My mother was Spanish and my father was Polish, so there was a little north vs. south going on in my home all the time as I was growing up. My mum would encourage us to watch Zorro and El Cid, my dad was all for Taras Bulba and whoever else Yul Brynner was portraying that week on late night TV. When my mother would make remarks about the superiority of the Mediterranean culture, my father would remind her that the Spanish culture, at least, came mostly from the Moors, and that Rome fell, crushed beneath the heels of the – you guessed it – northern barbarians.

Aside to the historically educated: Yes, I know that isn’t exactly what happened. Otherwise, why did it take Gibbon seven volumes to write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? I’m not talking history here, I’m talking popular (mis)conceptions.

Last week I took a look at the rise of the hero in popular culture – by which I meant not just among our genre-respecting selves, but with all those other people. This week I’d like to take a look at where heroes come from – or where we expect them to come from.

I’ll tell you what the Romans didn’t expect: they didn’t expect any hero to come from the barbarous north. I mean, really, whose language do you think the word “barbarian” comes from? And it sure didn’t mean “hero.” For one thing, it meant “wears a beard,” while we all know that heroes always shave, even if they’re not completely clean-shaven. Right?

So why did the barbarians come from the north? Simple. Because civilization came from the south. From Mesopotamia and Egypt and Crete. Okay, the south and east, but you see what I’m getting at. And what were there to the south and east? Cities.

Tension and conflict between country and city dwellers certainly goes back at least as far as Rome, and more likely as far back as there have been cities. It’s a dichotomy that forms the comic backbone of much of the drama of the late 17^th and early 18^th century, for example. The idea was that cities are sophisticated, urbane centres of culture and learning (note both denotation and connotation of the word urbane), while the country is full of common,  uneducated, narrow-minded simpletons, unable to grasp the finer points of behaviour, dress, and manners.

Aside: this isn’t exactly the same as how Shakespeare uses “low” characters for comic relief, but it’s related.

Okay, but how did the crude and the rude become heroes? There have always been heroes found among the witty and the urbane – and still are; Iron Man comes to mind, and certain incarnations of Batman. But the other kind of hero, the country hero, the barbarian hero, pops up with increasing frequency, beginning with the early genre work of the 20^th century. He (the barbarian hero certainly started out as a he) exemplifies the flip side of the country/city coin. It goes like this: the city is corrupt and evil (Prince Humperdinck) and the country is innocent and good (Wesley). Or, if not innocent, at least morally superior to the city dweller. Wesley, after all, is a dread pirate.

It’s from this concept that you get D’Artagnan, the Gascon, coming to Paris and becoming a Musketeer. The whole point of the boy (as anyone who has read the books or seen the marvelous screen version of Richard Lester knows), is that he’s an unknown bumpkin from some backwater province known to produce bumpkins. Though now that I think about it, Gascony’s in southern France. Hmmm. But still, D’Artagnan has the heart and soul of a Musketeer.

This idea, usually known as the concept of the ” noble savage” is pretty old in itself, but was quantified in the 18^th century, most notably in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote about the superiority of the “natural” or “primitive” man over his civilized counterpart.

Can’t you just see RE Howard thinking to himself: “Hmm. The Noble Savage. What if he wasn’t just noble? What if he was also,  well . . .  savage.”

Let’s look at this from another angle. Barbarian heroes don’t come from the south (here), they come from the north (there). Heroes in general don’t come from inside the community, they come from the outside. Even when they do come from inside, they’re outsiders – whether by intellect, wealth or poverty, trauma, or some combination of these.

I wonder if our familiar trope of the hero as stranger, as someone from away, began with the idea of the barbarian hero?

And what about climate change? What’s that going to do to northern barbarians?

A footnote on the images: though everything I’ve referred to in this post started out as something in print, they’ve all been made into movies, and I decided to go to the films for two of my images. I chose the Spanish book cover of Conan the Barbarian partly as a concrete demonstration of the root of the word “barbarian”, and partly because I own this book.

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Violette Malan is the author of the Dhulyn and Parno series of sword and sorcery adventures, as well as the Mirror Lands series of primary world fantasies. As VM Escalada, she writes the soon-to-be released Halls of Law series. Visit her website www.violettemalan.com.