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[2] [3] The Brothers Grimm defined legend as "folktale historically grounded". [4] A by-product of the "concern with human beings" is the long 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]
Myth is a genre of folklore consisting primarily of narratives that play a fundamental role in a society. For scholars, this is very different from the vernacular usage of the term "myth" that refers to a belief that is not true.
In structuralism-influenced studies of mythology, a mytheme is a fundamental generic unit of narrative structure (typically involving a relationship between a character, an event, and a theme) from which myths are thought to be constructed [1] [2] —a minimal unit that is always found shared with other, related mythemes [citation needed] and reassembled in various ways ("bundled") [3] or ...
This work attempts to reconcile the contradictory tales of the poets and provides a grand summary of traditional Greek mythology and heroic legends. [7]: 1 Apollodorus of Athens lived from c. 180 BC to c. 125 BC and wrote on many of these topics. His writings may have formed the basis for the collection; however, the "Library" discusses events ...
Cautionary tales are ubiquitous in popular culture; many urban legends are framed as cautionary tales: from the lover's lane haunted by a hook-handed murderer to the tale of a man who shot a cactus for fun only to die when the plant toppled onto him.
Thus, a structural approach towards myths is to address all of these constituents. Furthermore, a structural approach should account for all versions of a myth, as all versions are relevant to the function of the myth as a whole. This leads to what Lévi-Strauss calls a spiral growth of the myth that is continuous while the structure itself is not.
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Frazer contends that there are three primary categories of mythology (now more broadly considered categories of folklore): Myths, legends, and folktales, and that by definition, each genre pulls its narrative from a different ontological source, and therefore has different implications within a civilization. Frazer states: