Before the work of Moore and Miller, Roger B. Rollin examined Batman in conjunction with heroes from other stories of human history like Beowulf and Paradise Lost. At the time of Rollin’s essay in 1970, the dominant version of the Batman story was the campy Adam West television series. Rollin argued that Batman fit the Type II hero identified by Northrup Frye. A hero of this type is human, but he is morally and legally superior to others. This gives him “a semi-divine aura” (Rollin 435) that often seems to place him beyond real human concerns. “Though limited, he is still overwhelmingly powerful and overwhelmingly virtuous” (435). This type of hero presents a unified vision of morality that teaches proper conduct to the reader.

In contrast to Rollin, Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence observed major differences between the heroes of ancient mythology and those of popular American culture. They developed a critical definition of the American pattern, which they argued began in the 1930s and ’40s and continues to the present day:

A community in a harmonious paradise is threatened by evil; normal institutions fail to contend with this threat; a selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task. (6)

Although Lawrence and Jewett observed that heroes fitting this pattern were pervasive in American culture, they also found them to be problematic — even contradictory to the point of absurdity:

The monomyth betrays an aim to deny the tragic complexities of human life. […] The American monomyth offers vigilantism without lawlessness […] and moral infallibility without the loss of intellect. […] [The hero] unites a consuming love of impartial justice with a mission of personal vengeance that eliminates due process of law.  (47-48)

The blending of “impartial justice” with “personal revenge” played an important role in the shift in the Batman story brought about by Miller and Moore. All versions of the Batman story agree that the motivation for Batman’s creation, his moral code, and his actions is the tragic death of Thomas and Martha Wayne — and Bruce’s deep need to somehow do something about it.  Bruce often speaks of the need for justice and the need to save Gotham from criminals at great personal risk, yet he is never quite sure how his own personal feelings of revenge fit this ambition. His antagonists often exploit this conflict, which Miller and Moore explore in their three seminal works, Miller’s Batman: Year One and The Dark Knight Returns, and Moore’s The Killing Joke.

In Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One (1987), a young Bruce Wayne visits the grave of his parents and muses:

I’m not ready […] I have the means, the skill — but not the method . . . no. That’s not true. I have hundreds of methods. But something’s missing.  Something isn’t right.  I have to wait” (7).

Miller, Frank. Batman: Year One. 1987.

In Miller’s work, Bruce’s extraordinary physical abilities often overwhelm his mental discipline. Almost immediately after leaving the cemetary, Bruce finds himself in trouble when he cannot control his personal motives. He initiates a street fight with a man openly pimping an adolescent girl, and the situation turns into a disaster; Bruce later declares that there is “no excuse — didn’t control myself […] I have everything but patience” (20). The sequence shows a grown Bruce Wayne still driven by adolescent desires that he cannot control — a simple need to act without comprehending the underlying morality of why. The reader is left in a state of confusion as Bruce struggles to clearly define his moral exigence.

In The Dark Knight Returns (1986), Miller constructs a nearly post-apocalyptic Gotham whose hero has all but abandoned both the city and any righteous motives to the criminals. Fear has run completely amok in Gotham. The public’s lack of effort to stop crime forces Batman’s violent hand. Joker claims to be reformed and appears as a guest on a late-night talk show.  When he then massacres the entire studio crowd (121-29), it is up to Batman to use violence in the name of justice. Batman destroys both a gang leader and Joker. But Miller raises a serious concern: should Batman use violence to effect change in society? If his adversaries are using the same tactic, what makes Batman’s actions any better than those he is fighting?

Miller, Frank. The Dark Knight Returns. 1986.

Alan Moore explores fear throughout The Killing Joke (1988) from the opposite perspective, presenting Joker as a kind of negative image of Batman. Nearly every page and panel of the book is saturated in the yellow, purple, and red associated with Joker’s motley suit, giving a strong impression that Joker who terrorizes Gotham City is just as ever-present as Batman who watches over it. Batman doubts his own ability to fight this mirror image. In the book’s opening pages, Batman visits Arkham Asylum and expresses these doubts to Joker:

I’ve been thinking lately, about you and me. About what’s going to happen to us, in the end.  We’re going to kill each other, aren’t we? (Moore n.p.)

Moore, Alan.  Batman: The Killing Joke.  1988.

