History Main / Legend

* ''The Golden Legend'' -- Jacob de Voragine's definitive ''legendarium'' of the Christian MiddleAges.

[[AC:Sudan]]
* Myth/SegouCycle

* ''Literature/TheThebaid'

* ''Myth/TheScholomance''

%%%%%* ''Myth/TheScholomance''

* ''Myth/TheScholomance''

->''For the 1985 fantasy film, see ''Film/{{Legend|1985}} (1985)''. For the 2015 gangster film, see ''Film/{{Legend|2015}} (2015)''. For the 1995 science fiction/Western TV series, see ''Series/{{Legend}}''.''

Legends are stories that are, at least in their beginnings, passed down as “true”, or at least possibly true. Tellers of a legend and their listeners may not necessarily believe in all its details, or even in its truth as a whole, but at least they believe that previous generations thought it was true. Legends often describe events that supposedly happened "long ago".

Of course, “legend” has acquired secondary meanings – more often than not, to call something a “legend” can mean, depending on context, “it’s awesome” (like in “LivingLegend”), or “it’s not true” (like in “historical legend”). This doesn’t actually mean that we don’t believe in legends any more – only that we don’t ''call'' them “legends” (at least so long as we believe in them). Such modern day legends may be referred to as UrbanLegends.

Legends are related to, and sometimes overlap with [[{{Mythology}} myths]]; colloquially the two terms are often used as synonyms. If the categories are interpreted a little stricter, then legends, in contrast to myths, are mostly concerned with the human sphere, not gods or cosmology, and accordingly are not considered [[SacredLiterature "sacred"]]. They frequently ''are'' concerned with the [[JustSoStory origins]] of a particular people, settlement, custom, or technology; this type of legend is also called "founding legend".

* Religious Legend: This was the original sense of the word “legend”. ''Legendae'' (which means, not very specific, “things you should read”) were stories about Christian [[PatronSaint Saint]]s (mostly revolving around miracles), or non-biblical traditions about [[Literature/TheBible biblical]] characters. A book that contained these was a ''legendarium''. But religious legend is not limited to UsefulNotes/{{Christianity}}; the concept of "holy men" and women, and stories surrounding them, exists in virtually all major religions (compare, for example, the traditions attached to ''boddhisattvas'' and ''arhats'' in UsefulNotes/{{Buddhism}}, ''mahatmas'' in UsefulNotes/{{Hinduism}}, ''walis'' in UsefulNotes/{{Islam}}, and ''Tzadikim'' in UsefulNotes/{{Judaism}}). Religious legends extol religious devotion, piety, and whatever behavior is endorsed as exemplary by the religion at hand. -- The genre of Christian Saints’ Legends, with its focus on miracles, was much ridiculed by Protestants after the Reformation, which is when the word “legend” acquired its present-day flavor of “bullshit story”.

If you came here looking for something different, for the 1985 fantasy film, see ''Film/{{Legend|1985}} (1985)''. For the 2015 gangster film, see ''Film/{{Legend|2015}}. And it's ''Series/{{Legend}}'' for the TV series, ''TabletopGame/LegendSystem'' for the tabletop game system, Creator/LegendEntertainment for the videogame developer, and JustForFun/TropesOfLegend for this very wiki's Hall of Fame of tropes.

* ''Literature/TheIliad''
* ''Literature/TheOdyssey''

* ''Literature/TheThebaid''
* The lost works of the Literature/TrojanCycle.