Good catch. There is some muddle here, you’re right. Point 20 should not be there, but neither should 19 as you suggest; whereas on my rethink after your previous queries, he should score Point 5 (if we revise “baby” to “child”). But after all those adjustments, Mithradates would still score out at 10.

First, of course, for “the wars during his reign,” those obviously do not count as defeating a single monster or villain before he takes the throne, so I shouldn’t have “20” in his list. Whereas wars during his reign nix the criterion of reigning uneventfully. These are two different criteria (in my system, points 11 and 20, “He reigns uneventfully (i.e., without wars or national catastrophes)” and “Before taking a throne or a wife, he battles and defeats a great adversary (such as a king, giant, dragon or wild beast),” because those are what scored or didn’t for most other heroes.

Then, on the tomb score:

I treated the scoring point not as simply “having a tomb,” but having a tomb despite his corpse supposedly having vanished or been lost. Merely being interred, with no vanishing, would not score.

As such, a hero can only score the tomb if they also first score the missing body (this is, in a sense, an “empty tomb” attribute).

That’s what I had in mind. This should upscore Zeus and Pelops by one, but I kept their low scores to maintain their status by argument a fortiori. Because Raglan doesn’t score the missing body for Pelops and Zeus, yet their myths do score it (Pelops only actually dies once in his myth: like Dionysus, as a child, by being eaten and then resurrected, or by being snatched up to heaven, or both, in neither case being buried; yet there is at least one celebrated tomb; whereas that Zeus was in his purported tomb was disputed, on the grounds that he ascended to heaven or was never mortal), and thus on my reading do deserve the tomb score as well. But rather than burn word count arguing this point, I just left their traditional low scores up. Since the same conclusion follows even with them underscored.

If we instead just count any having of a tomb as scoring, then Mithradates would score 11 (since I shouldn’t have counted Point 20, but should have counted point 5) and Alexander would score 10 instead of 9. But that doesn’t change the conclusion (none of these scores is over half).

Point 19 is admittedly vague in its original formula. But I am fairly certain a mythical read of the criterion should prevail over the mundane, as this is a mythotype. So IMO, we should only score putatively empty tombs, not just any tombs. So you could say Mithradates should score 9 just like Alexander; then gain 1 for the recovery of Point 5, bringing him back to 10. If you strain to upscore him, you can get him to 11 with the mundane tomb thing (per above); but that’s still not the required 12. And already I think that’s pushing it.

And of course it’s moot in the end since I already grant a fortiori four historical persons in the set. So I already allowed for a possible inclusion of someone like these guys (Mithradates and Alexander).

I’m actually planning a peer-reviewed article on the Rank-Raglan genre type, and intend to double-check and nail down all this stuff there, and for a future edition would just refer thereto from now on, once its published. Your queries have been very helpful to that end. Keep any coming.

Hi, thank you for your replies. I have a clarifying question because I think there might be a typo in OHJ. In the footnote no. 193 on pp. 231-232, you list the scoring of Mithradates (on p. 231) and then go on to describe which points he doesn’t score (on p. 232). These two passages line up except for one point. You write:

“Mithradates, items 1-2, 10, 12-14, 16-17, 20 and 22” (p. 231)

This means Mithradates fails to score 3-9, 11, 15, 18-19, 21

Then you write:

“stories of attempts to assassinate Mithradates during his childhood and teen years do not correspond to attempting to kill him ‘as a baby’, and at once disqualify him from the criterion ‘we are told nothing of his childhood’. He was also not explicitly identified as the son of a god; there is no actual evidence his parents were related; a comet corresponding with his conception and birth does not relate to how he was conceived; he was not actually spirited away as a baby or raised in a foreign land (but merely traveled his own land incognito as a teen); having never left his kingdom as a child, he can’t have ‘returned’ to it; wars during his reign disqualify him from ‘reigns uneventfully’, and do not correlate with battling a single great foe before ascending his throne; there was nothing actually mysterious or supernatural about his death; his body never vanishes; and not having vanished, his body can’t ‘yet still have’ a tomb (it is just simply entombed).” (p. 232)

When I map these comments to the list of the points he fails to score, I get this:

