Editing Legend

{{Short description|Genre of storytelling that involves heroic humans}}
{{Other uses}}
[[File:Lady Godiva (John Collier, c. 1897).jpg|thumb|In this 1897 painting of [[Lady Godiva]] by [[John Collier (painter)|John Collier]], the authentic historical person is fully submerged in the legend, presented in an [[anachronistic]] [[High Middle Ages|high medieval]] setting.]]

A '''legend''' is a [[genre]] of [[folklore]] that consists of a [[narrative]] featuring human actions, believed or perceived to have taken place in human history. Narratives in this genre may demonstrate human [[values]], and possess certain qualities that give the tale [[verisimilitude (literature)|verisimilitude]]. Legend, for its active and passive participants, may include [[miracle]]s. Legends may be transformed over time to keep them fresh and vital.

Many legends operate within the realm of uncertainty, never being entirely believed by the participants, but also never being resolutely doubted.<ref>{{cite book |title=Folkloristics |year=1995 |publisher=Indiana University Press |location=United States of America |isbn=0-253-32934-5 |pages=7 |author1=Georges, Robert |author2=Owens, Michael }}</ref> Legends are sometimes distinguished from [[myth]]s in that they concern human beings as the main characters and do not necessarily have supernatural origins, and sometimes in that they have some sort of historical basis whereas myths generally do not.<ref name="Oxford literary">{{cite book |last1=Baldick |first1=Chris |url=https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780198715443.001.0001/acref-9780198715443-e-646?rskey=Nc4w5m&result=9 |title=Legend |date=2015 |publisher=Oxford University Press – Oxford Reference Online |isbn=978-0-19-871544-3 |quote=A story or group of stories handed down through popular oral tradition, usually consisting of an exaggerated or unreliable account of some actually or possibly historical person—often a saint, monarch, or popular hero. Legends are sometimes distinguished from myths in that they concern human beings rather than gods, and sometimes in that they have some sort of historical basis whereas myths do not; but these distinctions are difficult to maintain consistently. The term was originally applied to accounts of saints' lives.. |access-date=2021-04-24 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210426235953/https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780198715443.001.0001/acref-9780198715443-e-646?rskey=Nc4w5m&result=9 |archive-date=2021-04-26 |url-status=live}}</ref><ref name="bascom">{{cite book|first=William Russell |last=Bascom|author-link=William Bascom|title=The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives|pages=4–5, 9|url={{google books |plainurl=y |id=AU0hNAAACAAJ}}|year=1965|publisher=University of California|quote=Myths are often associated with theology and ritual. Their main characters are not usually human beings, but they often have human attributes; they are animals, deities, or culture heroes, whose actions are set in an earlier world, when the earth was different from what it is today, or in another world such as the sky or underworld....Legends are more often secular than sacred, and their principal characters are human. They tell of migrations, wars and victories, deeds of past heroes, chiefs, and kings, and succession in ruling dynasties.}}</ref> The [[Brothers Grimm]] defined ''legend'' as "[[Folklore|folktale]] historically grounded".<ref>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.</ref> A by-product of the "concern with human beings" is the long [[list of legendary creatures]], leaving no "resolute doubt" that legends are "historically grounded."

A modern [[folklore|folklorist]]'s professional definition of ''legend'' was proposed by Timothy R. Tangherlini in 1990:<ref>Tangherlini, "'It Happened Not Too Far from Here...': A Survey of Legend Theory and Characterization" ''Western Folklore'' '''49'''.4 (October 1990:371–390) p. 385.</ref>

<blockquote>Legend, typically, is a short (mono-) episodic, traditional, highly ecotypified<ref>That is to say, specifically located in place and time.</ref> 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.</blockquote>

==Etymology and origin==
[[File:Holger danske.jpg|thumb|250x250px|[[Holger Danske]], a legendary character]]

''Legend'' is a [[loanword]] from [[Old French]] that entered English usage {{Circa|1340}}. The Old French noun ''legende'' derives from the [[Medieval Latin]] ''legenda''.<ref>''[[Oxford English Dictionary]]'', s.v. "legend"</ref> In its early English-language usage, the word indicated a narrative of an event. The word ''legendary'' was originally a noun (introduced in the 1510s) meaning a collection or corpus of legends.<ref name="etymonline">{{OEtymD|legendary|accessdate=10 June 2013}}</ref><ref>{{MerriamWebsterDictionary|legendry}}</ref> This word changed to ''legendry'', and ''legendary'' became the adjectival form.<ref name="etymonline" />

