Legends Library

Legends Library

A journey through world mythology and folklore — the heroes, monsters, gods, and wonders of every tradition.

Explore the traditions

From the moment humans first gathered around a fire and tried to explain the thunder, the harvest, the dying of the sun, and the certainty of death, they told stories. Some of those stories hardened into traditions, were carried across generations in song and manuscript, and eventually became what we now call legends: the inherited narratives in which a culture encodes its sense of itself, its terrors, its hopes, and its gods.

This site is a guide to those narratives — the great legends of Greece and Norse lands, the misty cycles of Celtic Britain and Ireland, the sun-haunted epics of ancient Egypt, the shimmering ghosts and kitsune of Japan, the chivalric dreams of Arthurian romance, and the beasts that stalk them all. It is also a guide to the patterns beneath the surface: the heroes, monsters, gods, objects, and underworlds that recur, in startlingly similar shapes, from one civilization to the next.

Students, writers in search of source material, devotees of fantasy literature, and curious readers will all find here a doorway into the longest conversation humanity has ever had — the one it has been holding, in story-form, for as long as it has spoken.

Contents

What are legends?

The English word legend comes from the Latin legenda, “things to be read” — originally a term for the lives of saints to be recited in church. In its modern sense, a legend is a traditional narrative, sometimes believed to be historical, that concerns human actions set in a time removed from the present — a time of heroes, wonders, and magic. Legends blur into several neighbouring forms, and the distinctions between them are useful, though never hard and fast.

A myth is a sacred story, usually involving gods, the origin of the world, or the founding of a people. Myths are told to explain why things are the way they are. The war between the Greek gods and the Titans, the Norse creation from the body of Ymir, the Egyptian rising of Ra out of the waters of Nun — all of these are myths in the strictest sense.

Folklore is broader and lower-case. It refers to the body of beliefs, customs, and small stories — including fairy tales, nursery rhymes, local superstitions, proverbs, and charms — that live in a community without being tied to a particular author or text. The witch in the woods, the helpful animal who tests a traveller, the prohibition against opening a forbidden door: these are folklore motifs, and they often appear inside larger legends.

A saga is a long prose narrative, often Scandinavian or Icelandic in origin, telling the deeds of a hero or a family across generations. The Icelandic sögur of the medieval period, the Irish prose cycles, and even Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings are sometimes called sagas in a loose sense.

A tale — as in fairy tale or folk tale — is a short, often formulaic story, with stock characters and a clear moral, that exists in countless variants. “Cinderella” is a tale; the story of Theseus in Athens is a legend, even though both may share a structural core.

A legend, then, sits somewhere in the middle of all these forms. It is more specific than folklore and more human-scaled than myth; it is more rooted in place and time than a fairy tale, but more magical than a saga. Legends are also, crucially, believed, at least by the people who first told them, to be true — or at least to have grown up around a kernel of truth. That is what separates King Arthur from Sherlock Holmes.

The function of legends within a culture is ancient and multi-layered. They explain the world: how a city was founded, why a river runs a certain way, where death came from. They encode values: courage is rewarded, hubris is punished, hospitality is sacred, the orphan who is patient will inherit the kingdom. They entertain: a good legend is a good story, with rising action, set-pieces, monsters, betrayals, and a satisfying close. And they mark cultural identity — the stories a people tell about themselves are the stories by which they recognise each other. To be Norse was to know the Eddas; to be Greek was to grow up inside the Iliad and the Odyssey; to be Japanese was to be a child of Amaterasu and a descendant of the imperial line.

A brief history of legend

Legends are older than writing. Long before the first cuneiform sign was pressed into clay, communities were shaping experience into narrative, and archaeologists can glimpse the practice in the cave paintings of Lascaux and the carved “sorcerer” of Trois-Frères. These are not stories in the literary sense, but they show that the prehistoric world was already thinking in images of beasts and heroes.

When writing arrived, in Mesopotamia and Egypt around 3200 BCE, legends were among the earliest things to be committed to the new medium. The Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh — half-myth, half-legend, half-folktale — was already ancient when it was first written down. The Egyptian Pyramid Texts, carved inside the pyramids of the Old Kingdom, are a kind of legendary guidebook to the afterlife.

