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used to ask the question, “What Becomes a Legend Most?” What do the so-called legends of Hollywood have to do with stories of ancient gods and heroes? Not much.
    Although the words “myth” and “legend” are often used interchangeably, there are some notable distinctions. When most people think of myths, they have in mind some pantheon (another Greek word, it is formed from pan for “all” and theos for “gods”) of Greek and Roman gods. According to the myths, these divinities were believed to be supernatural beings who actually controlled events in the natural world.
    Legends are really an early form of history—stories about historical figures, usually humans, not gods, that are handed down from earlier times. Most Americans, for instance, are familiar with the legend of young George Washington and the cherry tree. This story of Washington as a young boy chopping down his father’s cherry tree and being incapable of lying about it was the purely fictional creation of a “biographer” named Parson Weems, who passed himself off as the rector of the parish at Mount Vernon. His stories of young Washington were tailored to fit into a neat collection of morality tales for children, well after Washington was dead. Nonetheless, stories such as the tale of the cherry tree became part of the national American legend of George Washington and his unquestioned honesty. But while Washington was certainly celebrated as a legend, both in his times and for centuries afterwards, nobody actually ever thought of him as a god.
    Another familiar example of the distinction between myth and legend comes from ancient Great Britain. King Arthur is a historical figure about whom legendary stories have been created and retold for more than a thousand years, including, in recent times, in T. H. White’s popular The Once and Future King and the musical Camelot , which provide most of our images of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. A figure in British prehistory, Arthur was most likely based upon an actual person, possibly a tribal chieftain in Wales, around whom an elaborate cycle of heroic tales was collected. George Washington’s biography and times were reasonably well documented, but the life of Arthur is more difficult to pin down with hard facts. Many of the stories about a king called Arthur first began to be collected in History of the Kings of Britain , written by Geoffrey of Monmouth between 1136 and 1138, anywhere from five hundred to a thousand years after the real-life model for King Arthur might have lived.
    But older legends about Arthur go back even further, to an ancient Welsh collection of tales called the Mabinogion . These stories—which may have had their origins even earlier in Celtic Ireland, and then migrated to Wales—contain some of the earliest-known references to a character named Arthur. He is also mentioned as a military chieftain in post-Roman Britain, fighting against the Saxon and Norse invaders, and his name is derived from Artorius, a Latin name recorded in Britain in the second century. Spinning off from these ancient Celtic and Welsh myths came elaborate, Christian-influenced tales of Arthur and his wife Guinivere, as well as the collection of noble knights in their quest for the Holy Grail—the cup from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper. These tales were recycled and rewritten by many writers, working over the next several centuries, gradually transforming the legendary king and his court into the more-familiar image we hold of Arthur today—chivalrous knight in medieval armor. These medieval romances were complex fictions created by later generations looking to turn this Dark Age Welsh warlord into a Christian king of England. By the Middle Ages, when the concept of the knightly order and the ideas of chivalry developed, the legends of Arthur were draped in these medieval fashions, removed by centuries from Arthur’s far more primitive historical beginnings.
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