By 1613, English-speaking [[Protestant]]s began to use the word when they wished to imply that an event (especially the story of any [[saint]] not acknowledged in [[John Foxe]]'s ''[[Actes and Monuments]]'') was fictitious. Thus, ''legend'' gained its modern connotations of "undocumented" and "[[wikt:spurious|spurious]]", which distinguish it from the meaning of ''[[chronicle]]''.<ref>Patrick Collinson. ''Elizabethans'', "Truth and Legend: The Veracity of John Foxe's Book of Martyrs" 2003:151–77, balances the authentic records and rhetorical presentation of Foxe's ''Acts and Monuments'', itself a mighty force of Protestant legend-making. Sherry L. Reames, ''The Legenda Aurea: a reexamination of its paradoxical history'', 1985, examines the "Renaissance verdict" on the Legenda, and its wider influence in skeptical approaches to Catholic [[hagiography]] in general.</ref>

In 1866, [[Jacob Grimm]] described the [[fairy tale]] as "poetic, legend historic."<ref>''Das Märchen ist poetischer, die Sage, historischer'', quoted at the commencement of Tangherlini's survey of legend scholarship (Tangherlini 1990:371)</ref> Early scholars such as {{Interlanguage link|Karl Wehrhan|2=de|3=Karl Wehrhan|preserve=1}}<ref>Wehrhan ''Die Sage'' (Leipzig) 1908.</ref> [[Friedrich Ranke]]<ref>Ranke, "Grundfragen der Volkssagen Forshung", in Leander Petzoldt (ed.), ''Vergleichende Sagenforschung'' 1971:1–20, noted by Tangherlini 1990.</ref> and [[Will Erich Peuckert]]<ref>Peuckert, ''Sagen'' (Munich: E Schmidt) 1965.</ref> followed Grimm's example in focussing solely on the literary narrative, an approach that was enriched particularly after the 1960s,<ref>This was stimulated in part, Tangherlini suggests, by the 1962 congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research.</ref> by addressing questions of performance and the anthropological and psychological insights provided in considering legends' social context. Questions of categorising 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, {{Interlanguage link|Friedrich Ranke|2=de|3=Friedrich Ranke|preserve=1}} in 1925<ref>Ranke, "Grundfragen der Volkssagenforschung", ''Niederdeutsche Zeitschrift für Volkskunde'' '''3''' (1925, reprinted 1969)</ref> characterised the folk legend as "a popular narrative with an objectively untrue imaginary content", a dismissive position that was subsequently largely abandoned.<ref>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, criticized 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 chapter "Legend: Performance and Truth" in Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith, eds. ''Contemporary Legend'' (Garland) 1996:17–40.</ref>

Compared to the highly structured folktale, legend is comparatively amorphous, [[Helmut de Boor]] noted in 1928.<ref>de Boor, "Märchenforschung", ''Zeitschrift für Deutschkunde'' '''42''' 1928:563–81.</ref> The narrative content of legend is in realistic mode, rather than the wry [[irony]] of folktale;<ref>[[Lutz Röhrich]], ''Märchen und Wirklichkeit: Eine volkskundliche Untersuchung'' (Wiesbaden: Steiner Verlag) 1956:9–26.</ref> Wilhelm Heiske<ref>Heiske, "Das Märchen ist poetischer, die Sage, historischer: Versuch einer Kritik", ''Deutschunterricht'''''14''' 1962:69–75.</ref> remarked on the similarity of [[motif (folkloristics)|motifs]] in legend and folktale and concluded that, in spite of its realistic [[Literary mode|mode]], legend is not more historical than folktale.

In ''Einleitung in der Geschichtswissenschaft'' (1928), [[Ernst Bernheim]] asserted that a legend is simply a longstanding [[rumour]].<ref>Bernheim, ''Einleitung in der Geschichtswissenschaft''(Berlin: de Gruyter) 1928.</ref> [[Gordon Allport]] credited the staying-power of some rumours to the persistent cultural state-of-mind that they embody and capsulise;<ref>Allport, ''The Psychology of Rumor'' (New York: Holt, Rinehart) 1947:164.</ref> thus "[[Urban legend]]s" are a feature of rumour.<ref>[[Bengt af Klintberg]], "Folksägner i dag" ''Fataburen'' 1976:269–96.</ref> When Willian Hugh 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.<ref>William Hugh Jansen, "Legend: oral tradition in the modern experience", ''Folklore Today, A Festschrift for Richard M. Dorson'' (Bloomington: Indiana University Press) 1972:265–72, noted in Tangherlini 1990:375.</ref>

