If there’s one or two legends that someone should look up about your country what are they? Don’t bother searching for some niche local tale known only in your village, I’m looking for those heavy hitters like Percival and Holy Grail or the Excalibur.

Here are 3 🇵🇱 Polish ones:

1. The Wawel Dragon – a classic tale about a dangerous dragon terrorizing Cracow.

2. The Basilisk – the monster terrorizes a cellar in Warsaw.

3. Mr. Twardowski – A mix of Faust and Djinni tale. many of you already know this legend indirectly because Witcher 3: Heart of Stone was based on this legend.

20 comments

  1. Well we have [Grimms’ Fairy Tales](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimms%27_Fairy_Tales) a collection of 200+ fairy tales that includes famous ones like Rapunzel and Snow White. Aside from that I can’t think of anything that’s big in the entirety of Germany. Legends and fairy tales tend to be more of a regional thing here, just like German culture tends to be more regional than national.

  2. My favourite Polish tale are the Sleeping Knights of the Tatra mountains who are supposed to wake up, move the mountains and come to our aid whenever Poland is in need. Bloody let us down repeatedly over the last 600 years, didn’t move one inch apparently during the worst wars, so thanks but no thanks lol. But despite being completely useless time and time again at least there’s a lot of great modernist literature about them 😉 Miciński’s *Nietota* and Tetmajer’s *Na Skalnym Podhalu* are one of the best novels/story collections we have.

  3. I’m from Ireland originally, so I’d say The Children of Lir. Four royal siblings are turned into swans.

  5. We have H.C. Andersen, who is often called the Shakespeare of fairytales. His 3 most famous stories are probably The Ugly Duckling, The Little Match Girl, and The Little Mermaid.

  6. It’s funny because it was recently May Day, which is traditionally the date in English folklore associated with the most famous legendary character, Robin Hood. Robin Hood in the earliest ballads, is a folk hero, a yeoman archer and forrester from Yorkshire who is outlawed and the stories deal with his frequent run-ins with the law and besting his enemies in fights. They were set in a vague time period anywhere between a King Edward and King Henry.

    Later 16th century songs and chapbooks flesh out his company of Merry Men, adding Maid Marian and Friar Tuck, who join the famous Much the Miller’s Son, Allan-a-Dale, Will Scarlet, Little John, and so on. These stories move the action to Sherwood Forest and make the Sheriff of Nottingham the hireling for King Richard’s brother John (and thereby setting the tales firmly in the 1190s).

    “Robyn bent a full goode bowe,
    An arrowe he drowe at wyll;
    He hit so the proude sherife
    Upon the grounde he lay full still.

    And or he myght up aryse,
    On his fete to stonde,
    He smote of the sherifs hede
    With his bright bronde.

    “Lye thou there, thou proude sherife,
    Evyll mote thou cheve!
    There myght no man to the truste
    The whyles thou were a lyve.””

    Aside from that the Arthur stories generally, though those form part of the Matter of Britain and involve the wars between the Welsh and Saxons.

    A few more people may have heard of, are Jack the Giant Killer, Beowulf, and Wayland the Smith. Puck (also known as Robin Goodfellow) and King Oberon, and Tom Thumb, are also well known.

  8. Romania

    Dracula- Vlad Tepis

    Also related to the British Royal family. Kings Charles favorite destination for vacation is Romania where he has a castle and various properties.

  9. For the United Kingdom I would probably go with:

    1. King Arthur and his Round Table
    2. Beowulf and Grindelwald

    Maybe loosely I would say St.George and the dragon too, but that is shared with other parts of Europe.

    Loved Beowulf as a child.

  10. The befana.

    A good with that on the 6th of January brings sweets to the good child ans coal to thw bad ones.

  11. Regarding legends, Alberto da Giussano and the Company of Death is surely one of the most important ones since it’s set during the Battle of Legnano.

    For fairy tales, the two most important books are *Lo cunto de li cunti* by Gianbattista Basile (1634), a collection of 50 Fairy tales (including the first western version of Cinderella) in Neapolitan language, and *Fiabe italiane* by Italo Calvino (1956) who collects 200 tales from many parts of Italy translating them into Italian.

    Characters of the Italian folklore would be the Befana (the Witch of the Epiphany day) and Babbo Natale (the localised version of Santa Claus), there are tons of others but are limited to a regional/local diffusion.

    The masks of the Commedia dell’Arte are quite known since they’re usually the Carnival Masks as well, each of them is associated to a specific city (Arlecchino to Bergamo, Pantalone from Venice and so on). You could listen to Rancone’s song *Arlecchino* that references them.

