last updated 21 September 2005

The EV-WEB

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Myth, Legend, Folklore

"The wisest thing - so the fairy tale taught mankind in olden times, and teaches children to this day - is to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and with high spirits."
      --Walter Benjamin in Illuminations

the Unicorn [caged, referring to a fearsome Harpy in a nearby cage] : 
"I can not see her caged.  She is real, like me.         
We are two sides of the same magic."         
--from The Last Unicorn       

"We're quicksilver -
a fleeting shadow, a distant sound -
Our homes have no boundaries beyond which we can not pass . . .
We live in music, in a flash of color -
We live on the wind and in the sparkle of the stars . . ."
      --Endora in "Bewitched" television series
     What exactly is myth?  Such disparate individuals as comparative mythology scholar Joseph Campbell and structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and postmodern philosopher Roland Barthes all concur that
myths are the stories which determine a people's perspectives about the world, about themselves, about what behaviors and approaches have meaning or value beyond the material - what is good, what is evil, what if anything is neither - and about which questions can be asked and which questions will never occur to a people to ask.
     One major mythic or archetypal figure has been The Green Man.  This figure has had many forms: The Erlking, Jack-in-the-Green, and Robin the Hooded One of Sherwood Forest; The Green Man has been the Earth Father complement to the Earth Mother Gaia or Gaea or Maia.  Useful websites on The Green Man include Mike Harding on The Green Man and Phill Lister on The Green Man; although it is an advertisement, The Green Man archetype is nonetheless a nice site for Green Man lore.
     From the wild and fertile forests to the wild and fertile seas . . . I recommend Matthew Ignoffo's The Merman-Mermaid Fantasy: Examining Merfolk in Fiction, Science, & Fantasy and his website on the archetype of the merfolk and their kin.
     Spirit of the forest yet symbolic of the element of water, related to the fantastical equines of the land [centaurs], sea [hippocampi], and sky [Pegasus], the unicorn has vied with the dragon as the most magical creature for modern U.S.Americans.  Explore the unicorn with Robin Alison Michaels' Unicornicopia.
     A more modern form of folklore is known as the Urban Legend.  Everyone has heard an urban legend, and most people believe them.  A classic example is the poisoned Halloween candy scare.  Diligent investigation over the years has determined that the stories about poisoned Halloween candy are urban legends and nothing more; of the two documented police reports about poisoned candy, one of them turned out to be a cover-up for a sibling's drug habit, and the other turned out to be attempted murder by the father of the alleged victim of poisoned Halloween candy!  Nonetheless, people to this day insist that they have heard about cases of poisoned Halloween candy, and thus this totally-unsubstantiated but totally-believed urban legend continues on.  Other examples of urban legends can be found at The AFU and Urban Legends Archive and a page dedicated to that perennial favorite target for urban legends, Disney, at the Urban Legends Reference Pages: Disney.
     Other sources for the budding scholar of mythology include the Association of Cultural Mythologists and the online Encyclopedia Mythica.

 

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