test pits that the sea floods at each island until she reaches the active volcanoes of Hawaii Island. The journey doubles as an account of the chain of islands from older to younger. Sources differ on where Kahiki lay, most often Tahiti or Polynesia generally.

The Thai monk Phra Malai travels through the Buddhist hells out of compassion, then ascends to Tavatimsa heaven to meet the future Buddha Metteyya. Tradition names Avici, the lowest hell, among the places he visits. Illustrated manuscripts were commissioned for funerals, so the journey is still recited to remind mourners of the stakes of conduct.