14
Myth and Legend
Maurice Saxby
Speaking about his collaboration with Leon Garfield when they were reframing some of
the ancient Greek myths as The God Beneath the Sea Edward Blishen said, ‘It was like
working with a sort of radium of story’. (Blishen 1979:33). It is this ‘original tremendous
concentrate of story’ (33) embedded in myth and legend that, as Sir Philip Sidney
expressed it, ‘holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner’. The
very impulse that gave birth to myth and legend makes them the right and proper fare
for all children, especially for those growing up in a technological and rational society.
At the heart of mythology—mythos, a story—is imagination, creativity, the urge to
understand, to explain and to embellish. Throughout the ages all cultures have
developed a body of myth and legend, at first as an oral tradition, then ultimately fixed
in clay, stone, papyrus, vellum or paper and elevated to literature—if not always to
sacred lore and belief. While folk- and fairy tale, myth, legend and epic hero tales are all
threads of one vast story it would seem that myth, a universal phenomenon, is the
progenitor. The folk-tale, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, for example, in the version where Red
Riding Hood is released from the stomach of the wolf to be reborn could well be a
remnant of a nature myth explaining the setting and the rising of the sun.
For myth grows out of the need to form hypotheses and create explanations for natural
phenomena: how the world came into being; the formation of rivers, lakes, mountains
and other geographical features; why spring always follows winter just as the dawn always
rises to herald the new day that will end with sunset. More than that, it seeks to explain
what lies beyond the dawn and the sunset, beyond the edge of vision, beyond the
immediately observable and knowable: what worlds, celestial kingdoms or nether
regions exist beyond the horizon, above the sky or beneath the earth. Myth deals with
imponderables: where, how and why did life as we know it originate; what supernatural
being/s pre-existed human life; from whence did mortals come and whither are they
bound. Just as imperative are questions about human nature and behaviour. What is
the nature of ‘good’ and ‘evil’? When does folly slide over into sin? What fearful
consequences follow disobedience of the ‘Law’? Are the wages of sin always the death of
the spirit?
So myth postulates life before birth and an after life. It fashions a pantheon of deities,
demi-gods, nymphs, satyrs and a multitude of other supernatural creatures. It seeks to
explain the ways of the gods, the relationship of those gods with humanity and the
consequences of divine anger. It chronicles the human longing for immortality, the