What Is the Difference Between a Folktale, a Fable and a Legend? — Basics II

Folktales are not a homogeneous whole. On the contrary, they comprise numerous genres. If we drew the distinctions very finely, we would have to say that everything handed down to us under the label of popular or folk tale sits, in fact, in a bottomless, unsorted basket, despite the extraordinary efforts to classify it over the past century and more. In this kind of infinite library of disordered dreams, which is also changing and renewing itself in real time, we find all sorts of stories. Some seem complete; others are made up of scraps and fragments. Still others have gathered different genres, versions and pieces from here and there over time. Some of these human dreams, these tales, once meant one thing, mean something else today and, if they survive, will mean something different again tomorrow.

Oral narrative, and folktale genres in particular, have something of the character of a puzzle. Despite their apparent simplicity, drawing boundaries around them or trying to define them serves only as a map for navigating this infinite library. It tells us little about their deep and changing nature, though it does help us approach them. We must remember, however, that the map and compass will not always lead us where we expect to go. We are bound to lose our way, and who knows whether we will return. At least, we will not return as we were when we entered. That is one of the many wonders of tales.

In this second article in the Basics series, I will define three of the best-known genres, and the ones I will feature most often in Llegendàrium: folktales, fables and legends. To understand what follows more fully, I recommend reading the previous article, What Are Tales in the Oral Tradition?, although I have written this one so that it can be read independently. The descriptions that follow are not rigid in every case, and the boundaries between genres may be more or less blurred. Sometimes they are very clear; at other times, less so. As I mentioned in the previous article, the boundaries of oral narrative are porous and fluid, subject to constant change. These categories are also useful tools for scholars and for readers who wish to go beyond the anecdotal. Narrators and listeners do not need to distinguish between narrative types or anything of the sort (Oriol 2002).

Thomas Sully, Cinderella at the Kitchen Fire, 1843.
Dallas Museum of Art. Public domain.

Folktales

Folktales, also known as fairy tales, have a number of defining characteristics.

They take place in an indeterminate setting. They do not unfold in a “real” country or place with a familiar name, but in an imaginary, nameless space. If the place does have a name, it either does not exist in everyday reality or is constructed as a more or less distorted echo of it. Its features are generic and belong to a predetermined repertoire. Consequently, if a cave, palace, marsh or any other setting appears in a folktale, listeners already know what kinds of features it possesses because they have encountered them before. This is why such places receive little or no description. Generic repertoires and codes are a central narrative resource in oral tradition. This distance from everyday reality, together with the stylisation of settings and figures, is a defining feature of the wonder tale (Lüthi 1982).

The same applies to the characters. Folktale characters belong to predetermined types within a generic repertoire already familiar to listeners: the dragon; the evil witch or sorcerer; cruel and wicked parents—or kind and generous ones—; the brave princess or prince; and the powerful, benevolent magical maiden. There are many others. Many of these characters and settings have a long documented history, such as the ogre’s cave containing a treasure [G100, ATU 327, ATU 328], from which a weak but brave and clever protagonist must escape. Such motifs can be traced in tales and legends as far back as written records allow. Nevertheless, as specialists such as Bottigheimer and Gerndt (2024) warn, hypotheses about the origins and antiquity of folktales must be treated with caution. The presence of a motif in an ancient source does not in itself establish uninterrupted transmission to the present. Oral transmission follows no straight line; it is more like a labyrinth of bends, dead ends, hidden doors, returns and branching paths.

These characters often belong to the same type even when their names change. It depends on the case and the context. A Catalan or Italian informant, for instance, may use the word “giant” not for a creature of colossal size but for a kind of demonic sorcerer. In Nordic traditions, “troll” may designate a similar figure, while “ogre” is especially common in France and in the Italian Renaissance tradition represented by Straparola and Basile, on which French authors such as Perrault drew. We see this clearly, among many possible examples, in Perrault’s version of Puss in Boots. Following Basile, Perrault calls the evil antagonist an “ogre”, although his functions, attributes, powers and description correspond to those of a typical demonic sorcerer—shapeshifting, cannibalism, hostile magic, mind control and manipulation. For some reason, certain sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors appear to avoid the words “witch” and “sorcerer”, perhaps, though this is only a hypothesis, because those centuries saw the most intense witch persecutions in European history.

