The Social Co-Author in the Epic

The epic as we know it went through a lot of hands of redactors. But there seemed to have been this moment when these tales were gathered together and constructed around this theme. It seems to be the moment when this decision was made to kind of join the hero and the folkloric character together in order to give the hero something to mourn, some reason for his quest. And I tend to feel this was like a novelist discovered a theme and worked out the way to tell it.