Batman recognizes that his vigilantism and Joker’s terrorism both utilize the same weapon, fear, and Moore presents Batman with an unresolvable dilemma: how can he combat a villain who understands fear as well or even better than he does? The book concludes with Batman and Joker concluding their climactic battle sharing a laugh together over a bad joke, as if in recognition that victory for either of them is impossible.

In the past twenty-five years, the Batman character has grown into a morally complex amalgam of mythic qualities wherein the evolution of his humanity has become more important than any drive toward transcendence. This shift has been primarily the result of the three comic books discussed above, those written by Frank Miller and Alan Moore in the 1980s. According to Lawrence and Jewett’s definition of the American hero, in which the hero must “lift the siege of evil and restore the Edenic state of perfect faith and perfect peace” (46), the Batman of Miller and Moore must be seen as a tragic hero: he cannot overcome his personal flaws and save his community.

References

• Rollin, Roger B.  “Beowulf to Batman: The Epic Hero and Pop Culture.”  College English 31.5 (Feb. 1970): 431-49.
• Lawrence, John Shelton and Robert Jewett.  The Myth of the American Superhero.  Grand Rapids, MI:  W.B. Eerdmans, 2002.
• Miller, Frank et. al. Batman: Year One.  1986-87.  New York: DC Comics, 2005.
• Miller, Frank et. al. The Dark Knight Returns.  1986.  New York: DC Comics, 2002.
• Moore, Alan.  Batman: The Killing Joke.  New York: DC Comics, 1988.

In The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, two schoolchildren, Colin and Susan, get unwittingly entangled in conflict with supernatural powers. Unaware of its mythic significance, Susan wears a family heirloom, the Weirdstone of Brisingamen, around her wrist. This jewel could bring great power to the forces of evil that could turn the tide in the imminent battle of the last days. The backbone of the tale is a kind of “reverse quest” — that is, a quest not to retrieve something, but to get rid of it. Susan must deliver that artifact into the safe keeping of the wizard Cadellin. The Great Enemy, Nastrond, desperately desires the Weirdstone; at the same time, Nastrond’s minions hope to snatch it for their own use. The bulk of the novel is an exilic journey in which the protagonists’ only goal is to evade capture until they can put the Weirdstone into more capable hands and return to their normal lives.

Garner grew up and still lives in Cheshire, a county in northern England. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen includes real landmarks from Cheshire — the Wizard’s Well, Goldenstone, and Clulow Cross — as well as other familiar features of the countryside — abandoned copper mines, the old quarry, Radnor Mere, and so on. This contributes to the novel’s verisimilitude (one can actually retrace the protagonists’ steps on their journey), but more than that, Garner associates them with supernatural and mythic underpinnings. Garner has used what one literary critic called an “immense narrative and verbal power, with a feeling for landscape” in this novel to “infuse the countryside of contemporary Cheshire with ancient, furious magic” (Butler 2005). The Wizard’s Well and its inscription, for example, are given a magical explanation: there really is a wizard! The landmark is well-known to Cheshire-folk, though no one remembers the true story of the carven image and inscription. Garner, having grown up near the Wizard’s Well, must have imagined many possible stories to explain it. In The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, he offers readers his own fictive explanation, the wizard Cadellin.

The story is set in the environs of Alderley Edge, in present-day Cheshire, but its backdrop is an intricately woven tapestry of mythological influences drawn from the traditions of that region. Historically and geographically, Cheshire finds itself at something of a mythic crossroads, where Celtic, Old English, and Old Norse strands once met and mingled. Over the course of the Middle Ages, Celtic influences spread south from Scotland and northeast from Wales, while the Norse traveled southwest over the rough North Sea. Both of these converged on the native Anglo-Saxon tradition already well-established in England. The epic poems of legends of the Celtic Mabinogion, the Norse Eddas, and the English Beowulf were probably all known and appreciated in equal measure in this chilly northern county. Garner, therefore, takes pains to reflect the same admixture in his fictional representation. Let me give a few further examples of each to demonstrate how effectively Garner assimilates them into his novel.

