How do legends, myths and fables begin?

Question

All stories that are retold don't get mistaken for actual events, but for myths and legends there is a grey area.

Is it because there is a grain of truth embedded in these myths? Does that truth get distorted over time and simply becomes a legend, a bedtime story?

Is humankind rubbish at record keeping over hundreds of thousands of years- or is it only current thinking that tells us these events did not happen, when in fact they actually did.

Examples:

origin stories for all religions

greek gods

sumerian gods

egyptian gods

megalythic builders

Answer 1

Keep in mind that all these stories began in oral tradition; the original creators of the vast majority of the ancient tales in any culture were most likely illiterate. So tales would be transmitted by simply telling them, and they would never be remembered and transmitted perfectly; so tales always change in the telling.

Or perhaps over time, the tale might outlive the main characters in the story, and thereafter the tale is told by people who never knew and had no connection with the people in the story, so that would change the telling as well. There are very many reasons why tales change over time, even if they were once simple accounts of true events.

Answer 2

Replies you will receive here will not suffice you.

Read the works of Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Adolph Bastian, Marija Gimbutas, and Karen Armstrong.

Answer 3

There often is a grain of truth in them, but the point about myths especially isn't whether they're literally true, instead they can express deeper truths. (Sorry if I'm being too simplistic.  What I mean is that they exist for more important reasons than just to retell any grain of truth in them.)

I think how they actually begin is an interesting question - they often evolve from earlier forms of the myth, but I can't answer how they begin. Joseph Campbell is a good writer to read about mythology.

This quotation from the book "Before Philosophy" by Henri Frankfort et al, is fairly interesting:

"...the ancients told myths instead of presenting an analysis or conclusions. We would explain, for instance, that certain atmospheric changes broke a drought and brought about rain. The Babylonians observed the same facts but experienced them as the intervention of the gigantic bird Imduqud which came to their rescue. It covered the sky with the black storm clouds of its wings and devoured the Bull of Heaven, whose hot breath had scorched the crops.

In telling such a myth, the ancients did not intend to provide entertainment. Neither did they seek, in a detached way and without ulterior motives, for intelligible explanations of the natural phenomena. They were recounting events in which they were involved to the extent of their very existence. They experienced, directly, a conflict of powers, one hostile to the harvest upon which they depended, the other frightening but beneficial: the thunderstorm reprieved them in the nick of time by defeating and utterly destroying the drought. The images had already become traditional at the time when we meet them in art and literature, but originally they must have been seen in the revelation which the experience entailed. They are products of imagination, but they are not mere fantasy."

Answer 4

They start out as explanations for the unknown, and are quickly expanded upon.