Here you will find legends whose origins predate the twentieth century, a broad category overlapping with many others, including medieval, religious and classic legends, as well as stories of uncertain character that are difficult to classify beyond their age. Establishing the antiquity of a legend is a controversial matter, so at Llegendàrium we rely primarily on the dates when stories were collected or the earliest periods to which their folkloric motifs can be traced, using methods such as structural comparison.

You will not find here stories created from scratch or literary reworkings of pre-existing material that do not belong to oral and popular tradition. The Romantics, for example, often used an idealised Middle Ages to express their political aspirations, a tendency that persisted well into the twentieth century in Catalonia and throughout Europe. These “fabrications” are identified accordingly under the “Medieval” or “Modern” categories in this section.