I love your blog. I don't know much about eastern mythology but I feel like arjuna is a lot like rhagar . Charming prince , decent and virtuous man and hated for no reason. I googled arjun and it says he loved his second wife more than his first wife whom he married out of duty. Will you please discuss more arjuna and rhagar parallels please.
Firstly, I’m glad you like my blog!
As for your question, I’d say that Arjun and Rhaegar are more like foils than true parallels. Superficially, I can understand that Rhaegar and Arjun seem like they have parallels.
I’ll give a list of them, yes?
1. Charming Princes, both of them. Known to have ladies fawn over them.
3. Excel in fine arts (Arjun is an amazing dancer, I think he also plays the Veena and Rhaegar is a singer who plays the harp)
4. Abducted a lady/married her. Arjun abducting Subhadra nearly causes a war, Rhaegar abducting Lyanna actually causes a war.
This is where I add a statutory warning: I think Rhaegar is a disgusting git, not least because he abandoned his wedded wife and children, also probably raping her by coercion (I don’t think Elia was healed enough to conceive when she had Aegon, according to the timeline give in canon.) Hence, if you want me to agree that Rhaegar is a tragic, misunderstood man, I’m sorry, that’s not going to happen.
That’s where the similarities end. Because the more I read of Rhaegar, the more he seems to have a truly reprehensible personality. He was obsessed with destiny and gave no thought to his duty as a crown Prince, or to his legally married wife, the Princess Elia Martell of Dorne. He, indirectly, led to her gruesome death. The girl he abducted, Lyanna Stark, was underage. For all that I don’t like Lyanna, if the situation was not an elopement, Rhaegar is to blame for some really deep shit. He basically treated Lyanna like a prisoner, isolating her in alien lands, indirectly being the cause of her death too.
Arjun, on the other hand, is a man dedicated to his duty over his personal pleasure. Yes, he did abduct Subhadra, but, in his time and culture, that was an acceptable way of wedding a woman. Also, he had the permission of Krishna, her brother, who aided and abetted him, along with his brother too. That was why, as far as I know, the war that could have happened was avoided. Arjun was not egoistical at all. He did everything he did out of a sense of duty.
Yes, he wanted to excel in his pursuits, was supremely talented in what he did, but he never lorded it over anyone. As for him loving Subhadra more and marrying Draupadi only out of duty, that’s a misconception. For all that Arjun/Subhadra is my OTP, it is Draupadi who is mentioned in the canon epic as the love of Arjun’s life, not Subhadra. He did love Subhadra, too. But it was Draupadi who was the queen of his heart.
Unlike Rhaegar, Arjun was a man who explicitly refused the hand of a young girl when she was offered to him (Uttaaraa.) He accepted her for his age-appropriate son, instead, for preserving her honor. (He’d taught her dance for a year, it was, at that time, dishonorable for a maiden to be alone with a grown man). He refuses Apsara Urvashi, the most beautiful nymph in existence, because her position as his father’s courtesan and the wife of a long ago ancestor makes her a mother to him (KMG, not BORI).
Arjun, unlike Rhaegar, was a man of very dedicated duty and knew how to honour women.
Anon, thank you for this thoughtful ask. I would advise you to stop relying on Google and TV for information on mythology. It’s better to read the authentic versions (KMG and BORI Mahabharata) KMG, you can find at sacred-texts.com.
TLDR: Rhaegar and Arjun are very different in spite of superficial similarities, do not rely on untrustworthy sources to find the actual story when it’s mythology, refer to authentic sources.
I am sorry if I came off as rude.
