SCOTT AND THE SUPERHERO IDIOM

I suppose the following "wish" might be deemed by some self-fulfilling-

I may as well as mention that the writer I **wish** had some strong candidates in this idiom is Sir Walter Scott. It looks to me like he single-handedly reinvented the adventure genre in the early 1800s, after the Age of Enlightenment made most of the fiction very talky and didactic, even when one sees occasional glimmers of adventure in Gothics or Byron's proto-swashbucklers.

-- because, after I read various summaries of Walter Scott works online, and chose to analyze the 1805 LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL, I found what I wanted on my first try. "What are the odds?" a skeptic might say.   

Still, I'm fine with admitting that MINSTREL is not the ideal "first post-Renaissance almost-superhero." While Scott's narrative poem was popular in its day, its status as a long poem probably kept it from being influential on genre fiction of the 19th century. This stands in contrast to the way, say, Scott's novel IVANHOE unquestionably influenced the 1844 penny dreadful THE BLACK MONK. So other candidates for "first almost-superhero," such as one finds in the French crime-novel THE MYSTERIES OF PARIS or the fictionalizations of the English "urban legend" Spring-Heeled Jack, would seem much more credible as DIRECT influences on the superhero idiom that would eventually include such later 19th century proponents as Allen Quatermain and Nick Carter.

However, in a purely FORMAL sense, MINSTREL has most of the right elements for what might be termed a "fantasy-hero" if not a superhero. The poem has one supernatural creature in it-- a goblin with magical powers-- and a combative conflict between powerful opponents who can be loosely framed as "hero and villain." The fly in the ointment is that though the goblin might be said to be allied to the side of the "villains" in a general sense, the creature is not opposed to the hero in the way readers now expect from most fantasy literature following the birth of "sword-and-sorcery." MINSTREL also has a sorcerer, but he's not specifically helpful or harmful to either heroes or villains. In essence I think in MINSTREL Scott was trying to meld elements of "feuds between rival Scottish clans" with those of "people encountering the supernatural"-- both of which elements appeared in the older ballads Scott had been translating before he wrote MINSTREL, his first notable original work. One may argue that the two sets of elements don't quite cohere as one might desire.

Still, since I don't imagine I'll ever be devoted enough to this topic to read the entire Walter Scott oeuvre, I'm pleased that even on the purely formal level, the author has some skin in this particular literary game.