For other senses of this word, see Legend (disambiguation).

A legend (Latin, legenda, "things to be read") is a narrative of human actions that are perceived both by teller and listeners to take place within human history and to possess certain qualities that give the tale verisimilitude. Legend, for its active and passive participants, includes no happenings that are outside the realm of "possibility", defined by a highly flexible set of parameters, which may include miracles that are perceived as actually having happened, within the specific tradition of indoctrination where the legend arises, and within which it may be transformed over time, in order to keep it fresh and vital, and realistic.

Etymology and origin

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The word "legend" appeared in the English language circa 1340, transmitted from medieval Latin language through French. Its first blurred extended (and essentially Protestant) sense of a non-historical narrative or myth was first recorded in 1613. By emphasizing the unrealistic character of "legends" of the saints, English-speaking Protestants were able to introduce a note of contrast to the "real" saints and martyrs of the Reformation, whose authentic narratives could be found in Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Thus "legend" gained its modern connotations of "undocumented" and "spurious".

Before the invention of the printing press, stories were passed on via oral tradition. Storytellers learned their stock in trade: their stories, typically from an older storyteller, who might, though more likely not, have actually witnessed the "story" was "history". Legend is distinguished from the genre of chronicle by the fact that legends apply structures that reveal a moral definition to events, providing meaning that lifts them above the repetitions and constraints of average human lives and giving them a universality that makes them worth repeating through many generations.

Examples

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A legend or legend fragment is a meme that propagates through a culture. It may be crystallized in a literary work that fixes it and which affects the future direction it will take. Such an example of this is the contrast of Hamlet the legend, and Shakespeare's Hamlet. When a legend that is rooted in a kernel of truth is so strongly affected by an ideal that it conforms to expected literary conventions of behavior, in certain cases it turns into a Romance. Such may well be the case with a historical Arthur (see Historical basis for King Arthur), around whom legends accumulated and were expressed in the purely literary magical atmosphere of surviving Arthurian romances: the "Matter of Britain".

Modern retellings of the legend of Saint George omit many of the miraculous happenings that were central to earlier versions, but which have lost credibility. Thus modern "urban legends" are quite correctly termed legends: "it happened to the brother-in-law of someone my friend's mother knew". In short, legends are believable, although not necessarily believed. For the purpose of the study of legends, in the academic discipline of folkloristics, the truth value of legends is irrelevant because, whether the story told is true or not, the fact that the story is being told at all allows scholars to use it as commentary upon the cultures that produce or circulate the legends.

Hippolyte Delehaye, (in his Preface to The Legends of the Saints: An Introduction to Hagiography, 1907) distinguished legend from myth: "The legend, on the other hand, has, of necessity, some historical or topographical connection. It refers imaginary events to some real personage, or it localises romantic stories in some definite spot."

The distinction is carefully drawn by Karl Kerenyi in the opening pages of The Heroes of the Greeks (1959):

"An essential difference between the legends of heroes and mythology proper, between the myths of the gods and those of the heroes, which are often entwined with them or at least border upon them, consists in this: that the latter prove to be, whether more or less, interwoven with history, with the events, not of a primaeval time which lies outside of time, but with historical time."

A clear example, which distinguishes what is myth from what is legend, is the story of the Gordian Knot. The legend concerns Alexander the Great, who, when confronted with the ancient knot of cornel bark that secured the pole of the sacral ox-cart at Gordium in the winter of 333 BC, severed it with a slash of his sword. The myth of the Gordian Knot is the founding myth of Gordium itself, justifying the authenticity of its line of kings.

From the moment a legend is retailed as a legend, its authentic legendary qualities begin to fade and recede: in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving transformed a local Hudson River Valley legend into a literary anecdote with "Gothic" overtones, which actually tended to diminish its character as genuine legend. Like metaphors, legends may be living or dead: the vital signs of a legend depend upon its being fiercely defended as true, which eliminates the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow. But compare the Voyage of Saint Brendan, and the "Black Legend" of the supposedly fanatical and cruel national character of Spain.

Related concepts

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Legends that exceed these boundaries of "realism" are called "fables". The talking animal formula of Aesop identifies his brief parables as fables, not legends. The parable of the Prodigal Son would be a legend if it were told as having actually happened to a specific son of a historical father. If it included an ass that gave sage advice to the Prodigal Son it would be a fable.

Legend may be transmitted orally, passed on person-to-person, or, in the original sense, through written text. Jacob de Voragine's Legenda Aurea or "The Golden Legend" comprises a series of vitae or instructive biographical narratives, tied to the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church. They are presented as lives of the saints, but the profusion of miraculous happenings and above all their uncritical context are characteristics of hagiography. The Legenda was intended to inspire extemporized homilies and sermons appropriate to the saint of the day.

Legend may be interpreted for its ontological consequences and be treated as myth. To take an example, myths surrounding Cadmus, a Phoenician immigrant credited with bringing the alphabet and other Near Eastern culture to Bronze Age Greece, may have begun as a series of legends gathering around the memory of the historical founder of certain coastal cities in Greece. Explaining the origins of myth as former historical legends in this fashion is termed "euhemerism". See the entry Euhemerus for more detail.

Conspiracy theories are similar to legends in that the linchpin of the conspiracy is usually a plausible, but unprovable secret agenda which exclusively drives the story and links otherwise unconnected happenings into a satisfying pattern: thus meaning is supplied for events.

Artificial legends are the basis of many computer games. See The Legend of Zelda, among numerous examples.

Some famous legends

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• Atlantis, was used by Plato as a parable
• Cenodoxus, or the Damnation of the Good Doctor of Paris, told as an event justifying the sanctification of St. Bruno
• King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, when the "real Arthur" is identified in 6th century Cornwall
• The Holy Grail
• El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth, which both evolved from legend to myth
• Vlad the Impaler; the legend from which vampire mythology is said to derive
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
• Robin Hood
• Roland
• William Tell

See also

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• Folklore
• the "Mary Celeste"
• Wandering Jew
• Bermuda Triangle
• Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp and a host of others;
• Loch Ness monster
• mythology
• urban legend
• legend tripping
• Black Legend
• Ancient mysteries

References

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• Hippolyte Delehaye, The Legends of the Saints: An Introduction to Hagiography (1907), Chapter I: Preliminary Definitions, et passim
• Karl Kerenyi, The Heroes of the Greeks (1959)
• Catholic Encyclopedia article Literary or Profane Legends

Legends | Literary genres

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