Legend, Myth, Fable, and Folktales

Sorting Out Epic Storytelling

Show of hands: Who is writing a fantasy story? I know it’s not everybody I talk to but it’s a lot of people. Fantasy is really popular right now, for adults, young adults, and middle grade readers. A lot of hit television in fantasy adaptations the last several years, too (Game of Thrones, Shadow and Bone, and now Wheel of Time). This is a great time to be writing a fantasy story, or a fantasy screenplay, or to be daydreaming about someone adapting your as-of-yet-unwritten fantasy novel for HBO or Netflix.

I have been thinking about writing this topic for quite a while, since someone asked me about the difference between a myth and a legend. Identifying these kinds of stories by type is pretty simple once you know the the key differences, and I’ll share those. But when I sat down to think about the topic, I got to thinking about how closely tied to fantasy this type of storytelling is—in both directions. Including legends, myths, fable, and folklore in your fantasy writing, as part of your worldbuilding process, will make a fantasy world feel much more realistic (a science fiction world, too). In reverse, fantasy writing is itself kind of like legend- and myth-making. 

So while I’m droning on about these different types of folklore, be thinking about how they might fit in to your speculative fiction if that’s what you’re writing. And if not you can just kick back and enjoy a cool article about folk traditions. 

Fables

A fable is a brief narrative that illustrates a moral lesson, usually using anthropomorphized animals or other creatures or even objects (think of the Can o' Beans, Dirty Sock, Spoon, Painted Stick, and Conch Shell from Skinny Legs and All) as the main characters. 

• Brief

• Moral lesson

• Talking animals

The Anglo American tradition doesn’t have a whole lot of original fables. When it comes to fables I think of Aesop, probably the most famous fabulist, of Classical Greek origin. I want to note that at least one of Aesop’s fables, “The Man and His Two Wives,” features no animals but is still a fable; not every fable must have nonhuman characters. I don’t know of any famous American fabulists like that, or actually I can think of one, but given he appropriated the fables of a marginalized culture and profited off them I don’t feel like he needs to be immortalized here.

Since fables illustrate a moral lesson, and many morals are wildly shared or even universal among human cultures, the same moral lesson might turn up in fables from different cultures.

For example: “The Coyote and the Turtle,” a Hopi fable, tells the story of a turtle who got too far from the water and tricked a coyote into tossing him back in by asking for any punishment but that. I said Anglo Americans don’t really do fables but we sure love stealing them: You can see this fable pop up in all kinds of later American stories, for instance when Br’er Rabbit begs Br’er Fox not to toss him into the briar pit or when Tom Sawyer tells his friends they can’t help him paint the fence because he’s having too much fun and does not want to share the pleasant experience. The moral of this fable is, “Don’t threaten me with a good time.”

I feel like fables are overlooked for inclusion in a lot of fantasy fiction because it’s really challenging to come up with an original one, first of all. But think about how some fables are so well-known that they’ve wormed their way into our linguistic culture as idioms. “The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing” is one of Aesop’s fables but “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” is shorthand for a dangerous person who seems harmless on the surface. Or what about “The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf”? That’s where the phrase “cry wolf” comes from. I only speak English but assume other cultures have these kind of idioms as well that draw on ubiquitous fables. Any fictional culture created for a fantasy story would surely have a few.

Myths

Next up are myths. Myths tell a story that explains a phenomenon and usually play an important role in cultures and societies. For example, creation myths explain how things came into existence—like the world, the people in it, a country, a culture, and so on. Myths usually feature people as characters but in a broad sense—gods, demigods, supernatural creatures, and sometimes specific people although importantly, although we may believe these people were real, specific individuals (or not), there is no evidence that they were real. 

The myth of Romulus and Remus, for example, explains the origin of a city. Romulus and Remus were demigods, sons of a human queen and Mars, the god of war. They were tossed into a river and then suckled back to health by a she-wolf and eventually founded the city of Rome (well, one of them did). While the myth features some specific humans, like King Numitor of Alba Longa and his daughter Rhea, we don’t have any evidence they were real people. They may have been; Alba Longa was a real place. We just don’t know.

Another one I think most Americans would be familiar with: that God created the heavens and earth and animals and people in six days and on the seventh day took a break. For many people that is part of their belief system but from a storytelling perspective, it’s a creation myth.

