Myth, legend and folktale: what is the difference?

Three labels that do different jobs

Readers write to us with a version of the same question every few weeks. Is the story of Persephone a myth or a legend? Was the Trojan War history? Is the Cyclops episode in the Odyssey really just a fairy tale with better poetry? The questions feel like they should have quick answers, and they do not, because everyday English has flattened three words into one heap meaning “old story, probably untrue”.

Folklorists keep the three words apart, and the distinction they use is more useful than it first looks. It says nothing about how old a story is, how good it is, or whether any part of it happened. It describes the position a story occupied for the people who told it: the kind of world it takes place in, whether the audience was expected to receive it as an account of real events, and what sort of characters carry the action. Those three questions sort an enormous amount of material very quickly, including most of Greek mythology.

The working distinction, in one table

The standard three-way division used in folklore studies runs like this. A myth is set in a past that is not continuous with the present: a time before the world had its current shape, when the boundary between gods and mortals had not yet settled. It is told as true, often as sacred, and it explains why things are as they are. A legend is set in a world that is recognisably ours — named places, real geography, a countable number of generations back — and it is told as though it happened, whether or not any given listener believes it. A folktale is set nowhere in particular and at no particular time, and everyone involved knows it is fiction.

Greek examples fall out of the table easily enough. Hesiod's Theogony is myth in the strict sense: it begins before there is a world to be set in, and its subject is how the cosmos acquired its present arrangement, culminating in Zeus distributing honours among the Olympian gods. The Athenian stories of Theseus are legend: they run through a real city, explain real festivals and institutions, and were counted in generations by families who claimed descent from the people in them. The fable of the hawk and the nightingale that Hesiod drops into Works and Days is folktale material — two birds, no setting, a point about power — and Hesiod flags it as a different kind of speech from the rest of the poem.

Greek stories that will not stay in one box

Now the awkward part. Greek mythology respects these lines badly, and its most famous stories are the worst offenders.

Take Book 9 of the Odyssey. A hero is trapped in a cave by a one-eyed giant, blinds him with a sharpened stake, gives a false name to defeat the giant's cry for help, and escapes under the bellies of the sheep. Folklorists have collected close relatives of that tale from Ireland to Central Asia, in versions with no connection to Greece at all. By setting and cast it is a folktale: an ogre, a trickster, a cave that could be anywhere. But it is embedded in the return journey of a named man from a war that later Greeks dated and argued about, and the giant is given a father — Poseidon — which drags it back into myth. One passage, three categories.

Herakles is another. He is born to a human mother in a named city, does his work in a landscape a traveller could walk, and dies — all of which reads as legend. He also ends up on Olympus among the gods, and different communities honoured him with rites of different kinds, some fitting a dead hero and some fitting a god. His story leaks because his status leaks.

The Trojan War is the case that most often derails a classroom. Later Greeks did not file it with the beginning of the world; they treated it as their own past, put it at a countable distance behind them, and traced family lines back through it. That is legend behaviour. But the poems that carry it are half occupied with gods taking sides, which is myth behaviour, and a real settlement mound on the north-western coast of Anatolia has been excavated for a century and a half by people hoping the legend has a floor under it somewhere. The honest answer to “was it real?” is that category and historicity are separate questions, and answering one does not answer the other.

Persephone leaks in the opposite direction. Her story explains the shape of the agricultural year, which is myth work of the plainest kind, yet the long Homeric Hymn that tells it keeps stopping to name a particular town, a particular well and a particular set of rites, which is how a local legend anchors itself. Both readings hold at once.

The Greeks had no word that means what we mean

It helps to know that the tidy modern noun “myth” has no clean ancient equivalent. The Greek word mythos starts life meaning something much duller: a thing said. In Homer it covers a command, a proposal made in an assembly, a speech delivered with authority, a plan spoken aloud. It carries no suggestion at all that the content is false or fantastical. A character who delivers a mythos in the Iliad is simply a character who has said something, usually something weighty.

The word drifts over the following centuries. By the fifth century BC, prose writers are using mythos with a raised eyebrow, for the sort of old tale you repeat but do not vouch for, and setting it against logos, an account you are prepared to argue for. Thucydides makes the move explicitly in his opening book, warning that his history will be less pleasant to listen to because it lacks “the mythical” element (History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 1). Plato, meanwhile, uses mythologia for storytelling in general, is severe about which stories children should hear, and then cheerfully invents elaborate myths of his own when an argument needs a picture.

So there was never a single Greek category holding the material we now shelve as Greek mythology. What there was instead: epic poetry, hymns sung at festivals, stories attached to particular sanctuaries, genealogies that families took seriously, plots reworked for the Athenian stage, and later handbooks — Apollodorus' Bibliotheca is the standard example, and it is many centuries later than Homer — that tried to arrange the whole mass into order. Nobody in ancient Athens consulted “the mythology”. That noun is ours, and so is the tidiness it implies.

Calling something a myth is not calling it a lie

In ordinary speech, “that's a myth” means “that is false”. In the study of story and religion it means nothing of the kind. Myth there is a category of narrative, defined by setting, framing and cast — a description of what sort of story you are holding, not a verdict on it. Saying that Hesiod's account of the succession of the gods is myth is not saying Hesiod was lying, any more than calling a poem a sonnet is an accusation.

This matters for reading, because the flattened meaning encourages a reader to stop early. If myth simply means untrue, there is nothing left to do with the Theogony once you have noticed that the sky is not anybody's grandfather. If myth means an authoritative story about how the world came to be arranged this way, then the interesting questions open up. Why does this account insist that the present order was won rather than always there? Why does the division of the cosmos need three brothers and a lottery? What does it tell us that Mount Olympus is described as a household with quarrels rather than a serene heaven?

None of that is a licence to treat every claim as beyond checking. Historical questions stay historical: whether a war happened, whether a city was burned, whether a person existed. The point is narrower and firmer — the label “myth” answers a question about genre, and genre and evidence are two separate conversations. Keep them separate and you can be rigorous about the second without being dismissive about the first.

Using the categories without being ruled by them

The three categories are a lens, not a filing cabinet, and they were built by people comparing traditions across the world rather than by the Greeks describing their own. Used loosely they still earn their keep: they stop a reader from expecting a folktale to have a date, or a legend to explain the cosmos, or a myth to behave like a report. Used rigidly they produce arguments about whether Herakles is “really” a legend, which no evidence can settle because the question is about our vocabulary rather than about him.

That last note is the one we would keep if we had to keep only one. The useful output of this exercise is rarely a single word. It is a sentence like: an international folktale about a blinded ogre, worked into the legend of a hero's return, inside a poem whose gods behave mythically throughout. That tells you where the story came from, what it is doing, and which parts turn up elsewhere in the world under other names.