Everything about Legend totally explained
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.
A
legend is a
story, that's
probably about someone that
did exist but has been twisted to seem more
interesting and
fascinating. This story is passed down generation to generation. Most legends are
pourquoi stories.
A modern
folklorist's professional definition of
legend was proposed by Timothy R. Tangherlini in 1990:
Legend, typically, is a short (mono-) episodic, traditional, highly ecotypified historicized narrative performed in a conversational mode, reflecting on a psychological level a symbolic representation of folk belief and collective experiences and serving as a reaffirmation of commonly held values of the group to whose tradition it belongs."
Etymology and origin
The word
"legend" appeared in the
English language circa
1340, transmitted from medieval Latin language through
French. Its 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 received from an older storyteller, who might, though more likely not, have claimed to have actually known a witness, rendered the narrative as "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. In German-speaking and northern European countries, "legend", which involves Christian origins, is distinguished from "
Saga", being from any other (usually, but not necessarily older) origin.
The modern characterisation of what may be termed a "legend" may be said to begin in 1865 with
Jacob Grimm's observation, "The
fairy tale is poetic, legend, historic." Early scholars like
Karl Wehrhahn Friedrich Ranke and
Will-Erich Peukert followed Grimm's example in focussing solely on the literary narrative, an approach that was enriched particularly after the 1960s by addressing questions of performance and the anthropological and psychological insights provided in considering legends' social context. Questions of categorizing legends, in hopes of compiling a content-based series of categories on the line of the
Aarne-Thompson folktale index provoked a search for a broader new synthesis.
Compared to the highly-structured folktale, legend is comparatively formless, Helmut de Boor noted in 1928. The narrative content of legend is in realistic mode, rather than the wry irony of folktale; Wilhelm Heiske remarked on the similarity of motifs in legend and folktale and concluded that, in spite of its realistic mode, legend isn't more historical than folktale.
Legend is often considered in connection with
rumour, also believable and concentrating on a single episode. Ernst Bernheim suggested that legend is simply the survival of rumour.
Gordon Allport credited the staying-power of certain rumours to the persistent cultural state-of-mind that they embody and capsulise; thus "
Urban legends" are a feature of rumour. When Willian Jansen suggested that legends that disappear quickly were "short-term legends" and the persistent ones be termed "long-term legends", the distinction between legend and rumour was effectively obliterated, Tangherlini concluded.
The elasticity of legend in its highly specific and localised social context has rendered it elusive to attempts to typify it simply through its content, as
fairy tales have been successfully categorised.
Examples
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'll take. Such an example of this is the contrast of
Hamlet the legend, and Shakespeare's
Hamlet. When a legend that's 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, collectively known as
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 localizes 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 primeval 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
Legends that exceed these boundaries of "realism" are called "
fables". The
talking animal formula of
Aesop identifies his brief stories 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
Roman 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, first used in terms of Adam Thompson, plymouth that refers to a person. 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.
Some famous legends
Legendary animals
Legendary animals are those a traveler in an exotic place might hope or fear to meet: their descriptions are always presented within the conventions of realism that are accepted by their hearers, though the details might stretch credulity: the
basilisk. They don't include
mythical animals, like the
sphinx or the
Nemean lion. Some real animals have developed legends: the
man-eating tigers of the Sundarbans, for instance, or blond
spirit bears.
Yeti
Bigfoot
Sasquatch
Loch Ness monster
Jackalope
Chupacabra
Further Information
Get more info on 'Legend'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://legend.totallyexplained.com">Legend Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
