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Theories of Myth and the Folklorist

Students of myth and folklore once occupied some common ground. In his often reprinted collection of essays called Custom and Myth, first published in 1884, Andrew Lang spelled out the relationship as seen by the anthropological school of English folklorists who so spiritedly advanced the cause of folklore science in the late nineteenth century. Two bodies of material intrigued Lang and his fellows. Around them they beheld archaic survivals among the British—and European—lower classes, in the form of village festival, agricultural rite, and household charm, so anomalous in the midst of the progressive, industrial, scientific England of the Victorian age. From missionaries, travelers, colonial officers, and the new anthropological fieldworkers they learned about “savage” myths, usages, and beliefs in remote corners of the world. The equation between peasants and savages provided “The Method of Folklore,” the title of Lang’s opening chapter. Savage myth embodied in fresh and vivid form the withered superstitions and desiccated rites now faintly visible in peasant customs. The folklorist could reconstruct their original full-fleshed shapes, and the prehistoric world in which they functioned, by close comparisons with the myths of primitive peoples.

These bodies of living myths further explained to the folklorist the irrational elements in myths of civilized peoples. Lang puzzled over the question why classical Greece preserved in her mythology such barbarous ideas, and found his answer in the new anthropology of E. B. Tylor. Greek myths were survivals and distorted mirrors of an earlier culture when cannibalism and human sacrifice did indeed prevail. To see such customs intact in his own day, the folklorist need simply turn to the Andaman Islanders, the African Hottentots, the Australian Noongahburrahs, and similar newly exposed areas of primitive life. Now the ugly Greek myth of Cronus becomes meaningful. Cronus cruelly castrated his father Uranus, who was about to embrace his mother Gaea. A Maori myth from New Zealand gives the key, depicting Heaven and Earth as a wedded couple, Heaven lying on Earth and imprisoning their children between them. Finally one child, the forest god, forces them asunder, freeing the offspring for their godly duties over the various elements. So did Cronus secure the separation of Heaven (Uranus) and Earth (Gaea), although the Hellenic Greeks had forgotten the original sense of the nature myth.¹

Behind this method of folklore inquiry lay an enticing theory, transferred from Darwin’s biology to the young science of anthropology and thence to folklore. Lang and his coworkers, G. L. Gomme, E. S. Hartland, and Edward Clodd, all accepted the unilinear view of cultural evolution. Mankind had climbed from his simian ancestry upward to the state of polished civilization by suecessive stages. All peoples ascended the evolutionary ladder in exactly the same manner. The savages of today were the Victorians of tomorrow, simply arrested by local circumstance, and conversely the Victorians of the contemporary moment were the savages of yesteryear.

In his far-reaching study of The Legend of Perseus (three volumes, 1894-1896), Edwin Sidney Hartland engaged upon the most sweeping application of the folklore method to a single classical myth. By slicing the Perseus myth into component episodes, such as the notions of the Supernatural Birth, the Life Token, the Witch and her Evil Eye, and pursuing their appearances throughout the worldwide collections of fairy tales, sagas, and savage mythologies, Hartland was able to demonstrate the substratum of primitive ideas underlying the literary myth. In the refined versions by Ovid and Strabo, Pausanias and Lucian, coarse traits essential to the primitive saga had dropped out: the external soul of the ogre, the lousing of the sleeping hero by his maiden-lover.

Another leading member of the anthropological school, Edward Clodd, examined the relationship between myth and the new study of folklore in his Myths and 1Dreams (1885).² The title of a preliminary lecture expresses more completely his point of view: “The Birth and Growth of Myth, and Its Survival in Folk-Lore, Legend, and Dogma.” Clodd saw in the concept of “myth” not merely the label for a narrative of the gods or the creation of the universe, but also the designation of an entire period in the stage of man’s intellectual development, “a necessary travailing through which the mind of man passed in its slow progress towards certitude.”³ In this stage, prehistoric man corresponded to the child, taking dreams for reality, endowing inanimate objects with life, crediting animals with the power of speech.

