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On the Mythology of Indo-European Heroic Hair1
In this paper I will be limiting myself, so far as the "mythology" of hair is concerned, to head-hair.2 The bearded epic hero is of course possible (as in the egregious case of the Spanish knight and hero El Cid Campeador, with his flourishing and indicative grant barba) but to emphasize the specific adult masculine mark of the beard is slightly misdirective, especially when we recall that such a hero as the Irish Cu Chulainn, at the full stretch of his powers, was still called "a beardless boy;" so was his Irish contemporary, the super-warrior Conall Cernach and, in a quite different setting, the hero-prince Avtandil in the (non-Indo-European in language but heavily Persified) Georgian epic, the Vep'xiqaosani My main focus is on the "long-haired hero"-and beginning with the usual, in fact the predictive image, of Homer's longhaired-komoontes-Achaians.3
In fact the long hair of these Achaian warriors does not specifically or iconically separate them from their Trojan adversaries; the fighters of the two sides do not differ substantially in appearance, though it is at least possible that the hirsute Achaians are judged by the poet to occupy one pole in what Joel Grisward calls the "mythologie de la chevelure," that is, of long hair as showing Force (Grisward, 1981: 260-261). The other pole or mark, for Grisward, is that of hair characterized by its Beaute; if this characteristic is assigned only to the Trojan warriors we have an opposition that rather supports Scott Littleton's suggestion: of the presence of a reflex of a true Indo-European guerre du fondation in the ILiad (Littleton, 1970). Unfortunately the Homeric text doesn't provide any evidence for this "functional" hirsute contrast (save for one instance I will deal with later); the epic text does include, however, the episode that strongly contrasts the Achaian hero-princes to "crop-headed" Thersites, and I must return, in time, to that drama and its penumbra of possible significances.
The "long-haired" image (as specifically identifying the heroic and the warriorlike) is also repeated in the Indic Mahabharata; a closer acquaintance with that huge epic than I can boast may emerge with a longer list of specific references, but as it is it seems that the heroes of the Pandava do...