2 List of famous heroes
- Achilles, classical Greece
- Attila
- King Arthur, medieval England
- Beowulf, Iron Age Scandinavia
- Brer Rabbit, West African trickster figure
- Davy Crockett, Tennessee politician who fought and died for Texas independence at the Alamo
- El Cid, Spanish knight
- The Einherjar, heroes chosen by the war god Odin to fight the giants at the end of the world
- Giordano Bruno, renaissance mystic burned as a heretic
- Link, protagonist in the The Legend of Zelda series
- Lord Guan, Chinese general and demigod
- Piet Hein, Dutch pirate in 16th century
- Harry Potter, fictional character by J. K. Rowling
- Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, hero of the Battle of Trafalgar.
- Heracles ( Hercules), Greco-Roman mythology
- Hua Mulan, Chinese folk hero
- James Bond, British secret agent
- James T. Kirk, Star Trek hero
- Joan of Arc, France
- John Henry, an American steel-driver
- Kintaro, hero from Japanese folklore
- Laura Secord, Canada
- Momotaro, hero from Japanese folklore
- The twelve paladins of Charlemagne
- Nelson Mandela, during the apartheid, held in a South African prison for a long time. He led the battle to end the apartheid.
- Paul Bunyan, a mythical American lumberjack of great size
- Robin Hood, medieval British egalitarian (semi-mythical)
- Roland, French Christian knight killed by Islamic elements.
- Son Goku fictional Character by Akira Toriyama
- Spartacus, leader of a slave revolt in the Roman Empire
- Stanislav Petrov, Soviet military officer who averted a worldwide nuclear war in 1983
- Stenka Razin, Russian folk hero
- Superman, prototypical comic book superhero
- William Tell, the national hero of Switzerland
- Wong Fei Hong , Chinese hero who was a martial arts master as well as an esteemed doctor. Famous headquarters was named "Bo Chi Lam".
A book of recent fame, dealing with the telling of heroic stories, is called The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell.
Also see " In Quest of the Hero " Alan Dundes, Otto Rank and Lord Raglan, Princeton Univ. Press 1990
- On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History " Thomas Carlyle
- Heroes and Gods Moses Hadas and Morton Smith, Harper and Row, 1965