Definitions

Mythology- the body of myths of a particular culture, and the study and interpretation of such myths. A myth may be broadly defined as a narrative that through many retellings has become an accepted tradition in a society.

Myths are universal, occurring in almost all cultures. They typically date from a time before the introduction of writing, when they were passed orally from one generation to the next. Myths deal with basic questions about the nature of the world and human experience, and because of their all-encompassing nature, myths can illuminate many aspects of a culture.

Legend- traditional narrative or collection of related narratives, popularly regarded as historically factual but actually a mixture of fact and fiction. The medieval Latin word legenda means �things for reading.� During certain services of the early Christian church, legenda, or lives of the saints, were read aloud.

A legend is set in a specific place at a specific time; the subject is often a heroic historical personage. A legend differs from a myth (see Mythology) by portraying a human hero rather than one who is a god. Legends, originally oral, have been developed into literary masterpieces. Among the most famous legends of all time are the classic epics the Iliad and the Odyssey (see Homer) of ancient Greece and the Aeneid of ancient Rome (see Virgil). From the Middle Ages come legends about Arthur, king of the Britons; Charlemagne; and the German alchemist Faust.

In modern times legends have grown up around such presidents of the United States as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Contemporary legend usually deals with leading figures in the world of sports, motion pictures, and popular music. Another type of contemporary legend, the urban legend, is recounted�sometimes even in newspapers�as though it were true, but its patterns and motifs indicate that it is a folktale. Urban legends address the concerns and anxieties of urban living.

Fairy and Fairy Tale- in folklore, a diminutive supernatural creature, generally in human form, dwelling in an imaginary region called fairyland; and the stories of its interventions through magic in mortal affairs. The term fairy is also loosely applied to such beings as brownies, gnomes, elves, nixies, goblins, trolls, dwarfs, pixies, kobolds, banshees, sylphs, sprites, and undines. The folk imagination not only conceives of fairyland as a distinct domain, but also imagines fairies as living in everyday surroundings such as hills, trees, and streams and sees fairy rings, fairy tables, and fairy steeds in natural objects.

The belief in fairies was an almost universal attribute of early folk culture. In ancient Greek literature the sirens in Homer's Odyssey are fairies, and a number of the heroes in his Iliad have fairy lovers in the form of nymphs. The Gandharvas (celestial singers and musicians), who figure in Sanskrit poetry, were fairies, as were the Hathors, or female genii, of ancient Egypt, who appeared at the birth of a child and predicted the child's future.

The traditional characteristics of fairies are depicted in European literature in such works as Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night�s Dream and Romeo and Juliet (in Mercutio's �Queen Mab� speech); The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser; L'Allegro and Comus by John Milton; Contes de ma m�re l'oye, known in English as Tales of Mother Goose, by Charles Perrault; Kinder-und Hausm�rchen, known in English as Grimm's Fairy Tales, by the brothers Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm and Wilhelm Karl Grimm; a fairy-tale series by Andrew Lang, for example, The Blue Fairy Tale Book and The Red Fairy Tale Book; and representative collections of Irish stories such as Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland by Thomas Crofton Croker and Irish Fairy Tales by William Butler Yeats. Croker has described fairies as being �a few inches high, airy and almost transparent in body; so delicate in their form that a dewdrop, when they chance to dance on it, trembles, indeed, but never breaks.� In folklore fairies are generally considered beneficent toward humans. They are sensitive and capricious, however, and often inclined to play pranks; so if their resentment is not to be aroused, they must be spoken well of and always treated with deference. Bad fairies are thought to be responsible for such misfortunes as the bewitching of children, the substitution of ugly fairy babies, known as changelings, for human infants, and the sudden death of cattle.
 

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