Belief, Time, and Character: The Three Criteria That Distinguish Myth, Legend, and Folktale

In the first quarter of 1965, the Journal of American Folklore published volume 78, containing a 17-page paper by anthropologist William Bascom titled 'The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives.' The paper sought to resolve a persistent academic headache: the interchangeable use of terms like myth, legend, and folktale to describe any traditional story featuring magic or monsters. Bascom proposed that the presence of the supernatural was the wrong metric entirely. Instead, he argued, the true dividing lines between these narrative forms lay in how the originating society viewed their temporal setting, their principal characters, and their literal truth.[2][4]

Bascom’s tripartite framework established that a story’s classification depends on its relationship to the audience. 'Myths are prose narratives which, in the society in which they are told, are considered to be truthful accounts of what happened in the remote past,' he wrote. They are the sacred histories of a culture, operating as both theology and early science to explain the origins of the universe, natural phenomena, and human existence.[1][2]

Because myths deal with the primordial era before the world took its current shape, their principal characters are rarely human. Instead, they feature gods, deities, and supernatural beings whose actions shape reality. The Greek account of Hercules completing his 12 labors, or the Norse cosmology of the world tree Yggdrasil, were not originally consumed as entertaining fiction. To the cultures that forged them, these narratives were fundamental truths that validated religious rituals and social structures.[1][3]

Legends occupy a different space on the spectrum of belief. Like myths, legends are generally regarded as true—or at least rooted in historical fact—by the narrator and the audience. However, they are set in a period considerably less remote, during a time when the world was much as it is today. The principal characters in legends are human beings rather than gods, though they often possess exaggerated heroic traits or encounter miraculous events.[2]

The historical tethering of legends means they are usually tied to a specific locale and a defined period. The legend of Robin Hood, for example, is firmly associated with the English reign of Richard the Lionheart between 1189 and 1199. While the specific adventures may be embellished, the narrative operates within the realm of possibility. In 1990, folklorist Timothy R. Tangherlini defined the legend as a historicized narrative that reflects folk belief and reaffirms the commonly held values of the group to whose tradition it belongs.[4]

Folktales, by contrast, are the only category in Bascom’s triad that the originating society explicitly regards as fiction. They are secular narratives told primarily for entertainment or moral instruction, completely divorced from the requirement of belief. Because they do not need to align with a culture’s sacred history or historical record, folktales are highly adaptable and frequently migrate across geographic and linguistic borders.[2][3]

The temporal setting of a folktale is deliberately vague, often signaled by opening formulas like 'Once upon a time' or 'In a certain kingdom.' This placelessness allows the story to be transplanted without losing its structural integrity. The characters are typically everyday humans, animals with anthropomorphic traits, or magical creatures like fairies and giants. When a folktale concludes with a formulaic 'happily ever after,' it serves as a closing bracket, reminding the listener that the preceding events were an invention.[3]

While Bascom’s three criteria—time, belief, and character—provide a clean analytical baseline, the boundaries between the categories are highly permeable in practice. Stories frequently migrate from one classification to another as a society’s belief systems evolve over centuries. A narrative that begins as a sacred myth can degrade into a legend, and eventually into a folktale, as the religion that supported its truth-value fades.[2][5]

This degradation is particularly visible in Celtic traditions. Historian Peter Berresford Ellis noted that 'the Irish do appear to have made their heroes into gods and their gods into heroes.' The Irish sun-god Lugh, once a central divine figure in Celtic mythology and a prominent member of the Tuatha Dé Danann, lost his sacred status as Ireland Christianized. Over successive generations of oral storytelling, the deity was reduced in stature to 'Lugh-chromain'—a diminutive supernatural figure that eventually anglicized into the modern folktale concept of the leprechaun.

Physical landscapes often anchor stories that blend all three categories simultaneously. The Giant’s Causeway, a geological formation of tens of thousands of interlocking basalt columns in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, serves as a prime example. The narrative of the Irish giant Fionn mac Cumhaill building the causeway to fight a Scottish rival operates as an origin myth for the landscape, a legend of a localized hero, and a highly embellished folktale, depending entirely on the era and the audience hearing it.

The distinction between these forms ultimately reveals more about the people telling the story than the story itself. When a society categorizes a narrative as a myth, it is declaring its foundational theology. When it elevates a historical figure to a legend, it is codifying its cultural values and national identity. And when it shares a folktale, it is transmitting practical wisdom and moral boundaries through the safe distance of fiction.[3][5]

Modern folklorists continue to utilize Bascom’s 1965 framework because it centers the human element of storytelling. By analyzing whether a community places a narrative in the remote past or the recent past, and whether they treat it as sacred truth or entertaining fiction, researchers can map the psychological and cultural architecture of the society that keeps the story alive.[4][5]