Oral narrative must be interpreted case by case because it is not constrained by a rigid framework. Despite its use of generic codes, paradoxically, it is not like an album of collectable cards made up of predetermined patterns. Different narrators may use different words, but what matters is that those words refer to particular types that fulfil specific functions in the narrative. The forms these types take depend on each informant, on what that person knows and even on the precise moment when the tale is transmitted.

In terms of dramatic structure, folktales consist of narrative units that can move between different tale types, known as “folklore motifs”. One example is the journey on the back of a great eagle that the protagonist must feed with his own flesh [motif B322.1]. It occurs in the tale of The Magic Flight, ATU 313, in The Three Stolen Princesses, ATU 301, and in many others. Motif and tale-type indexes allow us to recognise such recurrences without turning each version into an immutable record, as though it were a Lego brick. Rather, we can see each version as malleable material with countless nuances expressed in submotifs, which can never capture everything (Thompson 1955–1958; Uther 2004). Motifs can appear in an endless kaleidoscope of versions.

Within this generic construction, listeners expect certain things to happen when they encounter codes with which they are familiar. These codes may be retained and fulfil listeners’ expectations through a sense of shared understanding. To continue the previous example, when the protagonist mounts the great magical eagle, listeners already know that the meat will run out and that he will have to feed it with his own flesh, thereby creating steadily rising dramatic tension. A simpler example is the customary final punishment of evildoers, which children and adults await, as Basile says, “with pleasure”. Codes may also introduce surprising variations that preserve the same meaning—as in different forms of punishment—or they may be subverted and surprise listeners, for example by having evildoers become good. The latter is less common, but it does occur in very old folktales.

Both stock narrative resources and generic codes form part of the narrative economy and mnemonic practices of oral storytelling, helping narrators to remember tales. They also encourage a wide range of tonal, expressive and gestural resources that accompany oral transmission. Certain characters may speak or move in a particular way; certain settings may be accompanied by sounds, silences or onomatopoeia. All this brings narratives closer to their listeners and helps them internalise and understand them. As Bauman (1984), one of the scholars who has studied the performative dimension of storytelling most closely, emphasised, the meaning of verbal art is constructed in each particular performance through the relationship between narrator, audience, situation and shared expectations.

Certain codes or motifs are sometimes accompanied by a particular gesture or tone—occasionally sung—which has often been lost. It was not until the early to mid-twentieth century, with some earlier exceptions, that folklorists began to realise these tonal and gestural resources also had to be recorded. Moreover, the limited technology available in the nineteenth century did not allow them to be recorded faithfully. A surviving example appears in the horror tale The Hanged Man’s Liver, belonging to type ATU 366, The Man from the Gallows, when the “dead man”—and the narrator—finally catches the female protagonist—and the listener—[E235.4.4].

There are many kinds of folktales. Magical tales are only one group, even though they are the best known. There are realistic, humorous, burlesque or satirical, grotesque, religious, frightening, sexual and many other kinds of folktales. Whatever their genre, folktales may convey one or more moral, didactic, survival-related or social lessons, but this function does not exhaust their meaning. The didactic dimension is only one of their many possible levels of interpretation. Because they have been transmitted across generations, they may—or may not—contain many other elements and readings, more or less concealed or fossilised within a broader narrative. As before, they must be read case by case. The interpretation of any of these levels, including the didactic one, depends on its temporal and cultural context and is not fixed: it may change more or less substantially over time (Bascom 1965; Oriol 2002).

Some ideas have remained surprisingly stable across generations and centuries, probably because folktales speak to universal human experiences. Yet—or perhaps for that very reason—the folktale is now the least understood, most mistreated and most misunderstood genre of oral narrative. Consider Cinderella’s struggle to escape poverty, which we already encounter in one of its clearest precursors, the Greek-Egyptian tale of Rhodopis recorded by Strabo in the first century. In antiquity, as in our own time, there have always been young women who wanted to escape abuse and exploitation. Sadly, that is likely to remain true. This is why Cinderella is an enduring tale.

Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel, The Fox and the Crow, 1888.
Fables choisies pour les enfants et illustrées. Public domain.

Fables

Fables share many characteristics with folktales. So much so that, depending on the classification system used, they may be grouped with “animal tales”. They take place in imaginary settings drawn from a generic repertoire, and their characters and dramatic structures likewise correspond to generic types. Fables, however, have a structure and codes of their own.

