Meredith Mansfield, Author

That about covers my research into Arthurian Legend. It’s about time I stopped researching and got back to writing the actual story. Meantime, I’m going to blog about something else for a while. I’ve recently finished my third read-through of Gail Carriger’s THE HEROINE’S JOURNEY. I can’t recommend this book highly enough if you’re a writer or reader of heroic fiction.

There are—there have always been—two kinds of heroic journey. We just never hear about or read analysis of anything but the Hero’s Journey. (Gail Carriger gives an excellent analysis of why this is. I won’t repeat it here.) Yet the other journey is at least as prevalent in fiction and movies. This other journey is unfortunately known as the Heroine’s Journey, both by contrast to the better-known Hero’s Journey and because the earliest examples of this type of story are about goddesses.

These two journeys really ought to have non-gendered names, because characters—of whatever sex—can, and often do, undertake either journey. As a culture, we’ve come to a place where we can accept some female characters, like Wonder Woman, as being on a Hero’s Journey. It’s a lot harder to talk about a very masculine male hero undertaking a Heroine’s Journey. People, me included, just have a lot of trouble wrapping their heads around that.

So, for the present purpose, I’m going to rename them. Let’s call the Hero’s Journey the Warrior’s Journey instead. Why? Let’s look at a few examples. Frodo goes to Mordor to destroy the One Ring so Sauron can’t use it to enslave all of Middle Earth. Luke Skywalker sets out to deliver the plans to the Death Star and ends up being the one who blows it up. Wonder Woman has to kill Ares in order to end the war. There’s something in common about all of those quite necessary actions. No matter how analysts of this journey try to define it as “retrieving a boon or healing balm”, the Hero’s Journey is most often framed as a zero-sum game requiring the destruction of something (or someone) to win.

Don’t get me wrong; I love a good Hero’s Journey. But that’s not the only kind of heroic journey out there and it shouldn’t be the only kind of story we tell—or recognize when we see it. As Abraham Maslow wrote, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” It’s worth knowing both journeys if only to increase our tool sets as writers, readers—and in real life.

More about what makes the two kinds of heroic journey different in the next post.