Legend

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For other uses, see Legend (disambiguation).
anachronistic high medieval
setting.

A legend is a genre of

verisimilitude. Legend, for its active and passive participants, may include miracles
. 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.

list of legendary creatures
, leaving no "resolute doubt" that legends are "historically grounded."

A modern folklorist's professional definition of legend was proposed by Timothy R. Tangherlini in 1990:[5]

Legend, typically, is a short (mono-) episodic, traditional, highly ecotypified[6] 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

Holger Danske
, a legendary character

Legend is a loanword from Old French that entered English usage c. 1340. The Old French noun legende derives from the Medieval Latin legenda.[7] 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.[8][9] This word changed to legendry, and legendary became the adjectival form.[8]

By 1613, English-speaking

Actes and Monuments) was fictitious. Thus, legend gained its modern connotations of "undocumented" and "spurious", which distinguish it from the meaning of chronicle.[10]

In 1866,

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 [de] in 1925[16] characterised the folk legend as "a popular narrative with an objectively untrue imaginary content", a dismissive position that was subsequently largely abandoned.[17]

Compared to the highly structured folktale, legend is comparatively amorphous,

mode
, legend is not more historical than folktale.

In Einleitung in der Geschichtswissenschaft (1928),

rumour.[21] Gordon Allport credited the staying-power of some rumours to the persistent cultural state-of-mind that they embody and capsulise;[22] thus "Urban legends" are a feature of rumour.[23] 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.[24]

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.[25]

Oral tradition

Main article: Oral tradition

History preserved orally through many generations often takes on a more narrative-based or mythological form over time,[26] an example being the oral traditions of the African Great Lakes.

Related concepts

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.
Treves
.

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."[27]

From the moment a legend is retold as fiction, its authentic legendary qualities begin to fade and recede: in

"Gothic" overtones, which actually tended to diminish its character as genuine legend.[28]

Stories that exceed the boundaries of "

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
]

Legend may be transmitted orally, passed on person-to-person, or, in the original sense, through written text.

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.[29]

Urban legend

The tale of the White Lady who haunts Union Cemetery is a variant of the Vanishing hitchhiker legend.
Main article: Urban legend
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.

Urban legends are a modern genre of folklore that is rooted in local

humorous
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.

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.

See also

References

  1. ISBN 0-253-32934-5
    .
  2. ISBN 978-0-19-871544-3. Archived
    from the original on 2021-04-26. Retrieved 2021-04-24. 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..
  3. ^ Bascom, William Russell (1965). The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives. University of California. pp. 4–5, 9. 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.
  4. ^ 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.
  5. ^ 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.
  6. ^ That is to say, specifically located in place and time.
  7. ^ Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "legend"
  8. ^ a b Harper, Douglas. "legendary". Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved 10 June 2013.
  9. ^ "legendry". Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary.
  10. ^ 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.
  11. ^ Das Märchen ist poetischer, die Sage, historischer, quoted at the commencement of Tangherlini's survey of legend scholarship (Tangherlini 1990:371)
  12. ^ Wehrhan Die Sage (Leipzig) 1908.
  13. ^ Ranke, "Grundfragen der Volkssagen Forshung", in Leander Petzoldt (ed.), Vergleichende Sagenforschung 1971:1–20, noted by Tangherlini 1990.
  14. ^ Peuckert, Sagen (Munich: E Schmidt) 1965.
  15. ^ This was stimulated in part, Tangherlini suggests, by the 1962 congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research.
  16. ^ Ranke, "Grundfragen der Volkssagenforschung", Niederdeutsche Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 3 (1925, reprinted 1969)
  17. ^ 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.
  18. ^ de Boor, "Märchenforschung", Zeitschrift für Deutschkunde 42 1928:563–81.
  19. ^ Lutz Röhrich, Märchen und Wirklichkeit: Eine volkskundliche Untersuchung (Wiesbaden: Steiner Verlag) 1956:9–26.
  20. ^ Heiske, "Das Märchen ist poetischer, die Sage, historischer: Versuch einer Kritik", Deutschunterricht14 1962:69–75.
  21. ^ Bernheim, Einleitung in der Geschichtswissenschaft(Berlin: de Gruyter) 1928.
  22. ^ Allport, The Psychology of Rumor (New York: Holt, Rinehart) 1947:164.
  23. ^ Bengt af Klintberg, "Folksägner i dag" Fataburen 1976:269–96.
  24. ^ 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.
  25. ^ Literary or Profane Legends Archived 2010-06-11 at the Wayback Machine. Catholic Encyclopedia.
  26. ^ Vansina, Jan (1985). Oral tradition as history. University of Wisconsin Press.
  27. ^ Hippolyte Delehaye, The Legends of the Saints: An Introduction to Hagiography (1907) Archived 2010-01-10 at the Wayback Machine, Chapter I: Preliminary Definitions
  28. ISBN 9781593392932
    .
  29. ^ 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.
  30. ^ 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).
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