Part of my study abroad trip to London and Rome in September is a series of blog posts about some assigned readings, and reflections upon them. This is the sixth such post, and is one of one about Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain.
“This son, indulging in secret pleasures, wed a certain granddaughter of Lavinia and fathered a child on her. When this was made known to Ascanius, he ordered his court wizards to ascertain the sex of the child. The wizards revealed, in no uncertain terms, that the girl would bear a son who would kill both his father and his mother, but that he would also wander in exile through many lands until he had finally achieved the highest honor. In this prophecy the wizards were not mistaken, for when the day of the child’s birth arrived, the woman indeed bore a son and died in childbirth. The boy was taken by the midwife and named Brutus. When fifteen years had passed, this young man came upon his father while hunting and unintentionally kill him with an arrow …”
– excerpt from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain
Ever since reading Otto Rank’s The Myth of the Birth of the Hero I’ve been more aware of the patterns of heroic birth. Otto Rank, a disciple of Freud, had a list of ten traits that were common to all heroic birth myths. Among these are ones that Brutus of Troy displays: prophecy before the birth, a difficult birth, orphaned / raised apart from parents, raised by one of the meek (the midwife), that he kills his parents, he lived among the animals / meek (slaves), and he crosses the waters in the sense of the sea voyages he undergoes.
The birth and youth of Brutus of Troy is written in the pattern of the classical mythological heroes, from the fictional (Oedipus) to the pseudo-historical (Sargon of Akkad), as detailed by Otto Rank. And that is without even starting into all of the Campbellian “Heroes Journey” aspects of Brutus’s tale.
