Image of Child Heroes
The image of a child hero or trickster is seen in many cultures. This kind of role can reveal a lot about how a culture acts and reacts to things. The idea of the child hero in stories written and told before the birth of Christ probably reflects the people’s belief that the child is the future and therefore carries some sort of power or gift.
For stories written after the birth of Christ, the child could reflect the idea stated above or be the people’s belief in an infant savior who will make everything right again. Whether the story comes from before Christ or after, the one uniform aspect about these stories is that they are present in every culture around the world. The image of the trickster is also prevalent in different cultures and seen in many fables and moral-based stories. You cannot go against the Philistine, you are but a youth, and he has long been a man of war” (Metzger 145). This is what King Saul of Israel said to David when he proposed that he fight the Philistine warrior Goliath.
The story of David and Goliath is possibly one of the oldest child hero stories. It is part of the Bible in the Old Testament. In this story, a young man named David proposes to the king of Israel that he fight and attempt to kill Goliath, the giant that had been plaguing Israel. The king agrees, hesitantly, and David goes on to slay the beast using just a slingshot. While this story is not made up, it still shows us that the ancient Hebrews believed that a child, or in this case, a teen, has the will and motivation to do the impossible. Moving to the eastern side of the world, we will next see examples of Russian stories.
In the former Soviet Union, stories, books, and other types of art were often hard to come by. However, in recent years, there has been genuine cultural enrichment as Gorbachev’s glasnost policy permitted previously forbidden works by writers, artists, and cinematographers to become accessible (Grolier Multimedia). After the public gained access to the mass of stories that had been kept from them, there was even more of an increase in books and other forms of art. The Russian people now had much more incentive to write. In a certain village, there lived an old couple with one little son named Ivashko (Wyndham 32).
This is the line that begins the story of Ivashko and the Witch. The story takes place in a small village in Russia, and the main character is a small boy named Ivashko. Ivashko was a very independent boy who wanted to go off on his own and go fishing. He begged and pleaded with his parents, and finally, they gave in. His father built him a canoe and off he went. Ivashko was doing well while he was fishing, but at one point, he was lured to shore by an evil witch.
The witch grabbed him and took him to her house deep in the woods. She showed him to her daughter, and they decided to eat him. The witch left to get some of her friends. Ivashko seized this opportunity, and when the witch’s daughter went to sit down on a shovel to demonstrate to Ivashko how to do it, he threw her into the fire. He then left and ran up a tree. The witch found him and started gnawing at the tree.
Luckily for Ivashko, a flock of geese was flying overhead, and one flew down to sweep him up. Just as he left, the tree fell over on the witch and all her evil friends, crushing them. Ivashko lived happily ever after. This shows that in Russian culture, there is a presence of the child hero and even the image of the trickster in the way Ivashko tricked the witch’s daughter into showing him how to sit on a shovel. Ivashko is a hero in this story not only because he killed the witch but also because he rid the lake and the woods of the evil that kept most people from going there.
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