What makes something mythology

Arthur is a blended type of heroic figure. Some of his characteristics stem from a legendary Welsh hero who fought monster-cats and dog-headed men and who went off to the Underworld to steal a magic cauldron. Yet Arthur also takes inspiration from a British war-leader, mentioned in early chronicles, who led his people against the invading Saxons.

In the mid-fifteenth-century, Sir Thomas Malory who was confined as a prisoner in the Tower of London, wrote down the best-known version of the Arthur story, incorporating into it tales of the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail. Malory included the ancient mythic ending, in which Arthur does not die after his last battle, but rather is borne away by boat to the Isle of Avalon.

Legends about Robin and his men, clad in Lincoln Green, who haunt Sherwood Forest, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, are first printed in the late fifteenth century. Later still, Robin is transformed from a thuggish and immoral thief to a dispossessed nobleman in exile in the greenwood. These two myths became very popular once again in the Victorian period. Both stories were mobilised for political and ideological purposes.

Robin Hood and his Merry Men spoke to ideas of a peculiarly English democratic tradition and independence of mind. Robin stood for fairness and justice, for a certain amount of distribution of wealth, and he hated the hypocrisy and corruption of the establishment: the evil Sheriff of Nottingham and the bloated and greedy churchmen whose treasures Robin regularly stole. Robin came to stand for the sturdy average Englishman, mistrustful of authority, but loyal to his rightful king, gallant towards women and with a marked sense of humour.

Both these mythic figures had important work to do in the contemporary culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. British myths, legends and folktales have survived in all kinds of different contexts. Others were written down as entertaining tales in early manuscripts, and from there were put into book form once the printing press was invented. Still other stories were not written down until the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, when people captured legends and folktales that were on the verge of dying out; many of our best sources for traditional stories are to be found in late eighteenth-century books of ballads or in Victorian folk-tale compilations.

Myths and legends began to be recorded just as soon as humans mastered the technology of writing. Often the very first texts were hymns to the gods or collections of mythological stories that became organised into cycles, explaining how the world was created, how humans came into existence or why Death is necessary.

Hero-tales are also among the most ancient of story-types. The recording of these tales began only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when explorers, scholars and anthropologists became interested in tradition, and were motivated to learn tribal languages and to record with pen and ink and subsequently electronically the vivid and unfamiliar tales they were told.

Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries myths, legends and folktales began to be seen as the province of children. Definition of mythology. Synonyms for mythology Synonyms folklore , legend , legendry , lore , myth , mythos , tradition Visit the Thesaurus for More. Examples of mythology in a Sentence We have been studying ancient Greek mythology. We compared the two cultures' mythologies. There is a popular mythology that he discovered the cause of the disease by himself.

Recent Examples on the Web The Trojan asteroids, which borrow their name from Greek mythology , orbit the sun in two swarms -- one that's ahead of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, and a second one that lags behind it. First Known Use of mythology , in the meaning defined at sense 1. Learn More About mythology. Time Traveler for mythology The first known use of mythology was in See more words from the same year.

From the Editors at Merriam-Webster. How Do You Pluralize 'Cyclops'? The Romance languages gave us 'cyclopes,' and we accepted. Style: MLA. The myths of a golden age give people hope that there are great leaders who will improve their lives. The hero's quest is a model for young men and women to follow, as they accept adult responsibilities.

Some myths simply reassure, such as myths that explain natural phenomena as the actions of gods, rather than arbitrary events of nature. The subjects of myths reflect the universal concerns of mankind throughout history: birth, death, the afterlife, the origin of man and the world, good and evil and the nature of man himself. A myth taps into a universal cultural narrative, the collective wisdom of man.

An excellent illustration of the universality of these themes is that so many peoples who have had no contact with each other create myths that are remarkably similar. Unlike fairy tales, myths are not always optimistic. True to the nature of life, the essence of myths is such that they are as often warnings as promises; as often laments as celebrations.