Gillian Bennett, Sheffield

What's 'Modern3 about the Modern Legend?

Of recent years scholarly interest in legends has shifted away from such story
types as saints and hero legends, aetiological, placename and local stories to a
genre of narrative that has less obvious roots in traditional themes and preoccu-
pations. The contents of these legends—macabre happenings, accidents with
household machinery, encounters with off-duty royalty, dreadful contamina-
tions of foodstuffs, environment or bodily organs, theft, violence, threat, sexual
embarrassments—seem to be novel in legendry. The setting of the time in the
recent past and the reliance of the story logic on modern lifestyles seems further
to separate these new forms from traditional legends. Hence we have come to call
these vivid expressions of contemporary beliefs 'modern urban legends' and to
treat them as somehow separate from 'traditional' legends. With what justice,
remains to be seen.
In this paper I want to look at some typical modern urban legends and to
examine their themes, contents and performance in order to try to distinguish
what is modern about them and what is not. Lbegin with an extract from a taped
recording of the conversation of a group of Leicester University students made in
November 1984. The main speaker is a twenty-year-old Art History student, Rob,
and other contributions come from Fiona and Sue.
Rob: There was something in the—somewhere on the radio or something the
other day about rats—s n a k e s in bodies—in the body ofthat girl. I can't remember
really. It was about three weeks ago now. I heard it somewhere. It's a snake in some
girl's body and they had to operate to get it out."
Sue: "How old was she?"
Rob: "She was only about six. It must have been in the Daily Mail or on Radio One.
No but, she was going really thin, [turns to Sue) You read that thing about that
snake in that girl? In the paper the other day? [turns to GB] I told her about it.
There was this girl with a snake in, and they operated on it."
Sue: "Was it all e n t w i n e d around her?*
Rob: "It was all in her intestine."
Fiona: "I can understand about tapeworms..."
Rob: "It was still alive."
GB: "And it was growing and she was getting thinner?"
Rob: "Mmm, and they operated. It's t r u e because it was in the paper. Well it
might not have been 'true because it was in the paper* but—."
Fiona: "I've heard..."
Rob: "It was in America..."
Fiona: "... that about tapeworms. They say it was about forty feet long or some-
thing ..."
Rob: "Oh, no, not tapeworms..."

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220 Gillian Bennett

Fiona: a ... Apparently you can b u y tapeworms like pills or something..."

Rob: "It was a s n a k e. It was about three weeks..."
GB: "Reptiles..."
Rob: "... and then they took it out and it was alive and they killed it—which I
thought really unreasonable."
This familiar legend is part of a vast complex of contemporary belief tales
about "dreadful contaminations"1. Of all modern legend types none is more end-
lessly inventive—insects in boils, cellulose fibres in the bloodstream, earwigs in
brains, alligators and rats in sewers, catfood in curry and so on. Not only are such
legends popular, they also seem to be clearly rooted in the present day: they
appear to reflect directly the neuroses of an age obsessed with hygiene.
Such suppositions, though very attractive, do not stand up to investigation.
In 1963 D. McKelvie reported that legends about the Bradford sewers had been
common for at least fifty years2; Loren Coleman has suggested that alligator
legends were current as early as 18433; and Shirley Marchalonis has found ana-
logues for The Spiders in the Hairdo legend in medieval exempla4. Similarly, ver-
sions of TheReptik in the Stomach were circulating in the English industrial towns
of Birmingham, Doncaster and Stockport in the mid-nineteenth century (times
and places not famous for their hygiene). During September to November of
1852, for example, the weekly journal Notes and Queries carried three letters on the
theme. In the first "A Londoner" quotes a story from The Doncaster Chronicle and
asks whether it can be true:
A Reptile Swallowed by a Little Girl
"Last summer a little girl, between eleven and twelve years of age, daughter of a
labouring man, Watson, living at Blaxton, whilst engaged in the harvest field,
drank some water out of a ditch, and, it appears swallowed some kind of reptile in
it. Since then the poor child has periodically experienced incredible pains in her
chest, from the increasing bulk and movement of the reptile, which at times
ascends the throat in search of food, causing intense agony. On these occasions
warm milk and water is poured down her throat; and, when the reptile has imbibed
the nourishment it descends to its place of lodgement, just above the diaphragm.
That a poor child should be left to endure such excrutiating torture is a reflection
on the science and benevolence of the age in which we live."5
In reply, two correspondents offer opinions and further narratives. In issue
number 154, K. P. D. E. replies that he has often read such accounts in provincial
newspapers "which I have always thought to be emanations from the brains of
that highly imaginative class of persons, the village correspondent", and appends