3 – [unusual conception] – “a comet corresponding with his conception and birth does not relate to how he was conceived”
4 – [son of god] – “He was also not explicitly identified as the son of a god”
5 – [murder attempt] – “stories of attempts to assassinate Mithradates during his childhood and teen years do not correspond to attempting to kill him ‘as a baby'”
6 – [spirited away] – “he was not actually spirited away as a baby”
7 – [reared by foster parents] – “he was not actually (…) raised in a foreign land (but merely traveled his own land incognito as a teen)”
8 – [nothing about childhood] – “stories of attempts to assassinate Mithradates (…) at once disqualify him from the criterion ‘we are told nothing of his childhood'”
9 – [returns or goes] – “having never left his kingdom as a child, he can’t have ‘returned’ to it”
11 – [uneventful reign] – “wars during his reign disqualify him from ‘reigns uneventfully'”
15 – [mysterious death] – “there was nothing actually mysterious or supernatural about his death”
18 – [body is not buried] – “his body never vanishes”
19 – [holy sepulchres] – ???
21 – [parents related] – “there is no actual evidence his parents were related”
??? – “wars during his reign (…) do not correlate with battling a single great foe before ascending his throne”

It seems to me that the list of the points Mithradates does score on p. 231 should say “19” instead of “20” because it’s apparent from your subsequent comments that you do give Mithradates the point for having a tomb (no. 19 in your numbering, corresponding to your comment “his body can’t ‘yet still have’ a tomb (it is just simply entombed)”) and you do not give Mithradates the point for defeating a great adversary (no. 20 in your numbering, corresponding to your comment “wars during his reign (…) do not correlate with battling a single great foe before ascending his throne”).

Is that correct? Thanks again, hope this helps to make the second edition or a sequel better!

In accordance with all of that, I do think a fortiori that Hercules should lose one point, insofar as it is not as clear as we should want it that his final time as prince (or any time as prince) was uneventful (that would depend on the unclear question of when he led the Calydonians in war, for example; I had taken it as part of the story of Meleager’s death which preceded Hercules’ marriage and thus final princedom, but on closer review just now, I see that is not precisely said in Diodorus, nor in other versions, so I shouldn’t assume it).

Accordingly I will downscore Hercules by one in the second edition of OHJ.

P.S. Indeed think we should define two fallacies at this point:

The Fallacy of John Wick’s Dog is the fallacy of claiming an obvious trope fulfilment isn’t one because of some hyper-specific semantics—rather than obeying literary structuralism, as any actual literature major would do.

John Wick’s dog cannot be removed from the category because he is incidentally not human. Likewise, ruling is ruling. The word “king” is no more essential to the literary function of the element than that Wick’s loved one be a human. Ditto “in what sense” someone is hailed a king. Hence Jesus is never literally made king; but the literary trope of proclaiming him one nevertheless is being played. It would simply be fallacious to deny that.

On the other end of the spectrum is the Fallacy of Ten Ways to Lose a Guy: claiming a literary trope (typology, mythotype, genre) doesn’t exist because you can disregard the literary structuralist role of each element of a genre and just make anything mean anything, hence a dying plant becomes a “loved one spurring vengeance” and “guilt-tripping” becomes “vengeance.” This is equally illegitimate.

You can’t define genres and tropes out of existence with semantic legerdemain. Clearly these genres and tropes exist. It would be more appropriate to just admit that and work from it being a fact, rather than try to make it go away because you are uncomfortable with the result.

Serious literary analysis requires honestly engaging with the actual semantic range of meaningful tropes and plot-points in replicated genres and mythotypes. In other words, you should not be stumping for either of the above fallacies. If you are, you have some soul-searching to do. You need to ask yourself why you are doing that. Because there is no valid literary reason to be doing it.

That’s the point of my John Wick and Ten Ways analogies: they make the impertinence of these tactics quite clear. Genres clearly exist. They also clearly have wide semantic ranges. But they also just as clearly don’t have infinite semantic ranges.

How you structurally understand a replicated trope defines its actual semantic range. These are not just random arbitrary boxes to check, that someone just made up. The tropes constituting a genre or mythotype have a structural role, one that curiously repeatedly appears in different ways; hence how you define and locate instantiations of them thus requires focusing on that structural function, rather than disregarding it.

What actually is it that we see continually repeated in curious conjunctions over and over again for hero after hero? You need to look at that, and not try to hyper-define entire genres out of existence. Yes, there will be edge cases, and a fortiori, we might choose not to count them (e.g. Osiris is fostered, but not in a foreign place); but not every variation of a theme is “therefore” an edge case (e.g. Hercules is indeed hailed a king at one point; and he does rule a few times even apart from actually earning an exact title).

It seems to me you only want to downscore Hercules from 17 to 15 on account of his never actually literally being king (indeed it is a famous part of his mythology that he was destined to be a king yet despite repeatedly getting close to that goal, has it snatched away) and that his exiles (there are in fact more than one; his story has many repeated cycles with similar patterns) being “voluntary.”