They often feature anthropomorphised animals or plants, although people, divinities and objects may also appear. Each animal or plant usually represents a set of human characteristics, which may vary from one cultural tradition to another. In many European fables, for instance, the cat is intelligent, cunning and benevolent, a benefactor; the fox, like the cat, is intelligent and cunning but often somewhat wicked, with exceptions, since it is a more ambiguous character; and the wolf is strong, violent and stupid. Certain animals are habitually paired, such as the fox and the wolf. As noted above, subverted codes are not uncommon: the fox may be benevolent and, at times, deceived by humans who prove worse than the beast itself.

These stock characters can pass into folktales. Returning to the magical cat in Puss in Boots, the cat in Perrault’s tale combines features of cats from fables with the functions, attributes and powers of a magical helper, a spirit of the benevolent-fairy type. In other words, the cat is the protagonist’s animal guardian spirit. In “Costantino Fortunato”, included in The Pleasant Nights, Straparola describes the cat inherited by the orphaned son as fatata, that is, enchanted. She has often been interpreted as a fairy, and Basile’s version reinforces that reading. Perrault takes up the same tale type, ATU 545B, and transforms several elements from the earlier Italian versions (Mazzoni 2019).

Fables are usually much shorter than folktales and contain a moral lesson, which may be stated explicitly—often at the end—or left implicit. To reinforce that lesson, they commonly set allegorical characters against each other. The animals may personify vices, faults, virtues, strengths or other human attitudes. Even when they do not personify such qualities, their actions and experiences usually serve as examples.

Above all, the genre seeks simplicity and clarity. Like folktales, fables are among the oldest and most widespread traditional narrative genres in the world. They are found among Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Oceania, in East Asia, Europe, Africa and India. Because of their characteristics, they have traditionally been associated with children’s education, although they have not always served that purpose. From early on, in ancient Greece, fables were used for political, satirical, countercultural and many other ends. The relationship between literature and fable has been constant. Authors have drawn on orally transmitted fables, while oral tradition has in turn absorbed fables written or rewritten by authors. The fables of Jean de La Fontaine, for instance, were particularly influential in the seventeenth century. Drawing on Greek and Eastern fables, he turned them into satirical and burlesque stories, particularly about the court, the Church and society at large.

The Three Little Pigs offers an interesting example. An English variant related to ATU 124, published in 1853 and set on Dartmoor, features three pixies—English spirits resembling goblins—and a fox. The printed versions by Halliwell and Jacobs, by contrast, feature three pigs and a wolf. This shows that the tale type circulated with different casts. It does not establish that Victorian collectors turned the characters of an original version into animals to make the story more family-friendly, as has sometimes been claimed, though it is very likely (English Forests and Forest Trees 1853, pp. 189–190; Uther 2004). In any case, such changes are not always the work of literary authors; they may also arise organically in oral transmission itself.

Gustave Moreau, Saint George and the Dragon, 1889–1890.
National Gallery, London. Public domain.

Legends

Legends have characteristics that differ markedly from, and may even oppose, those of folktales.

They are usually presented as taking place in real locations. Local legends, for example, unfold in places that local residents know and have experienced. National or regional legends take place at famous sites recognised by the corresponding cultural community. These places form part of the identity of the community that hears the legends and help to construct it. They may be rocks regarded as magical, notable mountains, wells, streets, particular trees, springs or any other location. A connection with verifiable topography and with the group’s belief system is one of the features that often distinguishes legend from folktale, although the boundaries remain porous (Dégh 2001; Tangherlini 1990). In this respect, Pujol (2002) situates legend, with due nuance, within conversational folklore, which requires us to consider not only the story but also the situation in which it is told and circulated. In other words, legends depend much more heavily on their social and historical context than folktales do.

The same applies to characters. Broadly speaking, legendary characters fall into four categories:

The first consists of real people who, for one reason or another, stood out from those around them and left their mark on a local or national community. Some move from local fame to broader recognition. A useful American example is Joshua Abraham Norton (1818–1880), the San Francisco merchant who proclaimed himself Norton I, Emperor of the United States. Newspapers printed his proclamations, local businesses accepted currency issued in his name, and stories about his dress, public appearances, eccentric decrees and civic visions turned him into one of the city’s most enduring folk figures. Every culture has people whose fame expands beyond its original setting for different reasons. When the social context that made them meaningful disappears, however, they are forgotten because they no longer fit new tastes and social functions.

