Editing Legend (section)

==Etymology and origin==
[[File:Holger danske.jpg|thumb|250x250px|[[Holger Danske]], a legendary character]]

''Legend'' is a [[loanword]] from [[Old French]] that entered English usage {{Circa|1340}}. The Old French noun ''legende'' derives from the [[Medieval Latin]] ''legenda''.<ref>''[[Oxford English Dictionary]]'', s.v. "legend"</ref> In its early English-language usage, the word indicated a narrative of an event. The word ''legendary'' was originally a noun (introduced in the 1510s) meaning a collection or corpus of legends.<ref name="etymonline">{{OEtymD|legendary|accessdate=10 June 2013}}</ref><ref>{{MerriamWebsterDictionary|legendry}}</ref> This word changed to ''legendry'', and ''legendary'' became the adjectival form.<ref name="etymonline" />

By 1613, English-speaking [[Protestant]]s began to use the word when they wished to imply that an event (especially the story of any [[saint]] not acknowledged in [[John Foxe]]'s ''[[Actes and Monuments]]'') was fictitious. Thus, ''legend'' gained its modern connotations of "undocumented" and "[[wikt:spurious|spurious]]", which distinguish it from the meaning of ''[[chronicle]]''.<ref>Patrick Collinson. ''Elizabethans'', "Truth and Legend: The Veracity of John Foxe's Book of Martyrs" 2003:151–77, balances the authentic records and rhetorical presentation of Foxe's ''Acts and Monuments'', itself a mighty force of Protestant legend-making. Sherry L. Reames, ''The Legenda Aurea: a reexamination of its paradoxical history'', 1985, examines the "Renaissance verdict" on the Legenda, and its wider influence in skeptical approaches to Catholic [[hagiography]] in general.</ref>

In 1866, [[Jacob Grimm]] described the [[fairy tale]] as "poetic, legend historic."<ref>''Das Märchen ist poetischer, die Sage, historischer'', quoted at the commencement of Tangherlini's survey of legend scholarship (Tangherlini 1990:371)</ref> Early scholars such as {{Interlanguage link|Karl Wehrhan|2=de|3=Karl Wehrhan|preserve=1}}<ref>Wehrhan ''Die Sage'' (Leipzig) 1908.</ref> [[Friedrich Ranke]]<ref>Ranke, "Grundfragen der Volkssagen Forshung", in Leander Petzoldt (ed.), ''Vergleichende Sagenforschung'' 1971:1–20, noted by Tangherlini 1990.</ref> and [[Will Erich Peuckert]]<ref>Peuckert, ''Sagen'' (Munich: E Schmidt) 1965.</ref> followed Grimm's example in focussing solely on the literary narrative, an approach that was enriched particularly after the 1960s,<ref>This was stimulated in part, Tangherlini suggests, by the 1962 congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research.</ref> by addressing questions of performance and the anthropological and psychological insights provided in considering legends' social context. Questions of categorising legends, in hopes of compiling a content-based series of categories on the line of the [[Aarne–Thompson]] folktale index, provoked a search for a broader new synthesis.
In an early attempt at defining some basic questions operative in examining folk tales, {{Interlanguage link|Friedrich Ranke|2=de|3=Friedrich Ranke|preserve=1}} in 1925<ref>Ranke, "Grundfragen der Volkssagenforschung", ''Niederdeutsche Zeitschrift für Volkskunde'' '''3''' (1925, reprinted 1969)</ref> characterised the folk legend as "a popular narrative with an objectively untrue imaginary content", a dismissive position that was subsequently largely abandoned.<ref>Charles L. Perdue Jt., reviewing [[Linda Dégh]] and Andrew Vászony's essay "The crack on the red goblet or truth and the modern legend" in Richard M. Dorson, ed. ''Folklore in the Modern World'', (The Hague: Mouton 1978), in ''The Journal of American Folklore'' '''93''' No. 369 (July–September 1980:367), remarked on Ranke's definition, criticized in the essay, as a "dead issue". A more recent examination of the balance between oral performance and literal truth at work in legends forms Gillian Bennett's chapter "Legend: Performance and Truth" in Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith, eds. ''Contemporary Legend'' (Garland) 1996:17–40.</ref>

Compared to the highly structured folktale, legend is comparatively amorphous, [[Helmut de Boor]] noted in 1928.<ref>de Boor, "Märchenforschung", ''Zeitschrift für Deutschkunde'' '''42''' 1928:563–81.</ref> The narrative content of legend is in realistic mode, rather than the wry [[irony]] of folktale;<ref>[[Lutz Röhrich]], ''Märchen und Wirklichkeit: Eine volkskundliche Untersuchung'' (Wiesbaden: Steiner Verlag) 1956:9–26.</ref> Wilhelm Heiske<ref>Heiske, "Das Märchen ist poetischer, die Sage, historischer: Versuch einer Kritik", ''Deutschunterricht'''''14''' 1962:69–75.</ref> remarked on the similarity of [[motif (folkloristics)|motifs]] in legend and folktale and concluded that, in spite of its realistic [[Literary mode|mode]], legend is not more historical than folktale.

In ''Einleitung in der Geschichtswissenschaft'' (1928), [[Ernst Bernheim]] asserted that a legend is simply a longstanding [[rumour]].<ref>Bernheim, ''Einleitung in der Geschichtswissenschaft''(Berlin: de Gruyter) 1928.</ref> [[Gordon Allport]] credited the staying-power of some rumours to the persistent cultural state-of-mind that they embody and capsulise;<ref>Allport, ''The Psychology of Rumor'' (New York: Holt, Rinehart) 1947:164.</ref> thus "[[Urban legend]]s" are a feature of rumour.<ref>[[Bengt af Klintberg]], "Folksägner i dag" ''Fataburen'' 1976:269–96.</ref> When Willian Hugh Jansen suggested that legends that disappear quickly were "short-term legends" and the persistent ones be termed "long-term legends", the distinction between legend and rumour was effectively obliterated, Tangherlini concluded.<ref>William Hugh Jansen, "Legend: oral tradition in the modern experience", ''Folklore Today, A Festschrift for Richard M. Dorson'' (Bloomington: Indiana University Press) 1972:265–72, noted in Tangherlini 1990:375.</ref>