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. The Brothers Grimm defined legend as folktale historically grounded.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

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.

In an early attempt at defining some basic questions operative in examining folk tales, Friedrich Ranke in 1925 characterised the folk legend as "a popular narrative with an objectively untrue imaginary content" a dismissive position that was subsequently largely abandoned.

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 is not 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.

Related concepts

Legends are tales that, because of the tie to a historical event or location, 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."

From the moment a legend is retold as fiction 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.

Stories that exceed these boundaries of "realism" are called "fables". For example, 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.

Some famous legends

• Atlantis
• Beowulf
• Cenodoxus, or the Damnation of the Good Doctor of Paris, told as an event justifying the sanctification of St. Bruno
• Celtic Legends
• El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth
• King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table
• Legends of Africa
• Odysseus
• Philosopher's stone
• Ramayana Legend of Rama the prince of Ayodhya
• Robin Hood
• Roland
• Romani legends and Romulus and Remus
• Shangri-La
• Vlad the Impaler; stories of his cruelty have attained legendary status, most likely spread after his death by his enemies.
• William Tell

References

1. Norbert Krapf, Beneath the Cherry Sapling: Legends from Franconia (New York: Fordham University Press) 1988, devotes his opening section to distinguishing the genre of legend from other narrative forms, such as fairy tale; he "reiterates the Grimms' definition of legend as a folktale historically grounded", according to Hans Sebald's review in German Studies Review 13.2 (May 1990), p 312.
2. Tangherlini, "'It Happened Not Too Far from Here...': A Survey of Legend Theory and Characterization" Western Folklore 49.4 (October 1990:371-390) p. 85.
3. That is to say, specifically located in place and time.
4. "Das Märchen ist poetischer, die Sage, historischer"; quoted at the commencement of Tangherlini's survey of legend scholarship (Tangherlini 1990:371), which is in large part the basis of this section.
5. Wehrhahn Die Sage (Leipzig) 1908.
6. Ranke, "Grundfragen der Volkssagen Forshung, in Leander Petzoldt (ed.), Vergleichende Sagenforschung 1971:1-20, noted by Tangherlini 1990.)
7. Peukert , Sagen (Munich: E Schmidt) 1965.
8. Stimulated in part, Tangherlini suggests, by the 1962 congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research.
9. Ranke, "Grundfragen der Volkssagenforschung", Niederdeutsche Zeitschrift fur Volkskunde 3 (1925, reprinted 1969)
10. Charles L. Perdue Jt., reviewing Linda Dégh and Andrew Vászony's essay "The crack on the red goblet or truth and the modern legend" in Richard M. Dorson, ed. Folklore in the Modern World, (The Hague: Mouton)1978, in The Journal of American Folklore 93 No. 369 (July-September 1980:367), remarked on Ranke's definition, criticised in the essay, as a "dead issue". A more recent examination of the balance between oral performance and literal truth at work in legends forms Gillian Bennett's chaprer "Legend: Performance and Truth" in Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith, eds. Contemporary Legend (Garland) 1996:17-40.
11. de Boor, "Märchenforschung", Zeitschrift für Deutschkunde 42 1928:563-81.
12. Lutz Röhrich, Märchen und Wirklichkeit: Eine volkskundliche Untersuchung (Wiesbaden: Steiner Verlag) 1956:9-26.
13. Heiske, "Das Märchen ist poetischer, die Sage, historischer: Versuch einer Kritik", Deutschunterricht14' 1962:69-75..
14. Bernheim, Einleitung in der Geschichtswissenschaft(Berlin: de Gruyter) 1928.
15. Allport, The Psychology of Rumor (New York: Holt, Rinehart) 1947:164.
16. Bengt af Klintberg, "Folksägner i dag" Fataburen 1976:269-96.
17. Jansen, "Legend: oral tradition in the modern experience", Folklore Today, A Festschrift for William Dorson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press) 1972:265-72, noted in Tangherlini 1990:375.

• 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
• Timothy R. Tangherlini, "'It Happened Not Too Far from Here...': A Survey of Legend Theory and Characterization" Western Folklore 49.4 (October 1990:371-390). A condensed survey with extensive bibliography.