The forces of evil include elements of all three mythologies. The Great Enemy is called Nastrond, and his abode is Ragnarok, both terms drawn from Old Norse mythology. But in the Old Norse, Nastrond is a place, not a person, while Ragnarok is an event, not a place. Why did Garner alter them? My suspicion is that he is trying to demonstrate the way in which mythologies erode over time. Names are remembered (usually), but their precise applications often are not — especially where disparate mythologies commingled. Tolkien demonstrated much the same kind of mythic mixture and erosion in his fiction. As another example, the svart alfar, represent the dark elves of the Old Norse tradition; here in The Weirdstone, they represent something analogous to the goblins of folklore. And where there are “dark elves,” there must also be “light elves” — and indeed the lios alfar make a quick appearance (they are more important in the sequel, The Moon of Gomrath). Later in the story, the forces of evil summon the fimbulwinter, a preternatural storm of snow, ice, and deadly cold invoked through dark magic, which also dates back to the Old Norse Eddic tradition.

The evil hoards against which Colin, Susan, and their allies find themselves pitted include a group of witches and warlocks called the morthbrood. This is clearly resurrected from Old English (morth ‘death, destruction, perdition’ + bród ‘brood’). Another part of the dark forces are the Lyblacs — a strange-sounding name for the equally strange scarecrow-like creatures it represents. But for those in the know, not so alien after all — lyblác is a kind of dark Anglo-Saxon magic. The word means ‘sorcery, witchcraft, the art of using drugs or potions for the purpose of poisoning, or for magical purposes.’ And finally, we have the Mara, great troll-like women, practically indestructible, and one of the most significant threats to our protagonists. These, too, are not mere invention on Garner’s part. The mara is a mingled Norse / English representation of the nightmare personified. The Old Norse word mara means a ‘nightmare, incubus,’ while in Old English there is the mære, mara, or mera ‘a night-mare, a monster oppressing men during sleep.’ (For more information on this mythical tradition, see Alaric Hall’s essay, cited below).

Garner’s principal witch, and the leader of the morthbrood, is called the Morrigan. This is a direct reference to a kind of sorceress archetype in Celtic mythology. One of the heroes, too, the dwarf Fenodyree, has Celtic origins. His cousin, Durathror, on the other hand, owes his name to Norse myth. But their mysterious ally, Gaberlunzie, is also a Celtic figure, as are Angharad Goldenhand and the distant realm of Prydein, to which some of the characters allude. Prydein lies outside the immediate map of the action, but it represents Northern Scotland, mythologized in the tradition of the Mabinogion (Prydain, so-spelled, also forms the mythic backdrop for Lloyd Alexander’s well-known fantasy series; however, Alexander shifted it southwest to Wales). In most cases, Garner draws little more than these distant names into his tale, like herbs and spices added to an already rich stew. But as with the examples of Nastrond and Ragnarok, Garner minds less that these remote people and places erode and evolve than that they be lost entirely.

I could easily enumerate a dozen other elements from these three major mythologies — the Weirdstone of Brisingamen itself refers to the necklace of the Norse goddess Freyja — but half the fun is in stumbling upon them for yourself. Indeed, these mythological landmarks are analogous, within the novel, to the actual landmarks of Cheshire and Alderley Edge, around which Garner built his fantasy adventure. Any walking excursion in the real, present-day countryside will reveal one ancient sight after another, and Garner wants to remind us that these landmarks have genuine stories — stories whose distant echoes in England’s early mythology can still be heard, if one stops to listen. And perhaps even a little of the magic lingers there as well.

Works Consulted

• Butler, Charles. “Alan Garner.” The Literary Encyclopedia. 6 August 2005. (Excerpt available for free online; membership required for full entry.)
• Butler, Charles. Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children’s Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper. Lanham, MD: Children’s Literature Association and Scarecrow Press, 2006.
• Garner, Alan. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. New York: Ace Books, 1960.
• Hall, Alaric. “The Evidence for Maran, the Anglo-Saxon ‘Nightmares’.” Neophilologus Vol. 91, No. 2. (April 2007): 299-317. (Abstract available online.)

Shiva, 12th century bronze. More information »

At the most fundamental level, the image tells the story of Shiva, the god who presides over the cosmic cycle of creation and destruction. The dancing Shiva is enclosed within a circular mandala of flames (prabhamandala) shown on a flat, two-dimensional plane, while the gestures of Shiva’s arms and legs describe a circle in space, in three dimensions. With your imagination, you need to supply the fourth dimension — time — which cannot be expressed in the static image: if you stare at the image and let the dancer begin to move, he will start to whirl in a circle, in the direction shone by his left leg which is lifted up and moving towards the right, as is his lower left arm. In addition to the whirling body of the god, you can also see his locks of matted hair whirling around, unbound; Shiva’s hair plays an important role in the god’s iconography and also in the stories told about him.

