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Urban legends perpetrate a type of folklore, in the form of supposedly-true stories circulated primarily by word of mouth. Urban legends are sometimes repeated in news stories and, in recent years, distributed by email. People frequently say such tales happened to a "friend of a friend" - so often, in fact, that FOAF has become a commonly used acronym to describe how such reports are rarely first-hand. Some urban legends have survived a very long time, evolving only slightly over the years, as in the case of the story of a woman killed by spiders nesting in her elaborate hairdo. Others are new and reflect modern circumstances, like the story of the man on a business trip being seduced by a woman and waking up the next morning minus a kidney surgically removed for transplant. Some urban legends have a basis in true events, such as the case of the young man shooting bullets into a large saguaro cactus and being killed when his gunfire severed the trunk, resulting in the falling plant crushing him. Even when essentially true, however, the stories often become distorted by many retellings. Despite their name, urban legends do not necessarily take place in an urban setting. The name is designed to differentiate them from traditional folklore created in pre-industrial times. Urban legends often are born of fears and insecurities, or specifically designed to prey on such concerns.
OriginsJan Harold Brunvand, Professor of English, first promoted the concept of the urban legend in his 1981 book The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends & Their Meanings. Brunvand used his collection of legends to make two points: first, that legends, myths, and folklore do not belong solely to so-called primitive or traditional societies, and second, that one could learn much about urban and modern culture by studying such legends. Brunvand has since published a series of similar books. The field also credits Brunvand as the first to use the term vector (after the concept of a biological vector) to describe a person or entity passing along an urban legend. Keeping track of urban legendsDiscussing, tracking, and analyzing urban legends has become a popular pursuit. A thriving usenet newsgroup, alt.folklore.urban, discusses such stories. The newsgroup's "Frequently Asked Questions" page summarises the truth or otherwise of these stories, so far as this can be determined. For a similar list see the Urban Legends Reference Pages at snopes.com. For online urban legends, see Virus Myths and the Darwin Awards site, which also showcases a few stories each year of dubious veracity (they've promulgated Urban Legends as facts in the past). The US Department of Energy has set up a service called Hoaxbusters that deals with all sorts of computer-distributed hoaxes and legends. A recent TV series, MythBusters, has the goal of proving or disproving urban legends by actually attempting to reproduce them. Historical examplesCertain early historians such as Tacitus, Geoffrey of Monmouth and Herodotus functioned as forerunners of urban myth, recycling hearsay and anecdotal accounts as historical facts; these writings, in turn, served as the basis for other accounts, and thus many cycles of inaccurate historical narrative became self-perpetuating vicious circles. Contemporary historians tend to cast a very cold and careful eye over historical evidence emanating from writers such as these. For a list of these and other works considered to be suspect, see Dubious historical resources. The Papal TiaraOne classic urban legend claims the pope's crown or Papal Tiara contains the words Vicarius Filii Dei which, when numerised, add up to 666, the number of the antichrist mentioned in the Bible. Though the story has no basis in fact (all papal crowns dating from the sixteenth century onwards are on public show and none contain the words), 'belief' in the 'myth' has continued, with constant specific references to an early twentieth-century photograph at a papal funeral (probably that of Pope Leo XIII in 1903) that proves the existence of a papal tiara with the words. Except that in one hundred years, no one has ever been able to produce the supposed photograph or even state definitively where it was supposedly published. Instead it is spoken of in terms of 'knowing someone who knows someone who definitely saw the photograph!', a phenomenon known in the Irish language as the 'Dhúirt bean liom gur dhúirt bean leí' syndrome (a woman told me that a woman told her that...), and as on alt.folklore.urban and other places as FOAF, for friend of a friend. See also
External links
de:Urban legend es:Leyenda urbana fr:Légende urbaine ja:都市伝説 nl:Broodje-aapverhaal pl:Miejska legenda pt:Lenda urbana fi:Urbaani legenda sv:Klintbergare he:אגדה אורבנית |
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