1
The term is Brunvand's: Brunvand, J. H.: The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban
2
Legends and Their Meanings. New York/London 1981, 75-90.
McKelvie, D.: Some Aspects of Oral, Social and Material Tradition in an Industrial
3
Urban Area. Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis Leeds 1963, 360 sg.
Coleman, L.: Alligators-In-The-Sewers: A Journalistic Origin. In: Journal of American
4
Folklore 92 (1979) 335-338.
Marchalonis, S.: Three Medieval Tales and their Modern Analogues. In: Journal of the
Folklore Institute 13, 2 (1976) 173-184.
5
"A Londoner": Newspaper Folklore. In: Notes and Queries 6 (1852) 221 sq.

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 What's 'Modern' about the Modern L·gend? 221

a story from The Stockport Advertiser relating to a lizard imbibed and later vomit-
ed up by a ploughboy in 18446. Finally a Birmingham surgeon dismisses the phe-
nomenon as hypochondria and cites the case of an old woman attending his
hospital and complaining of pain in the bowels caused, she claims, by the move-
ments of a newt ("nowt") which is lodged there. The canny doctor gives her a
harmless substance which he tells her will dislodge the reptile:
"Not long afterwards she again presented herself at the hospital, and was shown up
to the doctor, when the following colloquy ensued.
Dr. J. 'Well, my good woman, I suppose the draught I gave you soon killed the
reptile/
Woman. 'Lord bless you, no, Sir. The nowt has had young ones since!*
The doctor dismissed the case as beyond his skill."7

In an article in The Journal of American Folklore* Daniel Barnes has studied

literary uses of the legend in works by Hortense Calisher, Henry Thoreau and
Nathaniel Hawthorne. The latter's short story The Bosom Serpent predates the
earliest English newspaper example by a year (March, 1843), and Barnes also
draws attention to an even earlier version which appeared in Niks' Register for
October 1822. This variant, which includes details of an operation to remove the
reptile, shows a strong likeness to the legend collected in Leicester 162 years later.
Even earlier versions may exist. In his popular collection of "nasty legends", Paul
Smith refers to a letter from the Reverend Samuel Glasse to Sir Joseph Banks
(27th November, 1780) in which he describes how "Thomas Walker, under an
emetic, vomited a live toad two and a half inches long which crawled on the
floor"9.
This brief examination of the background to a legend which, on the face of it,
seems to be obviously modern serves to illustrate a growing unease among schol-
ars about the status of'modern urban legend'. One of the things to come most
forcefully from discussions at the Sheffield legend conferences of 1982 and
198310, for example, was a consensus that modern urban legends are rather inap-
propriately named, not only in the term's ascription of urbanness to the genre
(which has been implicitly recognised for some time) but in its ascription of
modernity too.
The same consensus is detectable in general in the growing scholarship on the
subject, especially in British and American work. If we take British studies as an
example, we find that David Buchan has demonstrated that modern legend char-
acters, themes and motifs have an ancestry in schwanke, trickster tales, exempla

6 K.P.D:E.: Newspaper Folklore, ibid., 338.

7
Ingleby, C.M.: Newspaper Folklore, ibid., 466.
8
Barnes, D.: The Bosom Serpent: A Legend in American Literature and Culture. In:
Journal of American Folklore 85 (1972) 111-122.
9
Smith, P.: The Book of Nasty Legends. London 1983, 49.
10
id. (ed.): Perspectives on Contemporary Legend: Proceedings of the Conference on
Contemporary Legends, Sheffield, July 1982. Sheffield 1984; Bennett, G./Smith, P./
Widdowson, J. D. A. (edd.): Perspectives on Contemporary Legend 2. Sheffield (forth-
coming).

