For centuries, heroes survived only in songs.
Homer was the Marvel Cinematic Universe of his day. And we find the same thing elsewhere, for example in the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Mwindo Epic or the Ramayana. You might say that heroes survived only if they were sung—because music served as cloud storage for traditional societies.
In the English-speaking world, the folk ballad stood out as the most important and enduring survival of the ancient hero’s tale. Even after the invention of the printing press, these songs still flourished in the aural culture—preserving the hero’s music even as it was forgotten by highbrow elites.
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