While the anthropological school of folklorists depended on myths, in this broad sense, to document their major hypotheses, they were at the same time vigorously battling a rival group of myth interpreters. The philological school of comparative mythology, championed in England by Max Müller, unlocked the secrets of myths with the new key of Vedic Sanskrit. In his famous essay on Comparative Mythology in 1856, Müller outlined the principles governing the proper explication of myths. All Aryan tongues stemmed from the Sanskrit, which transferred to its offspring the names of gods, all referring to celestial phenomena. The basic equation lay in Dyaus = Zeus, uniting the two chief gods of the Vedic and Hellenic pantheons. Through a “disease of language,” the original meanings and myths of the inherited names were forgotten and barbarous new myths arose to take their place. These myths had revolved around the sky (Dyaus) and the sun, the dawn and the clouds, and now comparative mythology could reconstruct these primary meanings buried within revolting Aryan mythologies.

So did solar mythology make its persuasive plea. Among the solarists who followed Müller’s lead, George Cox outstripped all others in the sweep of his claims. Every mythical hero—from Herakles, Perseus, Theseus, Oedipus, Samson, down to Beowulf and King Arthur and the humbler heroes and heroines of the fairy tales, the Frog Prince, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel—embodied the same solar deity or children of the dawn. One plot underlay all the primary myths and fairy tales, from the siege of Troy to the Song of Roland, the struggle of the sun against the powers of darkness. The sun hero battled monsters and ogres and armies, and suffered frightful trials in the nether regions, just as the sun toiled his way across the sky in the face of clouds and tempests. The gold he found at the end of his quest was the golden sunlight, and his magic swords, spears, and arrows were the sun’s darting rays. All mythology revolved around the conflict between day and night.

The science of comparative mythology thus strove to incorporate into its system the narrative traditions prized by the folklorists. In leading the counterattack, Lang called repeated attention to the inner disagreements among the celestial mythologists. Müller read the dawn into his Sanskrit etymologies; others deciphered the storm, fire, the sky, raindrops, the moon. Who was right? The anthropologists also employed the weapon of ridicule, showing how readily “A Song of Sixpence” could be interpreted as solar myth: the pie is the earth, the crust the sky, the four and twenty blackbirds the hours; the king is the sun, and his money the golden sunshine.⁴

By the turn of the century the solar mythologists were fairly routed. Four years after George Cox’s An Introduction to the Seience of Comparative Mythology and Folklore, there appeared in 1885 a rival volume faithfully presenting the anthropological point of view, An Introduction to Folk-Lore, by Marian Roalfe Cox, whose study of Cinderella constituted the first extensive comparative investigation of a folktale. The anthropological school controlled the Folk-Lore Society and dominated its publications during the remaining years of “the great team of English folklorists.”⁵

Half a century following the elaboration of Müller’s theory another symbolism descended on myth and sought to annex folklore. The sun and the dawn yield to the son and the mother. A new dispensation, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, replaces Müller’s Comparative Mythology, and psychoanalysis succeeds philology as the handmaiden of myth, laying bare the secret lore of the unconscious, as Vedic Sanskrit had opened the ancient wisdom of the East. Oedipus now leads the pantheon, embracing Jocasta as heaven had formerly clutched earth. In the myths, the toiling sun and the darksome night abandon their ceaseless contention, giving way to the energetic phallus and the enveloping womb. Where light had vanquished darkness, now, in the words of Jung, consciousness triumphed over unconsciousness.⁶ In the specific terms of Freud, the hero is a wish fulfillment, and the Devil personifies the “repressed unconscious instinctual life.”⁷ No longer are the meanings of the myths writ large in external, visible nature, but rather they are sunk deep in man’s unfathomed inner nature.

The Viennese psychoanalytical school could scarcely have avoided familiarity with the German nature mythologists, and the extent of their reading is seen in Otto Rank’s study of The Myth of the Birth of the Hero. Rank cites a shelfful of writings by the older school, disparaging them but adopting their method of interpretation. Only the symbols change. How transparent the myth of Cronus now is!⁸ And how appropriate that the word “incest” comes from the Sanskrit!⁹

In Rank’s gallery of heroes, the Freudian symbols fall neatly into place. The myth hero corresponds to the child ego, rebelling against the parents. The hostile father, projecting back his son’s hatred, exposes the child in a box or basket in the water; the box is the womb, and exposure in water is known in dreams to signalize birth. (The Flood myths are thus the hero myth amplified; the Ark is the box-womb.) The fact that birth has already occurred in the mythstory is easily explained away by Freud, who finds natural acts and fantasies from the unconscious peacefully succeeding each other in dream-myths. So the mythmakers are reconstructing their own childhood fantasies. The myth proves to be the delusion of a paranoiac resenting his father, who has preempted the mother’s love.