The great literary traditions of the ancient world are almost inseparable from legend. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (eighth century BCE, in their oral form) drew on centuries of accumulated Greek tradition about the heroes of the Trojan War — a war which, as we now know from archaeology, really happened. The Kojiki (712 CE) and Nihon Shoki (720 CE) recorded the myths and legendary origins of Japan, including the descent of the imperial line from the sun goddess Amaterasu. The Poetic Edda and Prose Edda of Iceland (thirteenth century CE, but reaching back to the Viking Age and beyond) preserved the Norse gods, giants, dwarves, and heroes — including Odin and his kin, who would not have seemed at all strange to a Viking of the year 1000. The Mabinogion, a collection of Welsh prose tales, was written down in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries but preserves Celtic legends of an incomparably older world. And Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) gathered the Arthurian cycle — already centuries old by his time — into the form in which English readers would know it for the next five hundred years.

The medieval period was, in a sense, the great synthesis of European legend. The Germanic and Norse traditions were carried south and Christianised; the Celtic traditions were absorbed into the mythology of saints and kings; the classical past was preserved in monasteries and filtered through allegory. The Arthurian cycle reached its highest literary form in the romances of Chrétien de Troyes; the Norse Völsunga saga gave Europe the shape of the dragon-slaying, treasure-guarding hero that would haunt its literature ever after.

The printing revolution of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries changed everything. Once legends could be printed, they could be standardised, illustrated, translated, and sold to people who had never heard them told aloud. Malory’s Arthur, the Brothers Grimm’s German folktales, the Icelandic sagas, the Hindu epics — all of these gradually became part of a shared, pan-European inheritance.

The Victorian medieval revival of the nineteenth century, fed by scholars like the Grimm brothers, Max Müller, and Andrew Lang, and by artists like the Pre-Raphaelites, gave legend a new prestige. The Victorians collected fairy tales, edited the Mabinogion, translated the Eddas, and laid the foundations of modern folklore studies. The stage was set for the explosion of the modern fantasy tradition — the work of William Morris, Lord Dunsany, E. R. Eddison, and most decisively J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, both of whom read legends not as quaint survivals but as the deep grammar of imaginative fiction.

Major legendary traditions around the world

A complete survey of world mythology would fill a library, but some traditions loom so large over the global heritage of legend that they deserve a mention.

The Greek tradition is in many ways the parent of Western legend. It begins with the creation of the cosmos from Chaos, descends through the wars of the gods and giants, and continues through the great cycles of Thebes, Troy, and the Argonauts. Heroes like Heracles, Odysseus, Perseus, and Achilles are not just figures of the Greek past but the templates against which the West has measured heroism for nearly three thousand years. The Greek pantheon — Zeus, Hera, Athena, Apollo, Dionysus, Hades — has become, through the filter of Rome and the Renaissance, the lingua franca of European imagination.

The Norse tradition is colder, bleaker, and more fatalistic. It is the mythology of a people who lived at the edge of the habitable world and who knew, in a way the Greeks rarely did, that the gods themselves were doomed. Odin sacrifices an eye for wisdom; Thor fights the world serpent and falls; Loki fathers monsters; the world ends in fire at Ragnarök, and a new green world rises from the sea. The Norse imagination produced a memorable bestiary — dragons, dwarves, the kraken, the fenrir-wolf, the eight-legged horse Sleipnir — and a unique melancholy that has shaped the modern fantasy novel.

The Celtic tradition of Britain, Ireland, and the wider Atlantic fringe is preserved in fragmentary but dazzlingly beautiful form. The Mabinogion gives us the dream of Macsen Wledig and the tragic children of Llyr; Irish literature gives us the hero Cú Chulainn, the cattle raid of Cooley, the four sorcery blasts of the Tuatha Dé Danann, and the land of the ever-young, Tír na nÓg. The Celtic legends are also the source of one of the most enduring English folk traditions in Robin Hood, the outlawed yeoman of Sherwood whose name is still a touchstone of English self-image.

The Egyptian tradition is, in human terms, one of the oldest and most continuous. For nearly three thousand years the Egyptians elaborated a single, deeply coherent mythological system: the sun god Ra sailing his barque through the twelve hours of the night; Osiris the good king murdered by his brother Set, dismembered, and restored by Isis; the weighing of the heart against the feather of Ma’at. The Egyptian legend-cosmos is also strikingly rich in magic — names, statues, amulets, and spells are not accessories to the stories but the very machinery by which the world is run.

