Hero's journey
common template of stories that involve a hero who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed
In narratology and comparative mythology, the hero's quest or hero's journey, also known as the monomyth, is the common template of stories that involve a hero who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed.
Early 20th-century figures proposed similar concepts, including psychoanalyst Otto Rank and amateur anthropologist Lord Raglan. Eventually, hero-myth pattern studies were popularized by Joseph Campbell, who was influenced by Carl Jung's analytical psychology. Campbell used the monomyth to analyze and compare religions. In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), he describes the narrative pattern as follows:
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
Campbell's theories regarding the concept of a "monomyth" have been the subject of criticism from scholars, particularly folklorists, who have dismissed the concept as a non-scholarly approach suffering from source-selection bias, among other criticisms.
More recently, the hero's journey has been analyzed as an example of the sympathetic plot, a universal narrative structure in which a goal-directed protagonist confronts obstacles, overcomes them, and eventually reaps rewards.
Background
The study of hero myth narratives can be traced back to 1871 with anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor's observations of common patterns in the plots of heroes' journeys. The German philologist Johann Georg von Hahn also compiled a list of common motifs, character traits, situations, and events that often appeared in Indo-European hero stories in his text Sagwissenschaftliche Studien (Scientific Studies) (1876).
In narratology and comparative mythology, narrative patterns have been proposed by a number of theorists, such as psychoanalyst Otto Rank in 1909, and amateur anthropologist Lord Raglan in 1936.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1542815. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1949, 1871, 1876 and 1909.
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