Legend, a name somewhat loosely applied on the one hand to the creations of mythology, and on the other to the more or less historical accretions that ever tend to grow around the names of heroes who impress the popular imagination. Interesting examples of entirely baseless legends in their turn becoming historical may be seen under the names Pope Joan and William Tell. It is ever the fate of a great name to be enshrined in fable, and this fact afforded a basis for Strauss in his famous attempt to reconstruct the history of Christianity. The term legend was early applied to those religious traditions which, in the early days of Christianity, clustered round the gospel history; this tendency to mythic embellishment having further showed itself in connection with the later saints and martyrs. This curious practice of interweaving truth with fable no doubt arose from a credulous love of the wonderful, an exaggeration of fancy, and an ecclesiastical enthusiasm, at times even pious fraud helping to disseminate such embellished and unreliable narratives. But, intermixed with falsehood as these so-called legendary tales were, they gradually crept into the Eastern and Western Churches, and in the course of centuries gained an entrance into the national literature of Christian nations. Already the same process had made the Talmud the strange medley of sense and nonsense that it is. It should be added that, in the Roman Catholic Church, the lives of saints and martyrs were commonly known as legends, because chapters were to be read (legenda) out of them at matins and in the refectories of the religious houses. One of the best-known medieval collections is that known as the Golden Legend (q.v.). Capgrave's Legenda Anglie, printed by Caxton in the 15th century, was a kind of precursor of the monumental Acta Sanctorum of the Bollandists (q.v.).
See the articles FOLKLORE and MYTHOLOGY. An admirable discussion of the ancient Greek heroic legends and their relation to mythology will be found in the first volume of Grote's history.