как показали ФиН в "Шахнаме...", история о Ростеме, убивающем, не желая того, сына Сохраба - отражение невольного убийства Иваном Грозным своего сына Ивана Молодого, на фоне истории Эсфири-Иудифи. При этом молодой Ростем описывается как Геракл = Андроник-Христос. Следует ли отсюда, что другие аналогичные истории в мифах / фольклоре разных стран и народов также должны восходить к тому же прототипу - Ивану Грозному? Далее фрагменты из книги Dean A. Miller "The epic hero", где описываются более менее похожие сюжеты.

The Sohnes Todt Theme
This is one of the most notorious and specifically Indo-European “markers” in the collected Indo-European heroic epos, which seems to emerge most clearly not only as a common Indo-European narrative element but as a characterological one. It involves that deadly duel between heroic son and heroic father in which the son will die at the father’s hand — an extreme but not a rare case of the agonistic relationship between generations contained in the typical (even the quintessential) hero tale. For Jan de Vries, who was concerned early on with the motif of the “heroic” generational conflict, there was no question but that a genuine Indo-European leitmotiv was apparent in what he termed the Vater-Sohnes-Kampf.2 A. T. Hatto then examined what he also saw as the four canonical exemplars of this conflict in the collectivity of Indo-European epic: Rustam and Sohrâb (Persian), Hildebrand and Hadubrand (Germanic), Cú Chulainn and Connla (Irish Celtic), Il’ya of Murom and Sokol’nichek (Russo-Slavic). Hatto considered the brief and fragmentary Germanic exemplar the most complete and unalloyed version, deserving of the “highest grade” for thematic power and schematic purity,3 but in fact the evidence of this central, paradigmatic confrontation is wider, and the variations within it more evocative and deeply convoluted, than any analysis of the canonical four epic incidents would suggest.4
The Ossetian Nart tales, as we often have seen, are full of wonderfully enigmatic and anomalous generational acts and sequences, but they also contain more ordinary births. One such occurs when the Nart Uryzmæg has a son, the “fils sans nom” in Dumézil’s translation, with Satána, the “mother of Narts.” Satána sends the boy to the Submarine Kingdom; Uryzmæg later meets him there and kills him “by accident” in a fight. In the old, received manner,5 neither was known to the other. This redaction also involves heterogamy (marriage or mating to a woman defined as completely “other” beyond the definition of simple exogamy) because Satána is a figure of supernatural origin and powers. Moreover, the son’s lack of a proper name appears to be a fitting parallel to that missing or obscured token of recognition between father and son in the canonical version of the theme.
The Norse-Icelandic lygisögur give us the case of Arrow-Odd (Örvar-Oddr – тот самый Орвар Одд, смерть которого параллельна смерти князя Олега) and his son Vignirr, begotten on the giantess Hildigunn in Giant-Land and raised there in the canonical fashion. At the age of ten, and already displaying his monstrous maternity in his extraordinary size and strength, Vignirr joins his father, but he is soon gruesomely killed after a hard-fought duel by the trollish and inhuman Ogmund Eythjof's-Killer. But Ogmund lays the blame for the precocious Vignirr’s death at Arrow-Odd’s door, saying that it would not have happened if Ogmund and Odd had been reconciled as the troll creature had asked. In this rendition of the theme, heterogamy and “exile” are clearly laid out, while an inhuman potency slays the son, apparently because of his father’s stubbornness. This death, however, is not by the father’s own hand.6 The Old French chansons de geste include the story of Gormont et Isambard. In this tale, evidently drawn from an historical core, a Viking raid into the Frankish realm is converted into a Saracen incursion; various changes are rung on the themes of kingship, ethnic identity, and other political and social problems,7 and the father-son conflict is deflected toward a tense subject-monarch relationship. Thus Isambard goes into exile with the heathen “Sarrazins” because King Louis had wronged him; Louis is transformed into the “distancing” father figure.8 While he is fighting on the Saracen side, Isambard and his real father, Bernard, meet in battle and exchange blows without recognizing each other, but in the end it is four French knights, again substituting for the father, who mortally wound Isambard — “but they did not know who he was” (mais ne l’unt pas reconeu).9 This Old French reflex of the theme has no strange or exotic marriage, splits of the “displacement” theme, shrinks from placing the death of the son into the father’s hands, and yet maintains a faint but intact outline of the original plot.
In another Old French source, the Perlesvaus, we find that Arthur had a son by Guinevere, Lohort or Lohout, and that this promising young man was treacherously killed by Sir Kay after Lohout had killed a giant and was, as was his custom, sleeping on his fallen foe’s body. Kay beheaded both Lohout and the giant and took the latter’s head back to Arthur to falsely claim the victory. Rather later in the tale Kay’s base deed is revealed, but he is not punished; he simply leaves the court.10 Here Kay appears to revert back to his older, more powerful and malignant persona; is he also reclaiming that “twinned” status he once shared with King Arthur? The king’s inaction in the face of Kay’s killing of Lohout is otherwise difficult to explain.
