What is the difference between myths folktales and fantasy

Myths, Fables, Legends, and Fairy Tales. Hi, guys! Welcome to this Mometrix video on myths, fables, legends, and fairy tales. Myth A myth is a story that was made up by people who wanted to explain how or why our world works, how it came to be, how we should treat each other, why hurricanes happen, and so on. Legend Legends are stories that people made up as well. Fable Now, a fable is also a story that is passed down. Fairy Tale Fairy tales are probably one of the most popular today.

Legends are designed to teach a lesson about a real person in history, with a few facts dramatically changed. Fables are stories that are passed down, with a good lesson to be learned, and are about animals, plants, or forces of nature that are humanlike. See you next time! You can find more about that here. Are folktales and folklore the same thing? Spoiler: nope. Sometimes most of the time , we use words interchangeably.

These stories have some historical fact and accuracy behind them. But of course, over time, and through the grapevine and creative listening, the story has become exaggerated. Dracula was inspired by the infamous Vlad The Impaler. A cruel tyrant who ruled during the 15th century. Although there are many spellings, pronunciations, and translations — Vlad comes from a family with the surname of Dracul. Even more interesting! Such a good movie — so sexy. There is definitely a lot of inspiration for Dracula.

Myths are Legends on supernatural steroids. It has some historical elements to it, but it involves gods, demigods, and explanations of natural phenomena. They appear as short stories that could be realistic except for one or two details, and are often based on true events. Most of the legends-as-stories I know are American. All of his fables, whether he wrote them or not, have animals with the same sort of thoughts and motivations as people.

The most famous example is the Tortoise and the Hare. You know how this goes, right? A tortoise and a hare agree to race, the hare has the lead but stops to take a little nap, the tortoise continues on at the usual pace and ends up winning. The moral? Slow and steady wins the race. This genre can get tricky though, because some cultures, like some African tribes or African folklore traditions, almost exclusively tell stories involving animals.

We would even consider these kinds of stories to be fairy tales, and the ATU index has an entire broad category for animals tales numbers I think the defining feature is the purpose of the story. Is the tale just an amusing story?

Does it explain some kind of phenomenon? Then it might be more fairy tale or myth. We already went over what makes a fairy tale in this post. But I will mention how a fairy tale differs from these other genres, at least in my eyes. The main thing is that fairy tales were and are mostly for entertainment.