  12. Some of the myths and legends and stories regarding the Carolingian Cycle are “Italian” in origin and in Sicily they are often the subject of the Opera dei Pupi.

    If you are looking for more folkloristical things, the most famous characters of the Commedia dell’Arte are also Carnival Masks each associated with one of the major cities, there is also a little fairy tale on it.

  13. Scotland has lots of sources including –

    The Fenian tales of Fionn Mac Cumhail and his warriors of Feinne which is common to Scotland, Isle of Man and Ireland.

    Scotland also a Y Gododdin which Scotland shares with Wales / Cymru.

    Also the Orkneyinga Saga which was written by an Icelandic writer about events in Orkney

  14. In the Netherlands I’d say “The flying Dutchman” or “de Vliegende Hollander” is a very big one.
    It’s internationally known and quite regularly referred to in even foreign pop-culture.

    While not as old as some other legends/fairy tales it’s still quite old and originated somewhere in the early 1700’s as far as I can see. It did however become a world famous tale and if there is a game, series, or movie that involves a medieval setting or piracy chances are high there is at least a reference to it.

    In contrast there is a lokal fairy/folk tale that isn’t even known by everyone here but is actually one of the better known and preserved ones in the Netherlands There is even a little museum dedicated to it. Its the story about “Ellert en(and) Brammert”. It’s unclear when the story started but written stories about it date back to as far as the mid 1500’s at which time it was already a obviously “known” folktale so it’s definitely older than that.

    It’s a story about 2 giant brothers living in a cave in the province of Drenthe. They string wires with bells across the path’s near their cave so that they can hear when travelers are close. They then rob and kill those travelers.
    At some point they abducted a young girl and forced her to live with them and do household chores. More modern versions leave it at that. After 7 years she manages to convince the 2 giants to be let out for a walk or a shopping run or something. Of course she tells others the story, the entire village assembles, and the 2 brothers and their cave are dealt with.

  15. It’s more folklore but anyway:

    -The White Lady (La Dame Blanche) : a ghost-ish young girl that you can encounter while driving by night just before a fatal accident. There’s 2 versions, in one you just see her from afar standing still before you die, in the other she appears in the backseat of your car, scream a warning and disappear.

    -The Ankou : he’s the servant of death in Britanny’s folklore. He’s a skeleton with traditional clothes and round hat, moving by night with a scythe and noisy chariot carried by an undead horse, and he comes picking people for which their time has come.

    -The Dahu : rather a popular joke about an animal who has shorter legs on one side and just walk around mountains in circles.

    -La bête du Guévaudan : probably the most famous and grounded one. In 18th century, a giant wolf killed many people in an rural area, with witnesses describing an oversized animal. The king had to hire famous hunters and send in the army to deal with it.

  17. In Turkey, both Nasreddin Hodja (from the Seldjuks I think) and Keloglan (probably from the early Ottoman era) have hundreds of folk tales. UNESCO declared 1996-1997 as the Nasreddin Hodja year.

  18. I think for Spain is without doubt the “Cantar de mio Cid”, something like “The song of my Cid”, Cid comes from the Arab Sidi (lord).

    It’s the first preserved long poem and was written around the 1200. It’s based on the story of Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar but apparently is very very freely based and it was written like a hundred years after his dead, supposedly it used to be transmitted orally until someone wrote it down so as you can imagine on a hundred years changes occurred.

  19. There are of course the fairytales “collected” by the Grimms, but some of these originated elsewhere in Europe.

    It’s hard to say which ones are the most famous.

    Outside of those the most famous for sure is the Nibelungenlied.

    Other famous myths:

    – legend of Klaus Störtebeker (a medieval pirate)
    – the Vineta myth (sunken city in the Baltic Sea)
    – Krabat (a Sorbian legend, later turned into a popular YA novel)

    But maybe I’m regionally biased, since all of those hail from the North or East.

  20. Mykyta (Kyrylo) Kozhumyaka is a legendary hero of the times of Rus. Who, according to legend, fought with a dragon, harnessed it to a plow and built protective ramparts, which are called “Serpent’s Wall”.

    Ivan Sirko (XVII century) was the chieftain of the Zaporizhzhya Sich. According to legend, he was a “character”. Cossacks who knew magic, knew how to cure deadly diseases, are invulnerable in battle and can turn into beasts are called characters. The name comes from the mark on the body that sorcerers must have according to the book “Malleus Maleficarum”

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