Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a fascinating book. It explores and compares stories from many cultures. Some people, notably George Lucas, have used the patterns he found as a template for their stories.

But the attempt to extract a “monomyth” from all the world’s heroic quest stories doesn’t impress me very much. It has an intensely Freudian focus and plays down aspects of myth which don’t fall into that scheme. I’m no folklorist, so don’t expect expert analysis here, but to me the basic formulation seems forced.
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