I could grant both and it has no effect on my thesis or counts. So it’s not a very substantive point. 15 is still more than half.

But, per the advice of Dundes, I revised the wording of the points to match how Raglan actually applies them, and double-checked the entire mythology, rather than only following the versions Raglan focuses on.

Hence…

-:-

The second pertinent point is “He is driven from the throne or city.” It has no relevance whether the hero voluntarily does this. Their belief that they must flee, and thus flee, is sufficient. And this happens more than once to Hercules (he flees Argos and his potential throne there from a similar crime).

Note that “losing favor” with subjects is a separate point that Hercules does not score. So there is no need of this being duplicated as the cause of the “driven from” point. Hercules simply scores the one and not the other.

That leaves the first pertinent point, which is “He is crowned, hailed or becomes king.” Take note.

A central theme of Hercules’ myth is that he is hailed a king by Zeus by being promised to be one (Diodorus: “Zeus, whose mind was fixed upon the birth of Heracles, announced in advance in the presence of all the gods that it was his intention to make the child who should be born that day king over the descendants of Perseus”).

After that Hera finagles away the actual fulfilment, but the notion that Hercules’ sons thus legitimately should have inherited rule over Argos, for example (and the rest of the Peloponnesus) was so well-known that actual literal wars were fought over this (the legend of the Heraclidae). Any ancient reader would know this. We cannot pretend it didn’t exist as indeed one of the most central themes of his myth.

Of course besides being hailed a king at his birth, in his legend, he rules many times as viceroy (he even leads the Caledonian armies, though [correction to my previous edit here] Raglan is most focused on his final quiet position after his marriage, when he is last officially a prince), and only fails to literally become a full king owing to Hera’s repeated machinations. But the central point is that at some point in his myth he is hailed a king (or in Raglan’s employment, “does” rule, whether literally as a king or not).

That this is supposed to happen at a certain point in the narrative is not an element of the scoring (some of the points relate to ordering; but this doesn’t). But even if we use Raglan’s wording, he isn’t using the word king literally, but only in reference to ruling, whether actually or in mere proclamation, either one satisfied the pattern.

Thanks for your reply! Btw what do you make of Raglan’s scoring of Heracles? Raglan says (p. 140): “On reaching manhood he (11) [= a victory over the king and/or a giant, dragon, or wild beast] proceeds to Calydon, where he (12) [= He marries a princess, often the daughter of his predecessor] marries the King’s daughter, and (13) [= Becomes king] becomes ruler. He remains there (14) [= For a time he reigns uneventfully] quietly for some years, after which an accidental manslaughter compels him (17) [= Is driven from the throne and city] to flee from the country.” Raglan gives Heracles points for becoming a ruler and then being driven from the throne and city based on the Calydon incident. I see two issues with this. First, as far as I was able to find, he is not actually driven from Calydon, in fact, Oeneus pardons him, he leaves of his own will, or both (Apollod. Bibl. 2.7.6, Diod. Sic. 4.36.2-3). And second, no source I could find has Heracles actually becoming a ruler in Calydon. I think this is important because a key trope in the Heraclean cycle is the paradoxical mismatch between Heracles’ excellence and his social status – he is the most accomplished Greek hero and yet he serves figures in positions of power even though they are much less suitable to occupy them (Eurystheus, Omphale). My worry is that in the case of Joseph, we don’t want to subtract a point from him because of a technicality (the attempt at his life doesn’t occur in his infancy) and instead want our scoring to capture the substantive trope and in the case of Heracles, we’d only give him the points because of a technicality (he lives in the palace of Oeneus and/or campaigns against the Thesprotians at the time, I guess?) in contradiction with the trope of the paradoxical mismatch between Heracles’ accomplishments and him not being a ruler while alive. What do you think?

I don’t use Raglan’s definitions precisely because they don’t match how he employs them. I adjust the definitions to the actual trope, per the advice of Dundes. But it is a fair point that the word “baby” is overly strict, because it assumes scoring the “no accounts of his childhood,” and there is no inherent reason why it should. So to include cases that don’t score the latter, it should be “before he is an adult.”

The trope is that an attempt is made to kill the hero, usually out of jealousy or selfish fear, and that this happens before the adulthood phase of their myth (defeating a foe, returning to or assuming kingdom, proclaiming laws, etc.). So there is no basis for the exact wording being “baby” any more than we should exclude John Wick from the Righteous Mass Killers type because his “slain or endangered loved one” is not human.

A beloved dog clearly fits trope in the same way a pre-adult selfish or jealous attack before becoming an adult fits trope.