The Japanese tradition is preserved in the Kojiki, the Nihon Shoki, and an enormous body of later folklore. It begins in the age of the gods with the separation of heaven and earth by Izanagi and Izanami, descends to the Sun, Moon, and Storm gods, and continues through a vast corpus of tales of foxes, tanuki, kappa, tengu, the vengeful ghost, and the faithful dog Hachikō. Japanese legend is striking for the way it preserves both an imperial mythology (the unbroken line from Amaterasu to the modern emperor) and a folk mythology of localised spirits and strange encounters that is still very much alive in modern culture.

The Arthurian tradition is unusual in that it is essentially a British legend-cycle built around a historical figure of the post-Roman period. The historical Arthur (if he existed) was probably a British war-leader of the late fifth or early sixth century, fighting against the Saxon advance. By the time of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Nennius, and Chrétien de Troyes, this kernel had acquired a full medieval panoply: the Round Table, the sword Excalibur, the Grail, Merlin, Morgan le Fay, Lancelot, Guinevere, and Tristan. The Arthurian cycle is the European legend par excellence — chivalric, romantic, tragic, and endlessly recyclable. No other medieval tradition has been so thoroughly rewritten for so many centuries.

Beyond these six great traditions there are many others that this site touches on. The Mesopotamian cycle — Gilgamesh, Inanna, Enkidu, the flood of Utnapishtim — is the oldest literary legend-cycle in the world. The Hindu tradition gives us the Mahabharata and Ramayana, the rise of Krishna, the cosmic dance of Shiva, and the avatars of Vishnu. The Chinese tradition includes the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, the journey of the Buddha, the Eight Immortals, and the Monkey King Sun Wukong. The Slavic tradition, transmitted orally long after Christianisation, includes the witch Baba Yaga, the thunder-god Perun, and the firebird. African legend-cultures — Yoruba, Akan, Dogon, Zulu — preserve creation stories, trickster gods, and hero-cycles of extraordinary depth. The Mesoamerican traditions of the Maya and Aztec, with their feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl, the hero twins of the Popol Vuh, and the multiple cycles of creation and destruction, are among the most philosophically complex on Earth. The Indigenous Australian Dreaming stories encode geography, law, and cosmology together in a continuous songline. And the Polynesian traditions — the voyage of Māui, the navigation of the Pacific, the origin myths of Hawai’i and Aotearoa — are perhaps the most extraordinary seafaring legends ever told.

The role of heroes

Almost every legendary tradition has, at its centre, a hero. Sometimes the hero is a god in disguise; sometimes he (or, less often, she) is a mortal of royal birth, abandoned as a baby, raised among commoners, and recognised at last by a token — a scar, a sword in a stone, a missing sandal. The hero is the human face of the legend, the one through whom the audience experiences the story.

In the twentieth century, two scholars in particular tried to abstract the universal pattern. Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), argued that the hero’s journey has a recognisable shape across cultures: the call to adventure, the refusal of the call, the crossing of the threshold into a supernatural world, the trials and helpers along the way, the central ordeal (often a confrontation with death), the reward, and the return — which may or may not be triumphant. Vladimir Propp, in his Morphology of the Folktale (1928), analysed hundreds of Russian fairy tales and identified thirty-one recurring functions — from the hero’s departure, through the test by the donor, to the villain’s punishment.

Their work, taken together, suggests that human beings are, in some deep sense, hard-wired to find certain narrative structures satisfying. The orphan prince is the dream of the powerless; the triumphant return is the dream of the exile. The hero’s victory is the temporary restoration of a world that has gone wrong.

But the hero also reflects the culture that produces him. Greek heroes — Achilles, Odysseus, Heracles — are glory-seeking, individualistic, and often bitterly aware of their own mortality. Norse heroes — Sigurd, Beowulf, Gunnar — are doomed, honour-bound, and conscious that their courage will not save them. Celtic heroes — Cú Chulainn, Fionn mac Cumhaill, Pwyll — are wild men, sometimes shape-changers, often ambiguous in their loyalties. Egyptian heroes — Sinuhe, the sons of Rameses — are pious, careful, and concerned above all with the proper ordering of the soul. Japanese heroes — Yamato Takeru, the Forty-Seven Ronin — are loyal to a fault, and the Japanese tradition has an unusually strong vein of tragic heroism in which the hero’s virtue is what destroys him.

To know what a culture admires, read its heroes. To know what it fears, read its monsters.

The role of monsters

If heroes are the way a culture dreams, monsters are the way it sweats. Every legend-cycle has them, and they are never just for show. The dragon, the giant, the serpent, the witch, the troll, the ogre, the sea-monster: these are the things that lurk at the edge of the campfire.

