The birth of heroes and the memory of them are reconstructed in changing times and peoples, reflecting how the desires and national imagination of each era mythologize and commodify them. Reinterpretations of heroes play an important role in bridging the past and present, and are deeply involved in the formation of national identity.
Exploring how heroes are created, how they are mythologized and demystified, and how the memory of heroes changes over time is essential for those who want to get closer to a “truer” representation of heroes. By understanding the processes and mechanisms by which myths surrounding heroes are created and transmitted, and tracing their contribution to the formation of national identity in particular, we gain an objective distance from the times in order to read the different desires of each era that have created heroes and repainted their portraits.
In this process, the concept of heroism is not simply limited to individual abilities or achievements. Rather, heroes come to exist as the sum total of the collective memories and symbols of the society to which they belong. In social memory, heroes embody the hopes and despair, triumphs and defeats of a people, and as a result, their lives are constantly reinterpreted and reconstructed in later historical narratives. The lives of these heroes are often portrayed as more complex and multifaceted than the lives they actually lived, and this depends on how they are remembered and venerated after death.
Every hero lives a longer and more eventful life after death, and it is the shifting memories of posterity that set the stage for this afterlife. Joan of Arc was dismissed as a “foolish maiden disguised as mystery and piety” during the Enlightenment, but during the French Revolution and Napoleon’s rise to power, she was revered as the embodiment of patriotism. With the rise of nationalism, the fervor of her veneration intensified, and 19th-century republican nationalists reinvented her as a “protector of France” and “daughter of the people. Across the border, for 20th-century suffragettes, Joan of Arc was a symbol of “militant feminism,” while in South Korea, she was remembered as “France’s Yoo Yoo-sun.
These examples show how heroes can be reimagined and reinterpreted within a particular time and cultural context. They also remind us that heroes are not just figures from the past, but mirrors that reflect the values and beliefs of people living in the present. For example, in modern times, the image of Joan of Arc has become more diverse, and she has transcended religious beliefs to become a symbol of female leadership, national independence, and resistance to oppression. In this context, the quest for heroes is not only about understanding the past, but also about gaining insight into the present and future.
Underlying the question of how future generations’ memories of heroes are created is the premise that the management of memory is a social task as important as the distribution of wealth and power. Human memory is fundamentally socially constructed and selectively transmitted by specific social groups, limited in time and space. The question of memory is therefore a question of collective and social power rather than individual. At the same time, it is also a question of oblivion, which is the relationship between memory and forgetting.
In modern history, the most important unit through which memory was organized and processed was the “nation”. In the memory of the “national past,” which is closely related to the birth of modern historiography itself, the hero has occupied an important site of memory. In this case, the hero is not just a possessor of extraordinary abilities, but an embodied symbol of the nation’s glories and wounds, an object of identification for its members.
This identification is not just a celebration of the past, but also an important force in shaping the future of a people. Heroic stories remind us of past glories and stimulate collective aspirations to recreate them in the present and future. Heroes are often associated with the virtue of patriotism. In Korea, we often see figures who were loyal to the ideals of the military during the feudal era being reborn as heroes of the old country during the Enlightenment. Heroes such as Yi Sun-sin and Eulji Munduk, who were rediscovered by intellectuals such as Park Eun-sik and Shin Chae-ho as they awakened to the ‘national spirit’ during the renaissance period, no longer focus on ‘military’ but on ‘patriotism’.
These modern heroes have become a source of imagination that unites strangers into a single ‘people’. In this way, the hero was a media in the sense that it mediated and connected all members in a hierarchical and horizontal relationship. This means that the presence of a hero is not a symbol of personal achievement, but rather serves to strengthen social bonds and community cohesion. Through heroes, we don’t just remember the past, we gain the imagination and inspiration we need to live in the present and dream of the future.
