Mythic Heros Sinbad The Sailor

Mythic Heros: Sinbad the Sailor

When I think about mythic heroes, for many years the first name that

came to mind was Sinbad: Sinbad the sailor. In his days as an adventurer, he

went on seven fantastic voyages which earned him fame for the rest of his life.

Yet, now in retrospect, I no longer consider him to be the great adventurer that

I saw him as in my childhood.

On his seven voyages, Sinbad encountered every obstacle one could

possibly think of. He and his crew met up with: a fish so large, many mistook

it for an island, an island where rocs (enormous birds (their eggs were often

mistaken for buildings)) still lived, cannibals, giants, and even herds of angry

elephants. On each and everyone one of his famed voyages, he was shipwrecked,

alone, and faced with some hideous danger. On each and everyone, he overcame

the odds, destroyed his foes, and returned home with riches beyond the

imagination.

As a child, the stories of Sinbad’s voyages were wildly entertaining.

In each one, there was adventure, danger, money, and the hero always came home

in one piece. Now that I look back at the stories, there are some parts of

Sinbad’s fantastic tales that bother me.

First of all, Sinbad never set out in search of adventure. These

amazing things just seemed to always happen to him. He normally set out as a

merchant, carrying goods from one exotic land to another. Yet, on each of these

trips, something incredible happened to him and his crew, resulting in a dead

crew and a fantastic story for Sinbad the sailor.

Secondly, all of Sinbad’s great adventures occurred sequentially. In

other words, he went immediately from one adventure to another without so much

as a nap in between. This man never had a quiet boat ride in the entire span of

time in which his adventures took place.

Another interesting point is the manner in which Sinbad always left and

returned to his home port in Baghdad. All seven times, he left with a full crew

and carrying the goods of a local merchant. Yet all seven times he returned, he

was alone, the crew having died in the early part of the respective adventure.

All seven times, he returned without the goods that he was to take to market,

but he often returned with new riches from the island where he was stranded (and

of course, kept them for himself). This leads me to believe that maybe his crew

didn’t die in the shipwrecks or some other accident after all.

Sinbad was a mythic hero; a hero for everyone with a love for adventure.

But now, I tend to think that Sinbad the sailor may not have been the great

adventure that he has been made out to be. Maybe there is more to the tale of

Sinbad than we know. Maybe something was lost in the translation from Arabic.

Maybe parts of the story vanished over the years. Who knows? Either way, I

don’t think we are getting the whole story of Sinbad the sailor.