Monsters in legend serve several functions. They are embodiments of chaos — the storm, the drought, the famine, the disease, the earthquake. To slay the monster is to push chaos back, even if only for a season. They are tests of the hero — the price of admission to manhood, kingship, or godhood. A young prince who cannot kill the dragon of the mountain is not yet a king. They are the unknown beyond civilization — the forest, the sea, the desert, the cave, the land to the north of the wind. The Greeks put their monsters at the edges of the world (the Hesperides, the pillars of Heracles); the Norse put theirs in Midgard and Jotunheim, the world of giants; the Japanese put theirs on the bridges between this world and the next.

Dragons deserve a special place in any discussion of monsters, because they appear — in recognisably similar forms — in nearly every legendary tradition on Earth. The Babylonian Tiamat, the Hebrew Leviathan, the Norse Jörmungandr the world-serpent, the Greek Python slain by Apollo, the British dragon of Wantley, the Chinese Long, the Japanese Ryū — all are vast, often serpentine, often associated with water, treasure, and the chthonic depths. The dragon is the master-monster of world mythology, and the dragon-slayer is the master-hero.

But the monster does not have to be a single beast. In some traditions the monster is a system — the chivalric corruption of the Round Table, the ice of the Norse apocalypse, the witches’ sabbath of medieval European folklore. The hero’s task is to see the system for what it is and break it.

The role of gods

Behind the heroes and the monsters, the legends assume a divine world. The way a tradition imagines its gods tells you almost everything about how it imagines the human condition.

Polytheism is the older and more common mode. Most legendary traditions begin with a family of gods — Olympians, Aesir, Tuatha Dé Danann, Ennead of Heliopolis, kami of Japan — who live in a sky-world, an underworld, or both, and who intervene in human affairs for reasons of their own. Polytheism tends to be dramatic: gods quarrel, gods love, gods make mistakes, gods take sides. Greek myth is a long soap opera; the Norse Eddas end in the Ragnarök, in which even the gods die. The gods are not always admirable; they are not always even nice. But they are characters, and the world they inhabit is a world of personality, of contingency, of pathos.

Monotheism — in the strict sense of belief in one personal creator-God — produces different kinds of legend. The great monotheistic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) tend to keep myth at arm’s length. The sacred history is given once, in scripture, and is not revised. But the human need for narrative is not abolished; it is redirected. The lives of saints, the stories of the prophets, the medieval miracle-plays, the legends of the Grail: these take the place of the older polytheistic myths. Even the monotheistic traditions produce monsters, heroes, and underworlds — only now they are saints, martyrs, and the Christian Inferno.

Between polytheism and monotheism sits an important mythic figure: the demiurge, the craftsman-god who shapes the world out of pre-existing matter. In the Platonic tradition, in the Gnostic texts, and in the Popol Vuh of the Maya, the demiurge is sometimes a flawed or junior deity whose work is imperfect. The world, in this view, was made by someone who was not quite God.

The dying-and-rising god is another recurring type. Osiris in Egypt, Attis in Phrygia, Adonis in Syria, Dionysus in Greece, Baldr in Norse myth, the Christ of Christian theology: all are gods who die, go to the underworld, and are in some sense restored. The pattern is so common that scholars from James George Frazer onward have argued for a common origin, though modern historians of religion are more cautious. Whether or not the pattern is historically one thing, it is psychologically one thing: an attempt to give death a meaning, and to assert that the agricultural cycle of death and rebirth is also the cycle of the human soul.

A final note on the relationship between gods and heroes. In many traditions the hero is a demigod — half-divine, half-human. Heracles is the son of Zeus; Achilles is the son of the sea-nymph Thetis; Cú Chulainn is the son of the god Lugh; Arthur is sometimes said to be the son of Uther Pendragon and Igraine, but also, in earlier Welsh tradition, of a supernatural father. The demigod hero is a way of bridging the gap between the human and the divine, of saying that, for one brief moment in history, the gods and mortals collaborated.

The function of objects

It is striking how often legends turn on things. Swords, rings, cauldrons, cups, crowns, harps, stones, cloaks — these are not just props. They are often the literal subjects of the story.

The function of the magical object is several-fold. It marks the hero as chosen: only Arthur can draw Excalibur from the stone; only the right person can wield the sword in the stone at all. It stores power that the hero cannot generate on his own: the ring of the Nibelungen is not just a piece of gold, it is the power to rule the world; the Grail is not just a cup, it is the healing of the land. It binds the story to a specific place: the holy lance at Peterborough, the heart of William Wallace at Dumbarton, the bones of the saint at the cathedral. And, very often, it is lost, and the legend of its loss is itself a major strand of the tradition — the lost treasure, the broken sword, the unmade crown.

