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| | Epic Qualities of the Sundiata (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20) |
 | | By the time you are done reading an epic, you know how the people in this culture live, honor their dead, dress, eat, worship, build their homes, design their government...what kind of laws they make and how they enforce them, how they interact with other cultures and much more. |
 | | The Epic hero represents GOOD (according to the mores of the culture whose epic this is) and the foil, the hero's antagonist, always has qualities morally and culturally repulsive to the subject culture. |
 | | Every epic hero repeatedly thwarts death (although he must eventually succumb), either by visiting and returning from the underworld, which mere mortals cannot do (katabasis), by receiving the help of a divinity or otherwise supernatural entity, or by using magic to protect himself from the laws that govern that realm. |
| www.casro.ilstu.edu /drjclassics/syllabi/IH/sundiataepic.shtm (501 words) |
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