So what we see here is a cycle, a circle, a whirling dance in which opposed forces are in perfect balance. To read the story of the forces that are both unleashed here and held in check, we need to look at Shiva’s arms (four of them) and his legs. They tell the story of creation and destruction which has happened not just once but over and over again, and not just in the world outside, but in the world within, especially within the hearts of Shiva’s worshipers. Statues like this were of course not originally intended for museums, but instead were venerated in temples and carried in processions during holy days in honor of the god, inspiring dances performed by his followers.

In Shiva’s upper right hand, there is a small hourglass-shaped drum, called a damaru, which provides the music for the dance, and which also symbolizes the act of the creation of the world through sound. The role of sound is an essential force in Hindu cosmology: the Sanskrit language came into being, syllable by syllable, from the sound of Shiva’s drum beating.

Shiva’s drum (detail). More »

In Shiva’s upper left hand, there is a vessel of fire, which symbolizes destruction and dissolution.

Shiva’s fire (detail). More »

Yet while the upper hands hold the drum of creation and the fire of destruction, Shiva shows the gesture of fearlessness (the abhaya mudra) with his lower right hand. This gesture assures us of the stability of the world. There is a balance at work here, a profound one, and the dancing Shiva stands upright, even as the forces of creation and destruction are whirling around him.

Shiva’s hands (detail). More »

The lower left hand, meanwhile, turns our attention towards Shiva’s feet, where again we see the balance of two opposing forces. With his right foot, Shiva presses downward, expressing his veiled incarnation in the bodily world (tirobhava). Yet at the same time, with his left foot, Shiva is moving upwards as he bestows a blessing upon his followers, freeing them from the illusion of the world (maya) in an uplifting enlightenment.

Beneath the foot is a demon called Apasmara, who is simultaneously both an enemy of the god being crushed underfoot but also a worshipful devotee who gazes up reverently at the lord. On either side of the demon are two makaras, mythical river beasts like crocodiles. The circle of flames, which seems paradoxically to flow both into and out of their mouths, is another sign of the unbroken circularity of creation and destruction.

Shiva’s foot (detail). More »

Shiva’s face, meanwhile, is peaceful and impassive, expressing the balance of the interplay of forces, up and down, left and right, in and out, which are set in motion during the dance.

This general sense of balance and motion is immediately clear to anyone who gazes at the image; I think it is the sheer beauty of that basic visual impression which captured my rapt attention when I first saw the statue. Then, in addition to the visual language of the statue’s form, there are also symbols (far more symbols than I could cover in this brief article) incorporated into the image which allude to other stories about the god Shiva. Just to take one example, if you look closely, you can find the river goddess Ganga in Shiva’s hair.

Shiva’s hair (detail). More »

This figure alludes to the descent of the goddess Ganga — the river Ganges — through the hair of Shiva. Here is a brief account of that story: The 60,000 sons of King Sagara were chasing a sacred horse which they discovered at the hermitage of the great sage Kapila. Angry at being disturbed in his meditation, Kapila burned them all to ashes. The only way to purify their ashes would be to wash them in the river Ganga, but at that time Ganga was nowhere to be found on the earth; she lived in heaven with the other gods. King Sagara’s pious grandson Bhagiratha prayed to the gods for a thousand years until finally the god Brahma agreed to send Ganga down to earth. Yet Brahma warned Bhagiratha that the force of Ganga’s descent would destroy the world, so Bhagiratha then begged the god Shiva to break the river’s fall. Moved by Bhagiratha’s extreme penances, Shiva agreed to do this, and the floodtide of the Ganga crashed into the locks of his hair, and then splashed safely onto the earth, purifying everything in her path.

The goddess Ganga is just one of the objects shown in the whirling locks of Shiva’s statue. There are other objects there in his hair, and many other stories that the statue tells in this way, calling those myths to mind  for audiences who are already familiar with the god and his stories. Yet even without knowing the symbols or the allusions, you can still be swept away by the visual story itself — at least I was, as I gazed for the first time upon the Nataraja in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.