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222 Gillian Bennett

and traditional legends11, and Noel Williams has argued that "in some cases not
only is Contemporary Legend similar to traditional legend, but it can be demon-
strated to be a development from a historical prototype, either oral or literary,
with simply a cultural updating of detail"12. These statements seem to be amply
justified by studies of individual legends: Jacqueline Simpson has for example,
suggested that two popular modern legends are "clever transformations" of witch
legends13 and Stewart Sanderson has traced ancestors of others in the Heptameron
of Marguerite de Navarre14. Other legends, while perhaps not so ancient, still
have a fairly lengthy history—Katharine Briggs traces the story of The Foreign
Hotels least as far back as 188915; Paul Smith finds a version of The Hairy Handed
Hitchhiker from 183416; Stewart Sanderson shows that The House with Blue Lights
was well known in Germany in the 1880V7; and I have argued that The Phantom
Hitchhiker is probably best regarded as the latest in a series of legends about trav-
elling ghosts which stretches back at least to the seventeenth century18. If these
legends are Modern' then they are so in a very peculiar sense. We may, in fact, feel
that we have reached the point where the most commonly used name for the
genre has become an embarrassment.
I want to suggest, however, that the name 'modern urban legend' (or at least
'modern legend') still has some validity, for there i s a sense in which we are deal-
ing with something novel. What I see as new about the genre is not the themes
nor the motifs but the way that they are shaped in the telling. Modern legends
seem to be happy borrowers of the features of other genres. In one form they
combine characteristics of tall tales, fables, and personal experience stories.
Their function, for example, often seems like that of fables, much of their con-
tent like that oftall tales, and the manner of narration surprisingly akin to that of
personal experience stories. It is this particular synthesis that makes them so eas-
ily recognisable yet so difficult to define. In the remainder of this paper I want
first to look very briefly at the ways in which modern legends resemble tall tales
and fables, and then to consider at more length the performative similarities be-
tween modern legend and personal experience stories.

11
Buchan, D.: The Modern Legend. In: Green, A. E./Widdowson, J. D. A. (edd.): Lan-
guage, Culture and Tradition: Papers on Language and Folklore Presented at the
Annual Conference of the British Sociological Association, April 1978. Sheffield 1981,
12
1-15.
Williams, N.: Problems in Defining Contemporary Legend. In: Smith (above, not. 10)
13
216-228, here 218.
Simpson,].: Rationalized Motifs in Urban Legends. In: Folklore 92,2 (1981) 203-207,
14
here 203.
Sanderson, S.: The Modern Urban Legend. The Katharine Briggs Lecture No. 1. Lon-
15
don 1981,12.
Briggs, K.: British Folk Tales and Legends: A Sampler. London 1978, 309.
"
17
Smith (above, not. 9) 91.
18
Sanderson (above, not. 14) 11.
Bennett, G.: The Phantom Hitchhiker: Neither Modern Urban nor Legend? In: Smith
(above, not. 10) 45-63.

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 What's 'Modern' about the Modern Legend? 223

Modern legends seem to be like fables in their ability to focus fears, warnings,
threats and promises, and to be like tall tales in the way the just-barely-possible
occurrence is exaggerated to the point of wild improbability. So, in one sense the
legends are very real and in another very unreal. They begin in the ordinary world
where ordinary people are doing ordinary things: eating, sleeping, making love;
they end in hospitals, police stations, psychiatric clinics, the potential hazard in
ordinary living having not only been actualised but actualised in particularly
gross form. In the world of the modern legend the most extravagant disasters can
occur. In the sense that these wild stories may embody social or sexual warnings19
or focus fears about the modern world20 they function in much the same way as
fables do. However, these fears and warnings are expressed, not through believ-
able or typical events, but through entirely preposterous happenings. Like tall
tales, these stories are not really quite believable.
This being so, it seems doubly strange that modern legends should bear any
resemblance to personal experience stories. Yet they do, and the resemblance is a
close one. Indeed, if one were to judge by performative techniques, by structure
and style alone, then modern legends and personal experience stories would
appear remarkably similar. Both are person-centred narrative forms, telling of a
single occasion in the near past, and featuring a cast of ordinary people. In the
legends, as in the stories, there are no gods or heroes, but simply 'this girl' 'this
man I heard about', 'a friend of a friend'. The events are presented as happening
Once' on a specific occasion, not as something that 'always' happened or 'used to'
happen, and the time is never far distant. The structures, too, are similar. Narra-
tors of modern legends characteristically begin by creating an opening for their
narratives then set the scene before outlining the events which lead to the climax.
The denouement follows, and finally the end-boundary is signalled with a short
meta-comment. Throughout the telling the narrative is saturated with evaluative
devices that add 'point' to the story in order to make it seem interesting and ex-
citing. This is exactly the structure that linguists W. Labov and J. Waletsky predict
for personal experience stories21: that is, abstract, orientation, complication,
evaluation, resolution, coda. The modern legend fits the model just as neatly as
the personal experience story.
Even Rob's confused narrative, with which this paper began, more or less
adheres to this structure. His first utterance is a summary or abstract of the story
to come, and his reference to the child's age and growing thinness in his next
utterance the briefest of orientations. The narrative clauses which follow ("There
was this girl with a snake in, and they operated on it. It was all in her intestine. It
was still alive and they operated") serve as complication, and finally both coda