Dreams, myths, and fairy tales tell one common story, a genitalanal saga. Thread is semen, wheat is the penis, salt is urine, gold is feces.¹⁰ Defecation is itself symbolic of sublimated or rejected sexuality. “Jack and the Beanstalk” was once a pleasant lunar mythtale, with the moon as the bean of abundance Jack climbs to the wealth of the morning light. Now it is a masturbation fantasy, in which the beans and the stalk symbolize testicles and penis.¹¹ Little Red Riding Hood, erstwhile a dawn maiden, has become a virgin ready for seduction; her red cap is a menstrual symbol, and her wandering in the woods a straying from the path of virtue; the wolf eating the girl is the sex act. But beyond this simple and obvious symbolism, Fromm finds subtler meanings, a “pregnancy envy” shown by the wolf (man), who fills his belly (womb) with a living grandmother and the girl, and is properly punished when Little Red Riding Hood stows stones, the symbol of sterility, in his insides. This copulation drama turns out to be a tale of women who hate men and sex.¹²

Just as the celestial mythologists wrangled over the primacy of sun, storms, and stars, so now do the psychoanalytical mythologists dispute over the symbols from the unconscious. Formerly it was Müller, Kuhn, Preller, Goldziher, Frobenius, who recriminated; now it is Freud, Jung, Ferenczi, Fromm, Kerényi, Róheim, Reik. The shifts and twistings of symbolism can be seen clearly enough in the crucial figure of Oedipus. In the solar orthodoxy of Cox, Oedipus the sun hero defeated the schemings of the thundercloud Sphinx that hung threateningly over the city of Thebes, he reunited with his mother Jocasta, the Dawn, from whom he had been parted since infancy; unwilling to see the misery he had wrought, he tore out his eyes, meaning that the sun had blinded himself in clouds and darkness; his death in the sanctuary of the Eumenides was the demise of the sun in the Groves of the Dawn, “the fairy network of clouds which are the first to receive and the last to lose the light of the sun in the morning and the evening.”¹³ Oedipus was hurried irresistibly on his predestined course, just as the sun journeyed compulsively onward.

In his revelation of the Oedipus complex Freud disclosed the wish fulfillment of our childhood goals, to sleep with our mothers and kill our fathers. Yet already in 1912, twelve years later, Ferenczi has added adornments. True both to Freud and to the older philological mythologists, he accepts Oedipus as the phallus, derived from the Greek “swell-foot”; the foot in dreams and jokes symbolizes the penis, and swelling signifies erection. But Ferenczi also worked in the castration complex, represented in Oedipus’ blinding himself. The eyes, as paired organs, symbolize the testicles. Oedipus mutilated himself to express horror at his mother-incest, and also to avoid looking his father in the eye. Ferenczi reads this additional motive in the reply of Oedipus to the appalled Chorus, that Apollo fills his measure of woe. Apollo, the sun, is the father symbol. Hence Oedipus, formerly the sun hero, is now son of the sun god, and thus, if both readings are accepted, has become his own father.¹⁴

Erich Fromm shifted the burden to a conflict between matriarchy and patriarchy, revealed in the whole Oedipus trilogy, with Oedipus, Haemon, and Antigone upholding the matriarchal order against the tyranny of Creon. Fittingly Oedipus dies in the grove of the matriarchal goddesses, to whose world he belongs. Jung, moving farther afield, is bitterly castigated by Freud for exciding the libido from the Oedipus complex, and substituting for the erotic impulses an ethical conflict between the “life task” that lies ahead and the “psychic laziness” that holds one back, clinging to the skirts of an idealized mother and a self-centered father.¹⁵