Some objects recur so often that they form their own category. The magical weapon — Excalibur, Durandal, the sword of Tristan, the hammer of Thor, the sword of Attila, the kusanagi-no-tsurugi of the Japanese imperial regalia — is the most common. The cauldron of regeneration appears in the Mabinogion (the cauldron of Pwyll and the cauldron of the head of Bran the Blessed), in the Norse Eddic lay of the Völuspá, and in the Celtic myth of the Dagda’s cauldron: it never runs out of food, but only the deserving can be boiled in it and come out alive. The holy grail, although it began life as a vessel, became the central object of the entire Arthurian tradition — the cup of the Last Supper, sometimes said, in which the blood of Christ was caught at the Crucifixion, which could only be sought by the pure of heart.

The ring deserves a special place. Tolkien knew what he was doing when he made the One Ring the centrepiece of his mythology. Rings, in legend, are emblems of binding — marriage, oath, lordship, enslavement. The Norse Andvaranaut, the ring of the Nibelungen, Wagner’s Ring cycle, the ring of Solomon, the ring of Gyges in Plato: in every case, the ring confers power but it also corrupts. To wear the ring is to give up part of your humanity.

The afterlife and the underworld

What happens after death is one of the oldest and most universal of human preoccupations, and legends have a great deal to say about it.

The common patterns are strikingly few. There is the Homeric underworld: a shadowy, joyless place beneath the earth, ruled by Hades, where the shades of the dead drift as wisps of their former selves. There is the Norse Hel: a cold hall in the north, ruled by the goddess Hel, where the dishonoured dead go, while the warriors chosen by the Valkyries are taken to Valhalla in the sky. There is the Egyptian Duat: a perilous twelve-hour journey of the soul through a sunless world of gods and demons, past the weighing of the heart, to a final judgment before Osiris. There is the Celtic Tír na nÓg, the Land of the Young, a western island of eternal youth, beauty, and music, sometimes reached by a sea-voyage, sometimes by entering a fairy mound. There is the Japanese Yomi-no-kuni, the land of the dead beneath the earth, ruled by the god Izanami — a dark, polluted place from which the dead are not expected to return, and which is sharply distinct from the Buddhist Pure Land that overtook it in later Japanese tradition.

The journey of the soul is a constant theme. Odysseus sails to the edge of the world and consults the dead; Aeneas descends to the underworld in Virgil; Dante descends through nine circles; the Egyptian dead recite the spells of the Book of the Dead; the Norse dead cross the river Gjöll over a golden-roofed bridge. The journey is, in nearly every tradition, dangerous: the soul must be fed, equipped, accompanied, sometimes rescued by a living relative or a priest. This is why funeral rites, grave-goods, and elaborate tombs are such a constant feature of human cultures.

The judgment of the dead is also nearly universal. The Greeks had three judges — Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus — and the Elysian Fields as a place of reward. The Egyptians had the weighing of the heart against the feather of Ma’at, and the devouring of the unworthy heart by Ammit. The Norse had the hall of the slain for warriors, but also Niflheim for the cold and dishonoured. The Celtic and Christian traditions combined to produce a vivid medieval eschatology of heaven, hell, and purgatory, with the Last Judgment painted on the western wall of every great church.

Legend and history

Almost every legend-cycle turns out, on close inspection, to be a memory of something — and almost every legend also turns out, on close inspection, to have grown well beyond that memory. The truth is rarely either “it all happened” or “it’s all made up”.

The most famous case is King Arthur. There probably was a British war-leader of the late fifth or early sixth century named Arthur (or Artorius) who fought the Saxons at battles such as Badon. But the Arthur of legend — son of Uther Pendragon, wielder of Excalibur, husband of Guinevere, father of Mordred, gatherer of the Round Table, sleeper in the hill — is a literary figure built up over a thousand years by Welsh bards, Norman chroniclers, French romancers, English knights, and Victorian poets. He is history’s most successful palimpsest.

Robin Hood is in a similar position. The earliest references to a “Robin Hood” appear in the late thirteenth century, and by the time of the ballads he is already a dispossessed yeoman of Sherwood, robbing the rich to give to the poor, fighting the Sheriff of Nottingham, and being bled to death by a treacherous prioress. The historical reality may have been a yeoman or a minor noble, possibly an outlawed supporter of the de Montfort or Lancaster cause; the legend is, again, much larger than the man.

