Myth, Legend, Folktale: How to Tell the Difference
There’s been some discussion of this recently, and I wanted to clarify the way academic folklorists understand these definitions. The short answer is that the category a given story falls into is based on CONTEXT, NOT CONTENT.
Basically, a myth is a sacred story told as truth (literal or metaphorical, but always cosmic), a legend is folk history (with a variety of belief options), and a folktale is told as pure fiction. Context is the best determinor of category, because a) it is predicated on how the people to whom the stories “belong” understood/understand them, and b) myths, legends and folktales often pass story elements around between them – a story where a hero slays a dragon/giant serpent can be myth (Thor and the Midgard Serpent), legend (St. George, Beowulf), or folktale (Grimms’ “The Two Brothers”) – so simply containing a particular story element, like dragon-slaying or gods*, is not enough to delineate a category. And even with those guidelines in mind, it’s important to remember that these are not absolutely discrete categories, but overlap and shade into each other; a narrative can be told in a different category in various times and places, and even by different tellers. Myths are *sacred* stories – sometimes the very telling itself will be sacred – that enshrine the Big Cosmic Truths of a culture: where the world came from, the relationship of humans to the divine, the foundation of sacred institutions like kingship or sacrifice, what happens after we die, and so forth. Myths are making a COSMIC truth-claim, which, depending on the culture and individual believer, can range from “metaphorical/poetic truth” to “literal/historical truth”; however, a myth’s PRIMARY function is to convey a cosmic truth, so any historical truth-claim will be secondary. Religion is the SOCIAL apparatus that springs up around myths – ritual, worship, liturgy, theology, festivals, hierarchy, and so on and so forth. Myths are the *stories* of a religion, and religion exists as a way of translating those stories into meaningful belief and action for human beings. Legends are basically folk *history*; they take place in real time and real space as we know it, and are making an *earthly*, rather than cosmic, truth-claim. American Folklore: An Encyclopedia defines legend as “localized and historicized traditional narrative told as believable in a conversational mode” (437). Migratory legends (i.e., legends that spring up in a lot of different cultural contexts, like “The Sleeping Hero Under the Mountain”) are often “oikotypified”–that is, the same story will be adapted in the telling for specific geographical areas: “The Dog in the Microwave” may be told by a New Yorker as taking place in Brooklyn, or by a Floridian as taking place in Palatka. Legends also tend to be about real or “real” people: King Arthur, Charlemagne, John Henry, “a man in Chicago who had just returned from Mexico.” Gods may appear, but in supporting roles, usually. Religious legends are auxiliary narratives to myths–they aren’t the central narratives of the religion, but they reflect and add to those narratives: saints’ lives are prime examples, and, indeed, that’s where the term “legend” comes from: L. legenda, “saint’s life.” A major thing about legends is that when the supernatural happens, it is a BIG DEAL: legends are about everyday or historical lived reality, and the busting through of the supernatural into mundane existence is presented as an anomaly worth noting. (Compare this to a fairy tale, where nobody bats an eye if, say, a frog talks.) Legends have a HUGE variety of “belief options” available and are most liable to vary from individual teller to teller. They can be told as straight-faced truthful history by a believer to a believer, they can be told in a joshing half-believing way, they can be told as if they were ridiculous superstitions, they can be told as warnings against particular forms of behavior… It’s worth noting that the “They say…” clause is more common in legends than in myths or folktales, because legends often occupy a greyer area of actual *belief* than those other categories do. Folktales are folk narratives understood as fiction, and told for entertainment. Folktales may reflect and/or share story elements with myths or legends (and their respective truth-claims), but aren’t making any truth-claims on their own behalf other than that of art. There are several kinds of folktales: animal stories, “realistic” folktales (clever peasants and the like), and fairy tales, among others, most of which are self-explanatory. However, “fairy tale” is HUGELY problematic term in English, and requires some unpacking. Many scholars prefer the German term Zaubermaerchen, or its English equivalents “magic tale” or “wonder tale” for folk narratives, and reserve “fairy tale” for original, literary tales, like those of Andersen, Wilde, or Byatt; the term “fairy tale” itself comes from the English translation of the 18th-century Cabinet des Fees, a collection of literary wonder tales by French salon writers. (Another term used for these stories is the German Kunstmaerchen, “art tale.” Many folklorists prefer German folklore terms to English ones, because German terms tend to be more precise.) A major characteristic of these stories (both folk and literary) is that magic and the supernatural are treated as a matter of course: animals talk, people get turned into stone and back, magical objects abound, and no one ever behaves as if any of this is unusual or surprising. If it were, we’d be in legend territory–magical occurrences are, in everyday reality, something to be remarked upon, but wonder tales are expressly NOT connected to everyday reality. (That’s Max Luthi’s distinction, btw.) A note on fairies: Most folk narratives about fairies are not fairy tales, but legends. Stories about fairies *as fairies* tend to be told as if they were true. They are often localized: there are fairies in those woods, Cadbury Hill is a fairy mound, Tam Lin appears at Carterhaugh.They’re historicized, too: while the teller may be vague on exactly when a specific incident happened, it is almost always told as if it were a part of lived history in the real world. Compare this to “once upon a time.” But what about all those fairy godmothers in fairy tales? Well, it is almost never important that they are *fairies*, as opposed to witches or talking animals. Vladimir Propp argued that it isn’t especially important, in a fairy tale, what a character *is*, but rather, what *role* he or she plays. Is the character a helper or a villain? It rarely seems to matter whether a villain is a witch or a stepmother or the Devil himself, because they all tend to behave the same way. Likewise, it doesn’t seem to matter much whether that helpful being the hero meets in the road is a beggar or a dwarf or a talking bear; their purpose is to give the hero good advice or a magical thingy, and their inherent beggar-ness or dwarf-ness or talking bear-ness almost never has anything to do with that. Fairies are weird and uncanny in the real world, because they are “magical” beings in a non-magical world; but in the world of a fairy tale, *everything* is magical, so fairies don’t have any uncanny abilities that aren’t also theoretically available to animals or witches or stepmothers. The enormous potential for confusion is why so many scholars don’t like to use the term “fairy tale” at all. * There are too many stories that aren’t myths per se, but in which gods figure, for that to be true. For example, there are a zillion Central and Southern European folktales about Jesus and St. Peter wandering around doing random miracles and, on Peter’s part, getting into trouble (the stories often take the “Wise Man and Fool” pattern); those stories weren’t really “believed” in on any level, but were told for fun, and they certainly were not placed on a similar level of “importance” with orthodox Christian myth or orthodox saints’ legends. If you want some examples, Calvino tells a few in Italian Folktales.“ The best and clearest breakdown of this is Elliot Oring’s chapter “Folk Narratives,” in the book Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction (ed. Oring). It’s standard within the field.
