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From the moment a legend is retold as fiction, its authentic legendary qualities begin to fade and recede: in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving transformed a local Hudson River Valley legend into a literary anecdote with "Gothic" overtones, which actually tended to diminish its character as genuine legend. [28] Stories that exceed ...
An urban legend or urban myth is a modern genre of folklore. It often consists of fictional stories associated with the macabre, superstitions, ghosts, demons, cryptids, extraterrestrials, creepypasta, and other fear generating narrative elements. Urban legends are often rooted in local history and popular culture.
Legend: story, sometimes of a national or folk hero, that has a basis in fact but also includes imaginative material Myth : traditional narrative, often based in part on historical events, that reveals human behavior and natural phenomena by its symbolism; often pertaining to the actions of the gods.
The story is set in pagan Scandinavia in the 5th and 6th centuries. Beowulf, a hero of the Geats, comes to the aid of Hrothgar, the king of the Danes, whose mead hall Heorot has been under attack by the monster Grendel for twelve years. After Beowulf slays him, Grendel's mother takes revenge and is in turn defeated. Victorious, Beowulf goes ...
Illustration from "The Dreadful Story of Pauline and the Matches" from Struwwelpeter, by Heinrich Hoffman, 1858. A cautionary tale or moral tale [1] is a tale told in folklore to warn its listener of a danger. There are three essential parts to a cautionary tale, though they can be introduced in a large variety of ways.
Anthropomorphic cat guarding geese, Egypt, c. 1120 BCE. Fable is a literary genre defined as a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized, and that illustrates or leads to a particular moral lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be added explicitly as a concise maxim or ...
A tall tale is a story with unbelievable elements, related as if it were true and factual. Some tall tales are exaggerations of actual events, for example fish stories ("the fish that got away") such as, "That fish was so big, why I tell ya', it nearly sank the boat when I pulled it in!"
A pourquoi story [a] (French pronunciation: ⓘ; "pourquoi" meaning "why" in French) is a fictional narrative that explains why something is the way it is, for example why snakes have no legs or why tigers have striped coats. Many legends, origin myths and folk tales are pourquoi stories.