Fairy tales, regarded by the mythologists as truncated myths, occasion the same discords. When Müller solarized “The Frog King,” first of the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen, he saw the frog as one more name for the sun, and worked out a derivation from the Sanskrit. People in the mythopoeic age called the frog the sun when they saw it squatting on the water. Ernest Jones, the voice of Freud, recognizes the frog as the penis. So the unconscious regards the male organ in moments of disgust, and the fairy-tale moral is the gradual overcoming of the maiden’s aversion to the sex act. In the chaster, archetypal reading of Jung, according to Joseph Campbell, the frog is a miniature dragon-serpent, loathsome in appearance but representing the “unconscious deep” filled with hidden treasures. He is the herald summoning forth the child from her infantile world to the land of adventure, independence, maturity, self-discovery, and at the same time filling her with anxiety at the thought of separation from her mother. Her golden ball lost in the well is the sun, the deep dark spring waters suggest the night; so the older symbolism overlays the newer.¹⁶

Even in their joint commentaries on the Winnebago trickster, the contemporary mythologists differ. Kerényi sees the ubiquitous Indian scapegrace and culture hero as the phallus; Jung and Radin find in him god, man, woman, animal, buffoon, hero, the amalgam of opposites, the reflection of both consciousness and unconsciousness.¹⁷

Toward the new symbolism of the psychoanalytical schools, the folklorist of today takes a position similar to that held by Lang and his fellows of yesterday. The language of the unconscious is as conjectural and inconclusive as Sanskrit, when applied to myths and tales. The tortured interpretations differ widely from each other; which is right? The psychoanalysts, like the philologists, come to the materials of folklore from the outside, anxious to exploit them for their own a priori assumptions. The folklorist begins with the raw data of his field and sees where they lead him. He can admire the symmetrical structure reared by Joseph Campbell from many disparate materials, but the folk literatures that occupy him cannot all be prettily channeled into the universal monomyth.¹⁸ The issue between contemporary mythologists and folklorists has, however, never been joined, because the one subject they could have debated, myth, has dropped from the vocabulary of folklore.

The English anthropological school of folklore did not long enjoy their conquest of the solar mythologists. Their own theory of survivals soon collapsed before the detailed field inquiries of modern anthropology.¹⁹ Leadership in folklore studies passed to the Continent, centering in the historical-geographical technique of the Finnish scholars. Collecting, archiving, and the comparative study of branching variants became, and still are, the order of the day. In the United States a division of labor has resulted between humanistic folklorists, who would abandon the term “myth,” and cultural anthropologists, who would discard the term “folklore.”²⁰ It is no accident that the keenest review of current theories of myth has been provided by the anthropologists Melville and Frances Herskovits, who test them empirically against their field materials.²¹ The collectors of folk traditions in contemporary America encounter almost all forms of traditional narrative—legend, anecdote, ghost story, Märchen, animal tale, jest, dialect story, tall tale, dirty joke, cante-fable—save only myth. The word “myth” is still flourished, say, at the mention of Davy Crockett or Paul Bunyan, but in the same fuzzy sense indistinguishable in common usage from “legend” or “folklore.”²² Cultural historians like Henry Nash Smith or Richard Hofstadter employ “myth” with the quite separate meaning of a popularly accepted cluster of images.²³

The progress of field collecting shows that mythologists and folklorists are dealing with different classes of material. In writing on Greek gods and heroes, Kerényi prefers sacred myths of the priests and poets to the heroic saga of the folk. The folklorist exhibits just the opposite preference. Heroic saga is the very stuff of folk tradition, and the Chadwicks in their exhaustive studies have explained the formation of the folk epics in terms eminently sensible to the folklorists.²⁴ The hero is not the sun, or the penis, or superconsciousness, but a great warrior around whom legends gather. The gold he wins is neither sunlight nor feces, but the same legendary gold that inspires countless treasure quests in real life, among downEast lobstermen, Southern Negroes, and Western cowhands.

The Crockett tradition follows in detail after detail the Chadwicks’ analysis, even given the special conditions of American history. From the frontier setting issues a Heroic Age society; Crockett is the historical figure to whom oral and written legends fasten; he undergoes adventures similar to those of all folk-epic heroes— single combats, wanderings, love affairs. He possesses famed weapons, utters fierce boasts, displays precocious strength, and meets death against great odds, like the other Heroic Age champions. His printed tales, close to their oral substratum, reveal him as a clownish hero, again in keeping with the Chadwicks’ findings, but the first step in the literary process leading to epic dignity can be seen in the almanac embroidery of the tradition.²⁵

The recent Disney-inspired revival of Crockett had nothing to do with the folk figure, but, like the Paul Bunyan story, was packaged by the mass media for popular consumption. These assemblyline demigods, numbering now nearly a dozen, belong to the “folklore of industrial man,” as Marshall McLuhan has called it in The Mechanical Bride, discussing themes that are not folklore at all but “pop kutch.” At the bottom of the Paul Bunyan fanfare lies the slenderest trickle of oral taletelling, and this has vanished in the sands of journalistic, advertising, radio, and juvenile-book regurgitation of Bunyan antics. Paul Bunyan has entered the vocabulary of journalism as a convenient humorous symbol for mammoth size and gargantuan undertakings, but the readings of the symbol vary widely. The lumber industry sees in him the exemplar of giant production, the Daily Worker finds in him the spirit of the workingman, artists extract from him the sheer brute strength of the American genius, resort promoters exhibit a big dummy to attract tourists.²⁶

A recent essay claims that the rebellious youth-idol hero, a composite of Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Elvis Presley, is the lineal descendant of Crockett and Bunyan. There can be no direct connection between a hero of oral folk tradition and the idol of teen-age mass adoration, but as mass-culture heroes, Crockett and Brando shocking the dudes, Superman and James Dean hurtling through space, Tarzan and Elvis Presley grunting and grimacing, do have an affinity.²⁷

Also in the domain of “pop kutch” belong the Paul Bunyansized treasuries of “folklore,” assembled most vigorously by Benjamin A. Botkin. These bargain packages use folklore as a bright label for their miscellany of local gags, schmalz, nostalgic reminiscences, and journalistic jokes, clipped from second-hand sources, with all coarse and obscene elements excluded, and a wide geographical area covered, to insure large distribution. There is a bit of sentiment and fun for everybody in these BIG American albums.

The problems in American folklore studies today are to separate the folklore of the folk from the fakelore of industrial man, and to establish among many specialists a common ground based on the unique circumstances of American history. There is a need to secure general acceptance of scholarly procedures in collecting and reporting the raw materials of folklore. In these respects American folklorists have a good deal of catching up to do to reach the solid platform of their English predecessors. The question of myth is far afield. But when it is posed, the lesson taught by Andrew Lang still holds, and the folklorist looks with a jaundiced eye at the excessive strainings of mythologists to extort symbols from folktales.

Notes

1. Andrew Lang, “The Myth of Cronus,” in Custom and Myth (London, 1901), pp. 45-63.

2. London, published by the Sunday Lecture Society, 1875.

3. Myths and Dreams (London, 1891), pp. 5-6.

4. E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (3rd ed., London, 1891), vol. I, p. 319.

5. As I have described them in an article of that title in the Journal of American Folklore 64 (1951): 1-10. My discussion of the Lang-Müller controversy, “The Eclipse of Solar Mythology,” appeared in the same journal, 68 (1955): 393-416, in a special symposium on myth, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok. Titled Myth: A Symposium, this group of papers also appears as Volume 5 in the Bibliographical and Special Series of the American Folklore Society (Philadelphia, 1955), and has been reprinted by the Indiana University Press (Bloomington, Ind., 1958).

6. C. G. Jung and C. Kerényi, Essays on a Science of Mythology, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Pantheon Books, 1949), p. 119.

7. The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, trans, and ed. A. A. Brill (New York: The Modern Library, 1938), p. 308; S. Freud and D. E. Oppenheim, Dreams in Folklore, trans. A. M. O. Richards (New York: International Universities Press, 1958), p. 39.

8. Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, A Psychological Interpretation of Mythology, trans. F. Robbins and S. E. Jelliffe (New York: Robert Brunner, 1952, 2nd ed. 1957), p. 93, note 97.

9. Ernest Jones, Essays in Applied Psycho-Analysis, vol. II, “Essays in Folklore, Anthropology and Religion” (London: Hogarth Press, 1951), p. 19.

10. See, e.g., Jones, “The Symbolic Significance of Salt,” ibid., pp. 22-109; Freud and Oppenheim, “Feces Symbolism and Related Dream Actions,” Dreams in Folklore, pp. 36-65.

11. Angelo de Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology (2 vols., New York and London, 1872), vol. I, p. 244; William H. Desmonde, “Jack and the Beanstalk,” American Imago 8 (1951): 287-88.

12. Erich Fromm, The Forgotten Language, An Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales and Myths (New York: Rinehart & Co., 1951), pp. 235-41.

13. George W. Cox, An Introduction to the Science of Comparative Mythology and Folklore (London, 1881), p. 126.

14. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, pp. 307-309; Sándor Ferenczi, “The Symbolic Representation of the Pleasure and the Reality Principles in the Oedipus Myth,” Imago 1 (1912), reprinted in Sex in Psychoanalysis, trans. Ernest Jones (New York: Robert Brunner, 1950), pp. 253-69.

15. Fromm, “The Oedipus Myth,” in The Forgotten Language, pp. 196-231; Freud, The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, p. 974. Rival psychoanalytic systems are considered in Patrick Mullahy, Oedipus, Myth and Complex (New York: 1948; reprinted in Evergreen Edition, 1955).

16. Max Müller, Chips from a German Workshop (New York, 1872), vol. II, pp. 244-46; Ernest Jones, “Psycho-Analysis and Folklore,” vol. II, p. 16; Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Pantheon Books, 1949), pp. 49-53.

17. Paul Radin, The Trickster, A Study in American Indian Mythology, with commentaries by Karl Kerényi and C. G. Jung (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956). Cf. Kerényi, pp. 183-85, with Radin, p. 169, and Jung, p. 203.

18. Joseph Campbell’s achievement in The Hero with a Thousand Faces rests on equal familiarity with folklore, psychoanalysis, literature, and theology. His brilliantly written “Folkloristic Commentary” to the Pantheon Books edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales (New York, 1944), pp. 833-64, shows his mastery of folktale scholarship.

19. The psychoanalytical mythologists evinced considerable interest in the survival theory. Freud saw the savage as well as the child in adult dreams and neuroses (Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. II, New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1955, P. 272), and made elaborate analogies between savages and neurotics in Totem and Taboo. Speaking at a congress of the English Folklore Society, Ernest Jones referred to “survivals” in the individual unconscious of totemistic beliefs, corresponding to survivals in racial memory (“Psycho-Analysis and Folklore” p. 7).

20. Stith Thompson, “Myths and Folktales, in Myth: A Symposium, pp. 482-88; William R. Bascom, “Verbal Art, Journal of American Folklore 68 (1955): 245-52

21. Melville J. and Frances S. Herskovits, “A Cross-Cultural Approach to Myth,” in Dahomean Narrative (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1958), pp. 81-122. See also the review by M. J. Herskovits of Fromm, The Forgotten Language, in Journal of American Folklore 66 (1953): 87-89.

22. E.g., Stuart A. Stiffler, “Davy Crockett: The Genesis of Heroic Myth,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 16 (1957): 134-40.

23. Thus H. N. Smith, Virgin Land, The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950); R. Hofstadter, “The Agrarian Myth and Commercial Realities,” in The Age of Reform (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1956), pp. 23-59.

24. C. Kerényi, The Gods of the Greeks (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1951); H. M. and N. K. Chadwick, The Growth of Literature (3 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932-1940).

25. I developed this idea in “Davy Crockett and the Heroic Age,” Southern Folklore Quarterly 6 (1942): 95-102.

26. My evidence for the journalistic treatment of Bunyan is given in “Paul Bunyan in the News, 1939-1941,” Western Folklore 15 (1956): 26-39, 179-93, 247-61. The only full scholarly treatment is by Daniel G. Hoffman, Paul Bunyan, Last of the Frontier Demigods (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1952).

27. Robert S. Brustein, “America’s New Culture Hero,” Commentary, 25 (February, 1958): 123-29. Leo Gurko considers the muscle-bound quality of American mass heroes in “Folklore of the American Hero,” in Heroes, Highbrows and the Popular Mind (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1953), pp. 168-98.

Reprinted from Daedalus 88 (1959): 280-90.