19 See, for example, Degh, L: The Hook. In: Indiana Folklore 1 (1968) 92-100; Bundes,
Á.: On the Psychology of Legend. In: id.: Analytic Essays in Folklore. The Hague/Paris
20
1975,163-174.
21
Williams (above, not. 12) 220.
Labov, W./Waletsky, J.: Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience. In:
Helm, J. (ed.): Essays on the Visual and Verbal Arts. Seattle 1967,12-44.

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224 Gillian Bennett

and resolution follow, though in reverse order, the coda doubling as an evalua-
tion ("It's true because it was in the paper", "and they took it out and it was alive
and they killed it, which I thought really unreasonable"). This is not just a chance
resemblance. Other studies have shown that this is the customary structure of
modern legend when performed as narrative22.
The likeness between the genres, however, is even more apparent when per-
formative characteristics are examined. In effect, the narrators' psychological
situation is similar and exerts the same pressures on storytelling style. Most no-
ticeably, narrators of modern legend and personal experience stories are alike in
being subject to what one might call 'the audience effect'. In telling stories such as
these, narrators are more than usually sensitive to public opinion as represented
by their audience, for their credibility and reputation are at stake. As for the audi-
ence, they have to make decisions about the truth or falsity of the story; they
must at least decide whether to accept the world view it proposes. They cannot
afford to be merely passive receptors. The 'audience effect' has two early conse-
quences. Firstly, narrators may choose to distance themselves from their stories
by devices such as dissociative body-movements and non-verbal signs or by set-
ting the scene at a distant place and disclaiming personal knowledge of the pro-
tagonists23; secondly, an audience may take on an active role and try to redefine
the meaning and significance of the story24.
Rob's narrative provides an illustration of both these processes. Though he
claims to have heard this dramatically gruesome story only three weeks ago, his
presentation of it is remarkably vague. He heard it, he says, "on the radio or some-
thing", and it is "something" about "some girl" who Vas only about six" and lived
far away "in America". Plainly Rob does not care to associate himself too closely
with the snake legend. As well as resorting to deliberate vagueness about detail,
he further distances himself from it by speaking throughout in an even 'discuss-
ing' tone of voice devoid of any narrative-like emphasis or liveliness, and, early
on in the rendition, by inviting Sue to take over the storytelling role ("You read
that thing about that snake in that girl? [... ] [turns to GB] I told her about it").
After a short time, Fiona, a student of biology, intervenes. For four conversa-
tional turns she tries to redefine the legend as about tapeworms. While Rob con-
tinues his halting account, Fiona is busy subverting it. "I can understand about
tapeworms", she begins: as nobody listens, she has to try again, "I've heard that
about tapeworms". Once again no one reacts or takes up her suggestion, but she is
still anxious to make her point and continues, gently but persistently, to talk
about tapeworms. It is not until Rob turns to her and directly contradicts her that

22
See Nicolaisen, W. F. H.: The Linguistic Structure of Legends. In: Bennett/Smith/
23
Widdowson (above, not. 10); Bennett (above, not. 18).
Smith, G.: Aspects of Urban Legend as a Performance Genre. In: Lore and Language 2,
24
10 (1979) 41-44.
Polyani, L.: So What's the Point? In: Semiotica 25 (1979) 207-241; Ellis, B.: Why are
Verbatim Transcripts of Legends Necessary? In: Bennett/Smith/Widdowson (above,
not. 10); Robinson, J. A.: Personal Narrative Reconsidered. In: Journal of American
Folklore 94 (1981) 58-85.

