A legend (Latin, legenda, “things to be read”) is a narrative of human actions that are perceived both by teller and listeners to take place within human history and to possess certain qualities that give the tale verisimilitude. Legend, for its active and passive participants, includes no happenings that are outside the realm of “possibility”, defined by a highly flexible set of parameters, which may include miracles that are perceived as actually having happened, within the specific tradition of indoctrination where the legend arises, and within which it may be transformed over time, in order to keep it fresh and vital, and realistic.

A legend is a story, that is probably about someone that did exist but has been twisted to seem more interesting and fascinating. This story is passed down generation to generation. Most legends are pourquoi stories.

A modern folklorist’s professional definition of legend was proposed by Timothy R. Tangherlini in 1990:

Legend, typically, is a short (mono-) episodic, traditional, highly ecotypified historicized narrative performed in a conversational mode, reflecting on a psychological level a symbolic representation of folk belief and collective experiences and serving as a reaffirmation of commonly held values of the group to whose tradition it belongs.”

The word “legend” appeared in the English language circa 1340, transmitted from medieval Latin language through French. Its blurred extended (and essentially Protestant) sense of a non-historical narrative or myth was first recorded in 1613. By emphasizing the unrealistic character of “legends” of the saints, English-speaking Protestants were able to introduce a note of contrast to the “real” saints and martyrs of the Reformation, whose authentic narratives could be found in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Thus “legend” gained its modern connotations of “undocumented” and “spurious”.

Before the invention of the printing press, stories were passed on via oral tradition. Storytellers learned their stock in trade: their stories, typically received from an older storyteller, who might, though more likely not, have claimed to have actually known a witness, rendered the narrative as “history”. Legend is distinguished from the genre of chronicle by the fact that legends apply structures that reveal a moral definition to events, providing meaning that lifts them above the repetitions and constraints of average human lives and giving them a universality that makes them worth repeating through many generations. In German-speaking and northern European countries, “legend”, which involves Christian origins, is distinguished from “Saga”, being from any other (usually, but not necessarily older) origin.

The modern characterisation of what may be termed a “legend” may be said to begin in 1865 with Jacob Grimm’s observation, “The fairy tale is poetic, legend, historic.” Early scholars like Karl Wehrhahn Friedrich Ranke and Will-Erich Peukert followed Grimm’s example in focussing solely on the literary narrative, an approach that was enriched particularly after the 1960s by addressing questions of performance and the anthropological and psychological insights provided in considering legends’ social context. Questions of categorizing 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.

Compared to the highly-structured folktale, legend is comparatively formless, Helmut de Boor noted in 1928. The narrative content of legend is in realistic mode, rather than the wry irony of folktale; Wilhelm Heiske remarked on the similarity of motifs in legend and folktale and concluded that, in spite of its realistic mode, legend is not more historical than folktale.

Legend is often considered in connection with rumour, also believable and concentrating on a single episode. Ernst Bernheim suggested that legend is simply the survival of rumour. Gordon Allport credited the staying-power of certain rumours to the persistent cultural state-of-mind that they embody and capsulise; thus “Urban legends” are a feature of rumour. When Willian 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.

The elasticity of legend in its highly specific and localised social context has rendered it elusive to attempts to typify it simply through its content, as fairy tales have been successfully categorised nobs.