All of the above examples might be called miniatures, reduced reflexes of the original Sohnes Todt theme. The Armenian epic David of Sassoon, however, presents an almost classic confrontation between father and son — yet it, too, reveals an important variation. The eponymous hero of this epic, David, begets a son, Mher (or Pokr Mher), on a foreign woman in another, “Arab” land. In paradigmatic fashion this son is raised apart from his father but with the usual token of recognition, in this case a golden ring; the two eventually meet and, unknown to each other, fight. The fatal conclusion, however, does not come with David’s killing his son, but in this: that before he recognizes Mher, he curses him. David then goes on to his own fated end (to be slain by his own illegitimate, Amazonian daughter), and the epic ends as Mher departs this world, to become the childless cave sleeper, the undying one of Armenian heroic legend. In this case generational sequence has been convoluted, but the essential character of the fated confrontation between heroic generations remains: father dooms son through the condemnatory power of his paternal curse.11
The filicidal potency of a father’s curse, its truly mythic power, brings us around again to that Oedipal drama to which the Sohnes Todt motif is archetypically reversed and counterposed. We remember that Oedipus unknowingly slew his own father, but he also — knowingly, for cause, filled with the red choler, the orgê that indelibly marks his character and all of his condemned Kadmean line — cursed his sons, and this curse surely prepares and activates the “bad death” the two young men would suffer later at each other’s hands.12 And we recall that the ramifications of the prepotent father’s curse also figure prominently in the later part of the career of the hero-king Theseus, Oedipus’s erstwhile protector in the last episode of his high drama at Colonos, for he too cursed and so must have caused the death of his son Hippolytos.13 Theseus’s curse is called forth by twisted or lying evidence; even farther from the filicidal scenario would be the act of the hero Herakles (often “doubled” with Theseus) who, sorely afflicted by lyssa or mania, slays his own children.14 The Theseus-Hippolytos drama makes explicit the subtheme of sexual jealousy between two male generations, to which I will presently return. Before that, however, I want to examine a series of aspects exploring confusion, recognition, and comedy.
Confused, Comic, and Sexual Variations
The late Henri Grégoire, in the course of a long and detailed scholarly exegesis of the great Byzantine Greek popular or border epic, the Digenes Akrites, investigated a variety of father-son encounters. Grégoire assiduously, even obsessively searched out what he believed to be the actual historical surround of the Digenid tale, employing, among other sources, a very long old demotic Greek ballad entitled To tragoudi tou giou tou Andronikou, the Song of the Son of Andronikos. Here, as in the Digenid itself, we have the hero’s father wed or mated in a foreign land, and the later encounter of the son who results from this mating with his father, but in this particular narrative, after a hostile or threatening introduction, the father does recognize the son and welcomes the reunion. For Grégoire this balladic episode parallels the begetting of the Two-Raced (Digenid) Basil the Akritic, the Borderer, his father the Emir’s return to Romania, and the reuniting of the two.15 Rather than fatality, a kind of “testing” seems to be at the base of this rendition of the father-son conflict, a conflict Grégoire calls to pagkosmio thema, a “universal theme,” and which he easily connects with the harsher or deadlier Persian and Germanic examples of the conflict.16
The comedic version of the father-son encounter, which in many ways resembles the meeting in The Son of Andronikos, takes us back to medieval Europe and involves Rainouart, the “slow” and “blackened” comic hero of the Guillaume Cycle of chansons de geste, and his “Saracen” son Loquifer (or Maillefer).17 Rainouart, of course, follows the heroic trajectory at one exaggerated remove, so in this comic instance he meets and fights with the son he had never known, but again there is no fatality. Instead we have recognition and “incorporation” — through the baptism of the heathen son. (In the Digenid the Moslem emir, the hero’s father, is the one baptized.) The theme turns serious again, however, when sex rears its head.
The theme of the older man confronting and compassing the death of the younger emerges in various encounters pitting uncle against nephew (mother’s brother, sister’s son). The two, instead of acting within a fully normative framework of affection, mutual obligation, and reciprocity expressed in the relationship of the avunculate, break this frame entirely by introducing sexual rivalry and subsequent betrayal. The Old Irish stories describing the fatal rivalry of Conchobar and Noisiu over Dierdre, or of Finn and Diar-maid over Ghráinne, clearly set out the pattern, and at least some versions of the most famous example of all, the story of Tristan and Isolde, put Tristan’s death squarely in King Mark’s hands. The point, in this variation, is that the classificatory “son” is killed, and the classificatory “father” is responsible for his death.18 The new element is the introduction of the younger woman as an object of sexual rivalry: the confrontation is not a contest of warrior excellence but of sexual primacy, and the term “the better man” takes on a thoroughly new meaning.
