Myth vs Legend vs Folklore: What's the Difference?

Start hereTo a folklorist, a myth is a story its tellers hold true and usually sacred. In everyday English, a myth can be a fiction or half-truth. How can one word carry both?

Myths, legends and folktales are three kinds of traditional story. Folklore is the bigger field they belong to. In William Bascom’s 1965 definitions, published in the Journal of American Folklore, myths and legends are told as true, and folktales are told as fiction.

So the first question is not whether it happened, but whether the people telling it treat it as true.

Myths are set in the remote past, legends in a time when the world was much as it is today, and folktales in any time and any place. This page lays the three side by side, then looks at where the words come from, where they overlap, and how this site uses the word myth.

011. At a glance

	Myth	Legend	Folktale
Told as	True	True	Fiction
Setting	The remote past, in an earlier world or another world such as the sky or underworld	A less remote time, when the world was much as it is today	Any time and any place
Tone	Usually sacred	More often secular than sacred	Not taken as dogma or history
Main characters	Not usually human: animals, deities or culture heroes	Human	Usually animal or human

We built this table from the sentences of Bascom’s definitions; it is not a copy of his own table. Folklore is not a fourth kind of story. In Bascom’s scheme, myths, legends and folktales are sub-types of one broader form, the prose narrative. Being in prose sets them apart from other forms of folklore such as proverbs, riddles, ballads and poems.

Folklore itself is far wider. A definition quoted by the American Folklore Society lists folk songs and legends, and also quilts, jokes, nicknames and holiday food.

022. Where the words come from

Myth

Myth comes from the Greek mythos. In Homer it often means a word or speech. It also meant a tale or story, in Homer “without distinction of true or false”. Later Greek writers, Pindar and Plato among them, also used it for fiction, as opposed to logos, historic truth.

Today a dictionary’s first sense of myth is a traditional, typically ancient story about supernatural beings, ancestors or heroes.

Legend

Legend comes from Medieval Latin legenda, a lesson to be read, from the Latin legere, to read. Its first dictionary sense is “an unverified story handed down from earlier times, especially one popularly believed to be historical”.

Folktale

Bascom used folktale as the English word for the German Märchen. He noted that folktales have been called nursery tales, but in many societies they are not just for children. And although they are often said to be told only for amusement, they have other important functions.

Folklore

The word was introduced in a letter headed Folk-Lore in the London weekly The Athenaeum, in its issue of 22 August 1846. The letter was signed Ambrose Merton. That was a pen name used in 1846 by the antiquary William John Thoms.

He called it “a good Saxon compound, Folk-Lore,—the Lore of the People”. He also claimed the honour of introducing the word. He hoped readers would send in records of old times: a neglected custom, a fading legend, a local tradition or a scrap of a ballad.

Folklorists Martha Sims and Martine Stephens note that the word names both what folklorists study and the discipline they work in. The American Folklore Society describes folklore as the art, stories, knowledge and practices of a people. It adds that people learn these traditions largely through oral communication and by example.

In 1976 a US law set up an American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress. The same law defines American folklife as “the traditional expressive culture shared within the various groups in the United States”.

033. Two stories from the Grimms

The Brothers Grimm show the legend–folktale line well, because they printed the two kinds in separate books. They published folktales in Kinder- und Haus-Märchen (Berlin, 1812). They published legends in Deutsche Sagen (Berlin, 1816).

• A legend. Their first legend, The Three Miners in the Kuttenberg, opens by naming its place: the Kuttenberg, in Bohemia. The Grimms marked it as told orally in Hesse.
• A folktale. Their first folktale, The Frog King, begins “Once upon a time there was a king’s daughter, who went out into the forest”.

The translations are ours. In the preface to their legends, the Grimms wrote: “The folktale is more poetic, the legend more historical”. A legend, they said, clings to something known, a place or a name secured by history, so unlike the folktale it cannot be at home everywhere.

Our reading: one story is pinned to a named place. The other could happen anywhere.

044. Where they overlap

Myths and legends sit on the same side of Bascom’s main line: both are “regarded as true by the narrator and his audience”. In his definitions, what separates them is setting, tone and characters.

Bascom notes that a plot or tale type can be classed as a myth in one society and as a folktale in another. For this reason, he adds, Boas said “it is impossible to draw a sharp line between myths and folk tales”. Our reading: the labels describe how a community treats a story, not the plot on its own.

Bascom did not claim his definitions were new. He argued they fit what students of folklore in both nonliterate and European societies had found.

They do not fit everywhere. Writing about Africa, the scholar Ruth Finnegan found that the line between myth and fictional story “does not seem to fit much of the African material”. She wrote that myths in that strict sense seem to be far from common in African oral literature.

055. Common mix-ups

• A myth is a false story. That is one everyday sense, and section 6 covers it. In folklore study, a myth is a story its tellers hold true and usually sacred. Our reading: Bascom’s definitions describe what the tellers believe, not whether the events happened.

• Folklore means old, or untrue. The folklorists’ definitions the American Folklore Society collects challenge the idea that folklore is simply old, untrue or dying out. The society counts internet memes as folklore too.

• Legends all come from long ago. Legends are still being made. A dictionary defines an urban legend as an apocryphal story about the recent past that spreads quickly and “is popularly believed to be true”.

066. The everyday meaning of myth, and how this site uses it

In everyday English, myth can mean something untrue. The American Heritage Dictionary lists that sense too: a fiction or half-truth, or a fictitious story, person or thing. Folklore has picked up the same sense: a popular belief without foundation. As one folklorist put it, “like myth, folklore can mean falsehood”.

On this site, a title such as History Myths Checked uses the everyday sense. It means a popular claim about the past that the sources we read do not support. It is not a judgement on any sacred story or any tradition. On the page itself, such a claim carries the label “Doesn’t hold up”.

Our pages on the flat-Earth story and the Library of Alexandria use the word the same way.

077. How to tell them apart

Our reading, built on Bascom’s definitions, as three questions:

1. Do the people who tell the story treat it as true? If not, it is a folktale.

2. If they do, is it set long ago in an earlier or other world, with gods or culture heroes, and held sacred? Then it is a myth.

3. Is it set in a world much like ours, with human characters, often tied to a real place? Then it is a legend.

When you meet the word myth outside a folklore book, ask one more question: does the writer mean a sacred story, or a false belief?

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How we checked this · Last checked October 2026

• We could not open Bascom's article itself. We read its opening pages as an abstract and confirmed his definitions word for word in two scholarly reprints, through the Open Library's search-inside snippets.
• We did not see Bascom's own comparison table. Ours is built from the sentences of his definitions.
• We read The Athenaeum letter in the Internet Archive's scan and the Grimms' first editions in Wikisource transcriptions. The translations from German are ours.
• The Dictionary of National Biography gives a slightly later date for the letter. We use the date printed on the issue itself.
• The Library of Congress, Merriam-Webster and the Online Etymology Dictionary blocked our requests, so we read the US law at Cornell's Legal Information Institute and used the American Heritage Dictionary.

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