==Christian ''legenda''==
{{main article|Legendary (hagiography)}}

In a narrow Christian sense, ''legenda'' ("things to be read [on a certain day, in church]") were [[hagiographical]] accounts, often collected in a legendary. Because saints' lives are often included in many miracle stories, ''legend'', in a wider sense, came to refer to any story that is set in a historical context, but that contains [[supernatural]], divine or fantastic elements.<ref>[http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09121a.htm ''Literary or Profane Legends''] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100611064242/http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09121a.htm |date=2010-06-11 }}. Catholic Encyclopedia.</ref>

==Oral tradition==
{{main article|Oral tradition}}

[[Oral tradition|History preserved orally]] through many generations often takes on a more [[narrative history|narrative-based]] or [[myth|mythological]] form over time,<ref>{{cite book |last=Vansina |first=Jan |title=Oral tradition as history |publisher=University of Wisconsin Press |year=1985 |isbn=978-0-299-10213-5 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=A-CVBVzZwmAC&dq=oral+tradition+as+history&pg=PR5}}</ref> an example being the [[Empire of Kitara|oral traditions of the African Great Lakes]].  

==Related concepts==
[[File:MataGrifone.jpg|thumb|Giants Mata and Grifone, celebrated in the streets of [[Messina]], Italy, the second week of August, according to a legend are founders of the Sicilian city.]]
[[File:Hübner Bürkner Genoveva.jpg|thumb|The mediaeval legend of [[Genevieve of Brabant]] connected her to [[Treves]].]]

[[Hippolyte Delehaye]] distinguished legend from [[mythology|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."<ref>[http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/delehaye-legends.html Hippolyte Delehaye, ''The Legends of the Saints: An Introduction to Hagiography'' (1907)] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100110212608/http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/delehaye-legends.html |date=2010-01-10 }}, Chapter I: Preliminary Definitions</ref>

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 novel|"Gothic" overtones]], which actually tended to diminish its character as genuine legend.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Encyclopædia Britannica|title=Britannica Concise Encyclopedia|publisher=Encyclopædia Britannica|year=2006|isbn=9781593392932|location=Chicago, Illinois|pages=652|chapter=Fable}}</ref>

Stories that exceed the boundaries of "[[Realism (arts)|realism]]" are called "[[fable]]s". For example, the [[talking animal]] formula of [[Aesop]] identifies his brief stories as fables and 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 a [[donkey]] that gave sage advice to the Prodigal Son it would be a fable.{{citation needed|date=April 2017}}

Legend may be transmitted orally, passed on person-to-person, or, in the original sense, through written text. [[Jacobus 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.<ref>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.</ref>

==Urban legend==
{{Main|Urban legend}}

Urban legends are a modern genre of folklore that is rooted in local [[popular culture]], usually comprising fictional stories that are often presented as true, with [[macabre]] or [[humor]]ous elements. These legends can be used for entertainment purposes, as well as semi-serious explanations for seemingly-mysterious events, such as disappearances and strange objects.

The term "urban legend," as generally used by folklorists, has appeared in print since at least 1968.<ref>Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed. 1989, entry for "urban legend," citing R. M. Dorson in T. P. Coffin, ''Our Living Traditions'', xiv. 166 (1968). See also William B. Edgerton, ''The Ghost in Search of Help for a Dying Man'', Journal of the Folklore Institute, Vol. 5, No. 1. pp. 31, 38, 41 (1968).</ref> [[Jan Harold Brunvand]], professor of English at the [[University of Utah]], introduced the term to the general public in a series of popular books published beginning in 1981. Brunvand used his collection of legends, ''[[The Vanishing Hitchhiker|The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends & Their Meanings]]'' (1981) to make two points: first, that legends and [[folklore]] do not occur exclusively in so-called primitive or traditional societies, and second, that one could learn much about urban and modern culture by studying such tales.

<gallery widths="200" heights="160">
File:Union Graveyard II.jpg|The tale of the White Lady who haunts Union Cemetery is a variant of the [[Vanishing hitchhiker]] legend.
File:Bahay na Pula fvf 2014-1.jpg|[[Bahay na Pula]] in the [[Philippines]] is believed to be haunted by all those who were murdered and raped by the Japanese army within the property during [[World War II]].
</gallery>

== See also ==
* [[Legendary saga]]
* [[Legendary creature]]
* [[Lists of legendary creatures]]
* [[Matter of Britain|The Matter of Britain]], Arthurian legend
* [[Matter of France]]
* [[Narrative history]]

==References==
{{Reflist|30em}}

{{Folklore genres}}
{{Narrative modes}}
{{Authority control}}

[[Category:Legends| ]]
[[Category:Adventure fiction]]
[[Category:Folklore]]
[[Category:Literary genres]]
[[Category:Narratology]]
[[Category:Traditional stories]]