Occasionally, they portrayed the lives of folk heroes, as was the case with Robin Hood and his merry men. In Hungary, these secular legends are called monda, a term whose meaning is very similar to the German Sage.

Traditionally, common folk did not distinguish between legends and fairy tales.  To them, both were equally true and equally credible.  Since the nineteenth century, however, these two literary forms have come to be differentiated from one another.  Fairy tales (fabulae incredibiles) have become associated more with poetry than with history, while legends (fabulae credibiles) have come to be treated as romanticized history.  This also holds true for myths, which are distinguishable from legends only in terms of their time.  Myths portray a more ancient past than do legends, and therefore they are thought to be more removed from reality.

An Illustration by Kate Seredy depicts Hunor and Magor chasing the wondrous stag.

The history of the origins of people and the deeds of their earliest heroes are so intertwined in legends that the two are almost indistinguishable from one another, the best example of which is the case of the founders of Rome, the brothers Romulus and Remus.  This also holds true for the Hungarians or Magyars, who are relative newcomers to Hungary (ninth century A.D.) and whose historical roots are lost not only in the mists of time but also in the vastness of the Eurasian steppes.  And while nowadays our knowledge about Magyar origins is decidedly greater and more detailed than only a few generations ago, not even today can we dispense with their heroic legends as sources for their history.

Like all other historical legends, the legends of the Magyars were produced by history itself.  They were and remained part of the Magyar nation’s oral traditions for many centuries, until they were written down and preserved in various eleventh-to fifteenth-century Hungarian chronicles.  Naturally this preservation was colored by the pro-Christian bias of the chroniclers, who were usually monks.  Later, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these legends were discovered, expanded, and romanticized by various poets and novelists, who used them as sources of inspiration during the period of Hungarian national revival. 

Still later, they were made part of the common educational heritage of all Hungarians, until finally they became the sacrosanct building blocks of Hungarian history.  Even today—following decades of de-heroization in post-World War II Hungary—these legends are so imprinted upon the Magyar mind that the average Hungarian simply considers them an integral part of his nation’s history.