Yet another instance, which brings these uncle-nephew confrontations sharply back to the main thrust of my argument, occurs in the Iliad (IX.444–84), where old Phoinix describes how and why he fled “from strife with my father Amyntor.” Because Amyntor had favored his young concubine over Phoinix’s mother, the betrayed woman besought her son to have relations beforehand (promigênai) with this concubine, to make the old man, by invidious comparison, hateful to the younger woman. But Amyntor found out and “cursed me thoroughly,” Phoinix says, enjoining in particular that Phoinix should never himself beget any child.19 Phoinix considered killing his father but forbore, “that I might not be called a parricide among the Achaeans” (461). Phoinix’s relatives and friends tried to keep him at Amyntor’s court but he fled to Peleus, Akhilleus’s father.20 This last episode constructs a complicated variant on our theme: (a) the father again reverses the generative-sexual norm, in parallel to the two uncles in the Celtic citations; (b) the son’s interference in this malformed relationship brings down the paternal curse, so that (c) like the Armenian hero Pokr Mher, Phoinix will have no child, that is, will be “dead”; (d) Phoinix considers killing his father “with the sharp bronze” (oxei khalkô), but instead he (e) flees to where he finds a second, fostering relationship with Peleus. This is a cross-fertilizing rendition of our base theme, touching and connecting numerous other cores of the story: sexual jealousy and generational reversal, the sterilizing curse, a threat of parricide avoided, and removal to a parallel but artificial generational scheme.
The Death of the Son Explained
Why is the Sohnes Todt theme, and particularly its primary format, so important? What motivates the act and drama? And how can such a theme be identifiable as peculiarly Indo-European?
Various heroic-epic contexts in which the theme is visible make a point of the tremendous heroism the hero’s son would inevitably have displayed — had he lived. Cú Chulainn’s son and victim, Connla, says this of himself; Arrow-Odd’s son Vignirr, according to his killer, would have been “the bravest and toughest in all Scandinavia”; and, in a slightly variant instance, the mortally stricken Sohrâb was not cured by King Kâvus because of what the king knew a son of the tremendous Rostam would surely become...

http://books.google.ru/books?id=z01SydnDwwYC&printsec=frontcover&hl=ru#v=onepage&q&f=false
The epic hero Авторы: Dean A. Miller. содержание -> Beyond immortality

См. также ссылки:
http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Кухулин
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildebrand
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lay_of_Hildebrand
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digenes_Akritas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rvar-Oddr

http://www.ebooksread.com/authors-eng/lucy-mary-jane-garnett/greece-of-the-hellenes-nra/page-20-greece-of-the-hellenes-nra.shtml
Read the ebook - Greece of the Hellenes by Lucy Mary Jane Garnett
...The heroes of the earliest of the definitely historical series of Greek folk-ballads have, as might be expected, assumed more or less of a mythical character. The group of Byzantine ballads I refer to are those which have been classed as the Andronikos or Digenes Akritas Cycle. Formerly believed to be mere fabulous personages — Greek demigods of the Classical period transformed by the popular imagination — the heroes of these ballads have been shown by M. Emile Legrand to have been historical personages of the tenth century. Andronikos was Andronikos Doukas, a member of the reigning Byzantine family and governor of a province in Asia Minor ; Digenes Akritas was the son of Arete, the beautiful daughter of Andronikos, and wife of Mansour, the Arab Emir of Syria, who had for her sake abjured Islam ; and Basil, the son of this romantic marriage, was surnamed Digenes, Alyevt]?- — " of two races "—from the fact of his parentage, and Akritas from his occupation as guardian-in-chief of the eastern frontiers of the Empire. In the popular ballads, however, he is exalted to the rank of a demi-god, and the character of the exploits related of him appears to witness to the influence of the old myths connected with the names of Herakles, Perseus, and Bellerophon. In the following lines from the ballad of " Andronikos and his Two Sons," the Emperor Nikephoros II and three other historical personages are mentioned —
" Forth goes he, and his fame is great, and no man him can daunton,
Not even Peter Phokas, no, nor even Nikeph6ras ;
Nor Petrotrachilos, who makes the earth and kosmos tremble ;
Nor Konstantino does he fear, should he in fair fight meet him."
According to folk-ballad — which is corroborated by an epic poem translated by M. Emile Legrand, Les Exploits de Digenes Akritas — this grandson of Andronikos died at the age of thirty-three, in the year 979. And a Cretan ballad thus describes his death —
" The throes of death seize Digenes, and earth with dread is trembling ;
And heaven, too, is thund'ring loud, and upper kosmos quaking ;
How can the cold grave cover him, how cover such a hero ? "
In another Cretan ballad, however, the death of the hero is represented as the result of a wrestling match with Charon —
" Long time they wrestle, but, as yet, one has not thrown the other; And Charon thinks within himself by treachery he'll conquer. Then trips he up young Digenes, and on the ground he throws him. And his poor mother, left forlorn, the draught of poison swallowed."