LEGEND. - I. NOTIONS. - From the gerundive of legere (legenda, "to be read"), with reference to the passages of the lives of the saints whose reading was prescribed or recommended in the divine office or in meditation, the word came to denote any narrative in which the historical element is associated with the fantastic, as has happened in more than one case in the narration of the life and deeds of the martyrs and of other champions of the Catholic faith. The legend is therefore a narrative that disregards history and distorts it, but that refers to personages who really lived or even to imaginary figures connected with a given place and active at a given moment in time. Thus the saga (= narrative, from the German sagen, "to say") of the Nibelungs, although it contains fantastic elements, refers to the people of the Burgundians and has the Rhine as the theater of its deeds. It is because of this reference to a place and a time that the legend differs from the fable, which is a narrative indeterminate in time and space (all fables begin with: "Once upon a time"), has human beings and animals as its actors, is narrated only to delight, and does not imply religious faith, just as the novella or tale does not imply it either, being likewise indeterminate in time and space, but whose protagonists are human beings and not animals.
The legend, besides requiring a historical or topographical link with reality, always has a purpose of a religious or civil character relating to the life of the human group to which it refers. Given the supremely utilitarian aim of the legend, it is understandable that its content is ideally amplified because it serves as a synthesizing symbol of the history of the group and as a norm for its action. From this point of view the legend has a profound truth of its own, inasmuch as it is a mirror of the popular soul and of its aspirations.
II. CHARACTER OF THE LEGEND
It is simple as a narrative because such is how the popular mentality wants it, a mentality that loves to synthesize in a few lines the whole of the fundamental institutions of the group.
The legend can also be transposed, that is, applied to another personage and to another setting, while the fundamental theme remains unaltered: for example, the Christian legend of Sts. Barlaam and Josaphat is the transposition of the legend of the Buddha in search of his enlightenment; or else it can be transformed into another of a different nature and value. Thus Gog, king of the land of Magog (Ez., 38-39), who fights against the kingdom of Israel but is defeated, becomes, through the contamination of his legend with that of Alexander the Great, the leader of a barbarian people whom Alexander shut up behind an iron wall in a territory of central Asia, whence he will come forth at the end of the world to lend aid to the Antichrist.
III. THE THEMES OF THE LEGEND
By theme or motif of a legend is meant its elementary plot. Themes are not necessarily tied to a geographical area, a race or a cultural zone, but are found spread over very vast areas, which nevertheless, as regards folktales (which are legends lacking the historical connection and the religious or utilitarian purpose), can be distributed into the following thematic zones: Northern Europe and Asia; Central Europe; the Mediterranean basin, the Niger basin; the Congo basin; the Far East with Tibet, India and Indonesia; Oceania; Australia (van Gennep).
There are, however, some themes that are found in each of these zones, so that they may properly be called universal. These are above all themes tied to magical beliefs and practices proper to the primitive mentality, which survive as a residue even among culturally evolved civilizations. Such are the theme of the wonderful object (whoever possesses the object can perform astounding feats), the theme of the taboo of the name (to know a person's true name is to hold his life in one's hands); the theme of the word of power (whoever knows it is capable of creating and of destroying). In these universal themes the particulars may vary (for example, the object is here a ring, there a rod or a bag, etc.) but the motif remains identical.
IV. CLASSIFICATION OF THE LEGEND
Legends are naturalistic, aimed at explaining the phenomena of the natural world: sky, earth, vegetation, etc. (v. MITO); supernatural, when they refer to beings of a superhuman nature: heroes, demons, etc., to which the primitive mentality is inclined to attribute the effects of causes that elude it; or they exalt the few certain data of history (as in the legend of the Buddha, which the Indian poet Ashvagosh sang) insofar as they are to be normative for the moral life of the individual or of the group; or they see in the sublimated figure the type of the national hero, as the Greeks did with the figure of Heracles, born of the love of Zeus and Alcmene, exceedingly strong from the cradle, where he strangles two serpents sent against him by Hera, conqueror of twelve labors, raised, after his death on a pyre he himself had prepared, among the gods of Olympus; and historical.