A second category comprises real people who, on entering legend, come to embody positive or negative values. Outlaws, heroes and many other figures belong here. It is sometimes possible to separate historical reality from legend, but not always. Jesse James is a clear American example: a former Confederate guerrilla and violent bank and train robber, he was transformed—partly through his own self-presentation, sympathetic newspapers and ballads—into a wronged Southern hero and a Robin Hood who supposedly defended ordinary people. Davy Crockett underwent a related process of legendary enlargement. The historical frontiersman and politician became the superhuman hunter and teller of tall tales familiar from almanacs, plays, songs and popular entertainment. Over time, “real” people may become mere abstractions, legends whose historical existence eventually comes into doubt.

The third category consists of real people who enter legend for propagandistic purposes. It includes many medieval or pseudo-medieval legends about kings, aristocrats and noble lineages, as well as supposed heroes and heroines of war. Another American example is Betsy Ross, a real Philadelphia upholsterer and flag maker. The story that George Washington personally asked her to make the first Stars and Stripes was first publicly promoted by her grandson in 1870, almost a century after the alleged event, and lacks contemporary documentary proof. Yet it turned Ross into a patriotic emblem and supplied the nation with a domestic heroine associated with its founding symbol. Propagandistic legends often have a literary or authorial origin that may be uncertain. Some pass into oral transmission, while others remain confined to the propaganda of their time. Once their purpose has been fulfilled, they either change or are forgotten. Such instrumentalisation belongs to a broader process of selecting, appropriating and even inventing folklore in the service of collective identities (Prat 1999).

Sometimes the propagandistic element serves commercial rather than political or social ends. A clear example is the Dragon of Sant Llorenç del Munt, first publicised through a chivalric romance and later through the display of relics said to be dragon bones, intended to attract visitors to the monastery. The display of saints’ and martyrs’ relics or other miraculous objects—always associated with legends—and, less often, the supposed bones of fabulous beasts was common in monasteries, castles and churches throughout Catalonia and Europe.

These three categories are much more subject to obsolescence than folktales. With rare exceptions, folktale characters and events are not as closely tied to the character and roots of a particular culture, but rather to widely shared human experiences. Legends, by contrast, and with them their characters and events, belong to a specific culture or people, to real places and to a particular way of understanding and interpreting life expressed through that community. When a community changes, its legends change, and older ones may cease to speak to the community that succeeds it. When a culture ages, dies or disappears, so do its legendary characters and places. Indeed, not knowing one’s own legends is a symptom of cultural senility.

A final category consists of characters who are not real but move through real settings and generally belong to a generic repertoire that listeners can readily associate with familiar people, complete with names and faces. Though not specific individuals, they are such familiar types that listeners could give them the names and faces of people in their own communities. American legends in this category feature knights, kings and nobles, itinerant peddlers and tailors, witches and conjure doctors—sometimes given the names of real people, though not always—, preachers who wield prayers against evil beings, moonshiners, midwives, musicians, travelling showmen, road agents and many other recognisable figures who, though not fantastic themselves, may appear in supernatural or realistic tales.

As in folktales, these characters are usually attached to generic codes already known to listeners. Tailors, for example, are often portrayed as cowards and become the subject of humorous legends. The code can also be reversed, as in the Manx legend collected by Sophia Morrison about a benevolent tailor-sorcerer from the Isle of Man, which I discuss in Rondalles del Diable. As in folktales, expectations can be fulfilled or subverted. In some cases, the characters occupy an ambiguous, undefined territory, and it is impossible to determine whether the story refers to a real person. It is then that legend acquires a particularly interesting ambiguity.

In terms of dramatic structure, legends, like folktales, are built from narrative units that can move between different types. In other words, there is a generic repertoire of legend types. Legends of demons as builders, for instance, are widespread in Europe: a demon drops a stone—usually a local megalith—or builds a bridge, church, building or local fountain. The same applies to many other legends, such as those about a piece of cloth belonging to the fairies that is stolen, or a treasure hidden by them or another spirit of the place or the land, such as Irish leprechauns or German gnomes.

Hybrids

The motifs or generic units of legends may be shared with folktales: they are interchangeable, although some motifs are more common or exclusive to legends and others to folktales. This exchange may also produce fascinating hybrids, such as folktales that, for some reason, are transmitted as events located in specific towns, or legends about real people that eventually become folktales. Josefina Roma (2021) has studied precisely these “journeys there and back” between folktale and legend in a fascinating study, showing that classification does not prevent stories and motifs from moving between genres. Such narratives, however, present complexities that deserve an article of their own.