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 What's 'Modern' about the Modern Legend* 225

she gives in. Plainly, Fiona cannot believe Rob's story as it stands: she is therefore
trying to redefine it in terms she finds more credible, to urge this interpretation
on Rob, and to invite Sue and the others to adopt it in preference to his version of
events.
Though these sorts of performative and adversarial ploys are intrinsically
"memorate-type possibilities of performance"25, they are equally open to hearers
and tellers of any story with (potentially) problematic content, where judge-
ments about truth and falsity are part of the total narrative experience and where
narrators have to take responsibility for the effect their story may have on the
hearers. In modern legend telling they are typically used by narrators and audi-
ences who are in some way uncertain—unsure, maybe, of the truth of the account,
its appropriateness in the social context, or its psychological effect on others.
At the other end of the spectrum, where storytellers are confident and unself-
conscious, and the legends "fully incorporated"26 into their presentation of self,
the 'audience effect' has very different results. In a sense, the storyteller reacts as
if she was on trial. She will not rely on a mere asseveration of truth to verify her
narrative, but puts her integrity and memory to the test in a public demonstra-
tion. Instead of distancing herself from the story, she attaches it to her life and
experience as closely as possible, authenticating it by minute details about
people, places and daily life, and by the exact quotation of remembered conver-
sations. It is in these sorts of performances that personal experience stories and
modern legends resemble each other most closely of all. Consider, for example,
the following narratives. Both are told by retired business women interviewed in
Manchester during April 1981. Mrs. Lawrenson's narrative is a personal story,
Mrs. Edelstein's a modern legend.

Mrs. Lawrenson's story

Oh, I have my little visions." [GB: "What else do you see?"] "Oh, all sorts of
things! Was it three years last November?— that's right—Or two years? No, three
years. We were in the kitchen washing up, my husband and myself, you see, and
we've a window there where the sink is [demonstrates], and a window t h e r e , so
you sort of go round and the back door's h e r e [demonstrates], and I said, Ooh!'
and it's dark you know, it's November and it's dark.
He said, 'What's the matter?' I said, 'I've just seen somebody standing in that cor-
ner!' and he looked at me and he said, Oh, God! There you go again!' [laughs] you
see. So I said, OK, then!' Sixth of November it was. Comes the Tuesday, the
following Tuesday—nothing happens. Comes the Tuesday, the following Tuesday,
and I've been out shopping. I come back. Turn into the top of the road. What greets
me? Three flipping police cars with their lights going round, you know, and a car all
smashed up on the side, and my son's truck which was parked outside bumped for-
ward into the lamp, the lamp down on top of it and I said to John [her husband],
'What's happened?' Oh', he said, 'you'll find out in a moment' and the bell went

25
Smith (above, not. 23) 42.
26 ibid., 41.

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226 Gillian Bennett

on the door and I opened the door. Guess to what? The man in blue! A policeman!
The same geezer that I'd seen—the man in the blue garb.
So now! I'm a great believer in the supernatural. Yes, I am! And there are more
things in Heaven and Earth than we dream about."

(Note: 'flipping* = all-purpose adjective signifying consternation; geezer* = man;

'blue garb* = blue uniform).