V. HISTORICAL LEGENDS
These are those in which the popular imagination deforms the data of reality, magnifying them, whether exalting or debasing them, in order to fill out the accounts of the origins of a given people, the deeds it performed at a given moment, the circumstances that determined the establishment of given customs or rites. They like to synthesize, by referring to a single person and with masterly lines that are intuitively clear and easily remembered, all that pertains to the origins and the early history of the group. Thus Romulus is the son of Mars, the national god of the Romans, and of Rhea Silvia, the vestal who links Rome to Alba Longa; he asserts his supremacy over Latium, founds the city according to the traditional rite on the 21st day of April, dwells on the Palatine where his house is shown, and at the end vanishes in a cloud, becoming a tutelary deity of his homeland. The same may be said of Numa as the founder of the priesthoods and of the sacred rites. Naturally the legend, in order to fulfill this normative office, magnifies certain elements, suppresses others, and links places with precise memories relating to the hero it wishes to exalt. Epic legends too have a historical basis, inasmuch as they arise around a real event which they develop in a manner congenial to the character of the people and all of them abounding to its honor, even if the facts unfolded in a wholly different manner. Thus the episode of the rout of Roncevaux (788) — in which Charlemagne's rearguard was defeated by the assault of the Gascons — is attributed in the Chanson de Roland to the treachery of Ganelon who, offended at having been passed over in favor of Roland, launches the Saracen army against it, of which the Emperor will naturally in the end carry off the victory, exacting just vengeance upon the traitor.
VI. SPREAD OF THE LEGEND
Born in the bosom of the people, it is carried about by shepherds, merchants, soldiers, pilgrims. Centers of meeting and diffusion are inns, monasteries, sanctuaries, where travelers stop and which become places of fair and market, with the performance of songs that extol the heroes or the patron saints of the locality. J. Bédier demonstrated that the chansons de geste spread precisely along the stages of the pilgrimage sites: to St. James of Compostela, to Rome, to Jerusalem.
Historical and epic legends remain alive until the abandonment or destruction of the places connected with them, the change of environments due to the progress of culture, the superimposition of other peoples, do not survive them. Fallen from their position of privilege, they can remain alive in storytelling or be saved by the work of poets. Thus the exploits of the paladin Orlando and in general those of the Carolingian cycle live again, albeit altered, in the poems of Pulci, Boiardo and Ariosto.
VII. HAGIOGRAPHIC LEGENDS
From the Greek ἄγιος = saint, they are legends of the supernatural type that refer to the life and work of some martyr or hero of holiness. All normative religions (Judaism, Islam, Buddhism) boast them, but Christianity possesses the greatest number and has made them the object of a more accurate and profound study.
Hagiographic legends too, although containing fantastic elements, are linked to reality through some historical or topographical element. Thus, in the Roman Forum, the Mamertine Prison gave rise to the legend of Peter's imprisonment in that place, and, again in the valley of the Forum, within the church of S. Maria Nova there is preserved the travertine slab with the supposed imprints of the knees of St. Peter who there, praying, would have won victory over Simon Magus, who had claimed to fly by virtue of magic.
The hagiographic legend can transfer to Christian figures more ancient elements, even non-Christian ones, without worrying too much about geography and history. Thus the significant legend of the Domine qua vadis was perhaps localized at that point on the Appian Way because nearby there was the sanctuary of the god Rediculus which recalled a beneficial return for the city, namely that of Hannibal who was advancing menacingly (but in reality not from that place) against Rome. Likewise an adaptation of the legend of Buddha is that of Sts. Barlaam and Josaphat (=Bodhisattva); Josaphat, the young son of an Indian king, by order of his father, lives isolated in a palace of delights that must hide from him the sorrow of the world; leaving it one day secretly from his father he encounters, as in the legend of Buddha, a blind man, a leper, a corpse, and is troubled by it; but the Christian ascetic Barlaam in the guise of a merchant presents himself to him, converts him to Christianity and persuades him to devote himself to the ascetic life in the desert (v. BARLAAM E JOASAF).
For the sources, the method, the various epochs, the work of historical criticism concerning the Christian legends, v. AGIOGRAFIA. For the Acts of the martyrs which constitute the foundation of the legendary, their classification according to the regions of origin, their differing historical value, v. ATTI DEI MARTIRI.