Returning Home

A quintessential step to the journey of a hero is the return home. Exhausted, taken to the limits of our souls and bodies, we adventurers turn our feet back down the path that had taken us to the edge of the world.

I am happy to return home. I cannot express how much I look forward to seeing my wife. I foolishly don't think I need a nap. My shower feels less like hygiene and more like a rebirth. I emerge with preternaturally smooth skin and I smell strange to myself.

The homeward journey is the only sensible ending to a heroes tale. The world of the ordinary, from which the hero was drawn in the beginning, is often the underlying drive for the myth in the first place. If the hero fails, home will be destroyed. While the return home isn't always positive (sometimes home is destroyed or the hero can't really fit in), the home is still the end of the story. It is the beginning, the end, and the ever-present counterpoint to the craziness of the supernatural world. Tolkein had it right: There and back again.

But I have just spent the weekend homeless getting to know homeless people I consider heroes. Because of this, I think the centrality of the home in the hero myth is a bit problematic.

Consider: how many heroes in stories have no home? Sure, some are wanderers, but even wanderers are often displaced from their rightful homes and become heroes when they take the fight to their oppressors and recover their home. Eternal wanderers are rarely more than colorful events in the travels of other heroes.

Perhaps our use of home as a necessary element of the hero myth is misguided. Think I'm over reading this? What in a myth has no homes? Beasts. Who has no respect for the belongings in homes? Scoundrels. Who destroys homes? Villains. It is through negation of home that characters have wildness, unpredictability, and evilness ascribed. When I think of ways society renders the homeless, beast, scoundrel, and villain are not too far off.

We must break ourselves of rendering the hero as essentially homed. We need to tell stories where the comfortable life is not the same as the good life. We need heroes who derive their morality from a place other than the home.

We need homeless heroes.