Mrs. Edelsteines modern legend

"This is very funny, but this is absolutely true. It was my aunty's neighbour who we
knew very well. This just reminded me—'Someone's wife left at the roadside during
a vacation journey*27.
They went on a caravan holiday. It, it was a long time ago, because I believe nowa-
days you're not allowed to sleep in a caravan while you're driving it. But in those
days there was no law about it. I should say it's twenty to twenty-five years ago, and,
er, they were coming home from Wales. It was late at night and she was tired. Her
husband said, Oh, I'll drive. You go and sleep.'
So she went in the caravan, got undressed and put herself to bed, and they had been
driving about half an hour. She wasn't settled, and the car stopped, and she looked
through the window. She saw her husband get out and go in the field [laughs], so
s h e wanted to go in the field as well. She got out and, urn, didn't tell him because
he had gone by the side of the road and she went behind a tree or something, and he
came back jolly quick and got in the car and drove off, and she'd j u s t gone behind
this tree. So she sort of ran out in her nightdress and shouted him, but off he went
[laughs].
Anyway [laughs] she was there on the roadside for ages in her nightdress, and a
young boy came along, and he was only about eighteen, on a motorbike, and she
sort of flagged him down, and he stopped, and she told him what had happened.
Said could he take her as her husband had gone, and he said, º can't, because I'm
out late and my mother will kill me anyway!' So she said, 'But I'll come and
e x p l a i n to your mother. Please. You can't leave me here in the road!' She'd only
got her nightie on. So anyway, he did take her, and they overtook this caravan. Her
husband was absolutely staggered to see her, to see this woman on the back of the
pillion.
Hayes, their name was. That reminded me of that, but that's t r u e , you know.
There's no doubt about that."

First and most obviously the two narratives share the same structure. Mrs.
Edelstein's legend, no less than Mrs. Lawrenson's personal experience story,
adheres to the Labovian model, as the following diagram shows.

27
The narrative was collected by means of a questionnaire administered within an
interview, see Bennett, G.: Problems in Collecting and Classifying Urban Legend: A
Personal Experience. In: Bennett/Smith/Widdowson (above, not. 10).

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 What's 'Modern' about the Modern Legend? 227

Narrative stage First sentence of

narrative stage
Abstract Oh, I have my little This is very funny
visions
Orientation Was it three years They went on a
last November? caravan holiday
Complication He said, "What's So she went in the
the matter?" caravan
Resolution Comes the Tuesday Anyway, she was there
on the roadside
Coda So now! I'm a great Hayes, their name was
believer
Slot Mrs. Lawrenson's Mrs. Edelstein's
story story

Moreover, the narratives have a close resemblance in terms of performance.

Most noticeably, both narrators use identical authenticating ploys. In order to
verify their narratives neither speaker relies solely on a simple statement that it is
true. Instead they each prefer to provide good e v i d e n c e of its truth by
demonstrating their reliability as eyewitness and informant, seeking to establish
their competence in these roles by an exhibition of skills of observation and
memory. For both narrators the truth of the account is vouched for by their scru-
pulousness about details of place and person, time and circumstance. Hence
both women provide unusually long initial orientations, and, throughout the
whole story, supply additional scene-settings and explanatory asides.
After her initial remarks, for example, Mrs. Edelstein gives a thirteen clause
orientation before moving on to the complicating action. When she does
describe these central events, her account, rather than giving details of the
woman's feelings at being left by the roadside, concentrates instead on laborious
explanations of how this came about. Likewise, the denouement is mainly taken
up with justificatory plot business in the form of the dialogue between the
woman and the boy, and finally the coda of the story includes yet another expla-
nation (this time, about why the story came to mind).
Mrs. Lawrenson is equally careful to be clear and specific. In her orientation
she not only describes the time of day and year and the activity she and her hus-
band are engaged in when she has her precognitive vision, but also throws in a
description of the layout of her kitchen. The complication likewise includes
mention of a specific date, and the resolution is initiated with an equally precise
marking of time and place, followed by a complex description of the road acci-
dent outside her house. In both accounts, factual scene-setting takes precedence