Homer’s Troy was long thought to be a fiction — a poet’s dream of a vanished bronze-age city. Heinrich Schliemann, excavating at Hisarlik in modern Turkey in the 1870s, found a city burned in approximately the right time and place, and the legend snapped back into history. The same is now true of many other legendary places: the Minoan palace of Knossos, the Hittite capital of Hattusa, the Mesopotamian Ur of the Chaldees, the Indus cities of Mohenjo-daro. Archaeology, in the last 150 years, has given us back the historical world that the legends were talking about.

The case of Beowulf’s Geats is more subtle. Beowulf is a legend about the Geats — a real Scandinavian people, the Gautar of southern Sweden — and the events in the poem may preserve dim memories of sixth-century dynastic conflicts. The hero’s name, Beowulf, may even be etymologically related to a historical prince mentioned in other sources. The poem, however, is a literary work, probably composed in England in the eighth century or later, drawing on centuries of oral tradition. The archaeology of Scandinavia — the great ship-burials of Sutton Hoo and Vendel — has shown us the world that produced the poem.

In every case, the work of the historian and the work of the folklorist have to be done together. Legends are not history, but they are made of history, and they are also the only evidence we will ever have for the lives of countless men and women whose names never made it into a chronicle.

Legend in the modern world

We live, oddly enough, in a time of unprecedented popular interest in legend. Far from fading, the old stories have colonised new media.

In fantasy literature, the legendary inheritance is now the air that the genre breathes. J. R. R. Tolkien, professor of Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature at Oxford, spent his life building a mythology for England out of the Eddas, the Kalevala, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Welsh Mabinogion. The result, The Lord of the Rings, is in many ways the most influential work of legend since Malory. C. S. Lewis’s Narnia is more overtly Christian, but no less steeped in medieval and classical sources. Ursula K. Le Guin built the Earthsea cycle out of Taoist and Buddhist legend, and in doing so invented a new kind of mythic fiction. Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and Sandman mine Norse, Egyptian, Hindu, and Slavic traditions with equal fluency. The fantasy novel of the twenty-first century — from Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive to R. F. Kuang’s Babel — assumes the reader’s familiarity with the great legendary cycles as a basic literacy.

In popular culture, legend is everywhere. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has given millions of filmgoers a working knowledge of Norse, Egyptian, Greek, and (now) Mesoamerican gods. God of War, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, Hades, and Smite have made the mythological cycles playable. Pokémon draws on Japanese, Chinese, and Western legend; Final Fantasy borrows freely from every tradition it can reach. Anime from Naruto to Spirited Away is a continuous, sophisticated engagement with the Japanese folkloric tradition.

In religion, the last century has seen significant revivals. Heathenry (sometimes called Ásatrú) is a revival of Norse polytheism, with working communities in Iceland, Scandinavia, Britain, and the United States. Celtic Christianity — sometimes sincere, sometimes aesthetic, often both — has remained a powerful strain within the broader Christian tradition. Shintō, the indigenous religion of Japan, has continued to evolve alongside Buddhism, with shrine-priests trained in the old kami traditions and a strong interest in the Kojiki as a sacred text. None of these revivals is a literal return to the past; all of them are creative re-readings of legendary inheritance.

In scholarship, mythology has been a discipline since the eighteenth century. The great projects of the modern academy — the Pauly-Wissowa Realencyclopädie of the classical world, the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, the Dictionary of Norse Mythology and its many siblings, the modern Sámi, Polynesian, and Aboriginal research projects — have made the world’s legendary heritage available in a way that would have astonished a Victorian scholar. Comparative mythology, the work of figures like Joseph Campbell, Northrop Frye, Mircea Eliade, and Dumézil, has shown that the legendary traditions of the world are not isolated artefacts but members of a single great conversation. New approaches — from the cognitive anthropology of Pascal Boyer to the evolutionary psychology of stories — are still being added.

And underneath all of this, in the quiet practice of grandmothers telling their grandchildren, in the school play about Ragnarök, in the local festival that no one quite remembers the origin of, legend continues to do its oldest work: explaining, encoding, entertaining, and binding people to each other.

The pages that follow are an attempt to honour that work — to make the great legends of the world available, one story at a time, to anyone who wants to enter them.

Last reviewed: June 2026.