• Explains a natural or cultural phenomenon

• Gods and other supernatural beings

• No historical record of events

A mythology is a collection of myths, usually of one culture (for example, Greek mythology). Sometimes you get a tag team edition, like Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, which contains robust Greek and Roman mythologies plus a phoned-in effort to cover Norse mythologies. True facts: I don’t know if the phone existed yet when Edith Hamilton was writing and I’m not going to look it up. 

Notably, not every society has a creation myth. For instance, the United States is a pretty new country. The historical record supports how the United States came to be. We have evidence that supports the record. We have plenty of legends about the early United States but the country was founded recently enough that we don’t have a mythical origin. 

Legends

Legends are stories about important people (or sometimes places) that many people believe are true, or contain a grain of truth. Maybe they’re about real people who actually walked the Earth or maybe we’re not so sure. Like a myth, we can’t verify that the events or people in a legend are strictly true. We might be able to verify historically that a legendary figure was real (for instance, Davy Crockett) or we might not (for instance, King Arthur). Even if we have a lot of evidence that someone existed, a legend about them probably includes some fictionalized or exaggerated elements. Did Arthur really pull a sword out of a stone to become king? Probably not. Davy Crockett, while we know he was a real person, probably did not kill a bear when he was a toddler.

• Normal people (not gods)

• Historically important events

• Fictionalized elements

There’s a specific breed of legend in the English-speaking tradition and especially the US and Canada called the tall tale. In a normal legend, there may be elements that stretch a modern-day person’s beliefs, like Joan of Arc receiving messages from God or William Tell shooting an apple off his son’s head to get out of prison. In a tall tale, the description of people and events is exaggerated to the point that a rational adult would have to know they could never be true, like Paul Bunyan being 50 feet tall and making the Great Lakes with his footprints. The trick of the tall tale is to tell it as though it were true and you believe it.

What about urban legends? Well, they’re not really legends, at least I don’t think they are. They are actually:

Folktales

Folktale is an umbrella term that captures some of the above (like fables) and then some additional things not already specified, like fairy tales, old wives’ tales, and urban legends. Folktales are stories that originate from a specific culture and are passed down generationally through an oral tradition. Folktales don’t stop being folktales when somebody writes them down, for instance Aesop’s Fables. But it’s important to note that Aesop’s fables don’t belong to Aesop. He was not the original author of them, he didn’t make them up himself—he was just the first or most famous to record them.

Folktales are part of a culture’s folklore, which also includes things like customs, beliefs, and traditions. Folktales are usually timeless and nonspecific—they don’t usually refer to a event although they might refer to a specific person or creature. For instance, there are Irish folktales about changelings: A fairy swaps their baby with yours when you’re not looking. That’s an Irish folktale. A community might have a tale about a specific person in the community, past or present, who they suspect might be a changeling or they knew someone who knew someone. A story like that would be a local iteration of the folktale, originating in that particular community.

• Originates within the community

• Oral tradition

• Nonspecific

Take this excerpt from Mama Day by Gloria Naylor that my friend Jamie kindly shared with me recently:

Everybody knows but nobody talks about the legend of Sapphira Wade. A true conjure woman: satin black, biscuit cream, red as Georgia clay: depending upon which of us takes a mind to her. She could walk through a lightning storm without being touched; grab a bolt of lightning in the palm of her hand; use the heat of lightning to start the kindling going under her medicine pot: depending upon which of us takes a mind to her.

This is a specific person, but no two people describe her or her deeds the same way. She has ascended to folk hero status.

Another example is the Goatman of Prince George’s County, Maryland, where I grew up. This urban legend has been around since the 1970s. Everybody knows about it. Nobody you meet has ever seen the Goatman personally but sometimes they know a guy whose cousin saw him one time. The Goatman kills dogs, sometimes cats and backyard chickens, but you never hear about a specific dog or cat that he killed and you definitely never meet anybody who lost their backyard chickens this way.

People who aren’t from Maryland think our folktale is the Blair Witch but it’s really the Goatman. There’s no Blair Witch. That was just a movie. The Goatman is real. We also have a haunted hospital. Visit Maryland, it’s great here.

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