The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [15]
Another celebrated monster-slayer was Theseus, who also grows up alone in the world with his mother. On coming of age he goes to rejoin his father, King Aegeus in Athens, having to kill a series of monsters and villains on the way. But when he arrives he finds his father's kingdom under a terrible shadow, cast by a rival kingdom across the sea in Crete, ruled over by the grim tyrant King Minos. Every ninth year the Athenians must pay a tribute to the tyrant, by sending the flower of their city's youth to feed the frightful monster the Minotaur, half-bull, half-man (another creation of Poseidon), which lives at the heart of the mighty Labyrinth, a dark, enclosed stone maze from which no one has ever found a way out. Theseus volunteers to lead the party of young men and maidens who are to be sacrificed to this creature; and on arriving in Crete he wins the love and support of the tyrant's daughter Ariadne, who secretly supplies him with the `magic aids, a sword and a skein of thread, he needs to win victory. Finding his way to the centre of the Labyrinth, unravelling the thread, he confronts the Minotaur and kills it. Ariadne's thread enables him to retrace his way back through the maze of tunnels to the open air. It is true that, when they then flee together back to Athens, Theseus abandons his Princess on the island of Naxos. And as he comes within sight of the mainland, and forgets to hoist a white rather than a black sail to show his father that he has returned victorious, King Aegeus throws himself in grief into the sea which ever afterwards bore his name. But this also means that, like many another monster-slaying hero, Theseus succeeds to the kingdom, becoming the greatest ruler Athens ever had. He also eventually marries the Princess, by making Ariadne's sister Phaedra his queen.
Compared with the array of loathsome and supernatural monsters in Greek mythology (not forgetting the succession of horrors, like the many-headed Hydra, overcome by Heracles in the course of his twelve labours), the villain of the most familiar Overcoming the Monster story in Jewish legend might seem almost domesticated. But when the Philistine army invaded the kingdom of Saul, nothing could have seemed more terrifying to the children of Israel than the Philistines' towering, seemingly invincible champion, the boastful giant Goliath. When an obscure little shepherd-boy David stepped forward to challenge the giant, first his own brothers, then the Israelite army as a whole could not have been more scornful - until they saw the deadly aim with which he cast his `magic' sling stones into the giant's forehead, sending the great figure toppling lifeless to the ground. And a detail of the story which might be overlooked is what happens to David after his victory. For being the saviour of his country, he is given the hand in marriage of King Saul's daughter, the Princess Michal; and eventually the young giant-slayer succeeds Saul to become his country's greatest king.
The hero's immediate reward for slaying the monster may not always be the winning of a'Princess' and succession to a kingdom: but in some form or another these are rarely very far away.
Another notable constellation of monster-tales, for instance, were those which loomed up in the imaginations of the inhabitants of northern Europe, amid the mists and darkness of the first millennium of the Christian era. The world has rarely seen such a parade of giants, dragons, trolls, treacherous dwarves, foul fiends and `loathly worms' as infested the Norse sagas and Germanic and Celtic epics of these times. And here the hero's immediate reward for slaying the monster was likely to be a fabulous treasure. One such tale, later to achieve wider currency from its adaptation by Wagner, was the episode in the Volsunga Saga which tells of how the young hero Sigurd, with the aid of his `magic weapon, the great sword Gram, slays the horrible monster Fafnir, who sits in the middle