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228 Gillian Bennett

over subjective description, in spite of the scope the subject matter gives for
imaginative reconstruction. This is surely because tellers of modern legend, like
narrators of personal experience stories, feel that the t r u t h of the events is just
as important as the n a t u r e of the events28. Hence stories are structured like
evidence in criminal trials to give priority to circumstances, and thus allow hear-
ers to test the internal consistency of the story and the reliability of the witness29.
Further demonstrations of the narrator's memory-skills, consistency and
accuracy are provided in the snatches of dialogue with which the narratives are
interspersed. In both personal experience stories and modern legends these
almost always take the form of direct quotations of thought and speech, com-
plete with dramatic emphasis and lively intonation. They are—or claim to be—
the exact words used on the occasion. That is why they often seem so banal: they
are not polished as literary dialogues are, but are meant to be taken as sponta-
neously recalled representations of actual speech. In Mrs. Lawrenson's and Mrs.
Edelstein's narratives these snippets of dialogue are almost comically natural-
istic. Ooh!" says Mrs. Lawrenson, "I've just seen somebody standing in that cor-
ner!" and her husband replies, "Oh, God! There you go again!" Likewise, in Mrs.
Edelstein's narrative the boy explains that he cannot give the woman a lift
"because I'm out late and my mother will kill me anyway". The psychological
effect on the hearer is obvious—who could not believe so 'real' a situation so
accurately recalled in the Very words' which were used?
The patterns of authentication, then, are identical in both narratives and
spring from the same motivation—an earnest desire to be a 'good witness'. The
teller of the modern legend, no less than the teller of the personal experience
story, is concerned not to appear dishonest, incompetent or foolish. When a
modern legend is believed by the transmitter and its contents are incorporated in
her store of useful or entertaining memories, she tells it like a personal experience
story. Because, of course, for her it i s one. This is, perhaps, the clue to the whole,
apparently bizarre, resemblance between modern legends and personal expe-
rience stories. In a storytelling context the exact status of the modern legend is
often in doubt. Crudely put, there is often a degree of uncertainty about whether
they a r e legends in the commonly used sense of 'popular narratives with an
objectively untrue imaginary content'30. For people like Mrs. Edelstein, The Wife
Left at the Roadside is neither untrue nor imaginary (not a 'legend' at all in this
popular sense). For other transmitters, the stories m i g h t j u s t be true, or per-
haps c o u l d b e true, or are a truth if not t h e truth31—and so on, ad infinitum.

28
Bennett, G.: Aspects of Supernatural Belief, Memorate and Legend in a Contemporary
29
Urban Environment. Unpublished Ph. D. Thesis Sheffield 1985, 456-463.
Bennett, L. W.: Storytelling in Criminal Trials: A Model of Social Judgement. In: Quar-
30
terly Journal of Speech 64 (1978) 1-22.
Ranke, F.: Grundfragen der Volkssagenforschung. In: Niederdeutsche Zeitschrift für
31
Volkskunde 3 (1925) 12-23, here 14.
Boyes, G.: Belief and Disbelief: An Examination of Reactions to the Presentation of
Rumour Legends. In: Smith (above, not. 10) 64-78, here 75.

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 What's'Modern'about the Modern Uzend* 229

This uncertainty is, of course, one of the consequences of the likeness of modern
legend to tall tales and fables with their real/unreal contents. For only a minority
of transmitters, therefore, is the status of the narrative not in doubt: only a few
people are absolutely certain that they are telling a 'popular narrative with an
objectively untrue imaginary content'.
A 'traditional' legend is not subject to these sorts of philosophical and con-
textual pressures. A legend about a saint, a witch or a hero is recognisable in a way
that a legend about a snake or a runaway caravan is not. Both tellers and hearers
of a saint's legend, for example, already know that it i s a legend (after all that is
the purpose in telling it). As sharers of a cultural tradition, they are familiar with
the range of characters, themes and motifs of such stories and they have already
worked out their attitudes towards them and decided whether they are willing to
believe them. The philosophical context of the narrative experience is thus
already fixed. In telling a modern legend, on the other hand, the situation is
rather different. The status of the discourse is uncertain and the participants' atti-
tudes to it cannot be taken for granted. It is these philosophical and interactional
constraints that necessitate a different mode of performance—one that borrows
characteristics from a genre that is specifically adapted to formulate, defend and
negotiate public opinion—that is, the personal experience story. It is this type of
performance, I would argue, and the psychological contexts which engender it,
that differentiate 'modern* from 'traditional' legend. What is novel about the
genre is its peculiar synthesis of legend, tall tale, fable and personal experience
story elements, which gives rise to a real/unreal opposition that calls for careful
handling by tellers and hearers alike.
There is nothing intrinsically new or modern about the c o n t e n t s of the
legends, on the other hand. Studies of individual legends consistently show that
their themes are perennial, their motifs not always new, and their history always
longer than is at first assumed. "Many of the legends we meet in oral circulation
today are old tales updated."32 The way forward in the study of the genre, I there-
fore believe, is by a study of its performative and psychological aspects, rather
than of its contents. By following through these avenues of thought, we may
eventually discover what is modern about the modern legend—as well as what is
not.

32
Sanderson (above, not. 14) 13.
15 Fabula 26

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