THE STORY INDEX
A growing collection of myths and legends, with their origins, variations, and sources.
At night, by a river or a canal, a woman is heard wailing for her children, and whoever meets her may not live. The oldest texts we found that call her La Llorona are Mexican poems of the 19th century, yet in the Florentine Codex, finished in 1577, Nahua elders already remember a woman heard weeping in the night before the Spaniards came.
Read story 13 min readHuitzilopochtli's mother waits on a hill of sand for a son who never came back, and a Mexica king sent sixty sorcerers to find her. Her great statue was dug up in 1790, buried again more than once, and still divides scholars over whom it shows.
Read story 10 min readLed by their god, the Mexica walked for generations from Aztlan until they saw an eagle on a cactus growing from a rock in a lake, and there they built Tenochtitlan, today Mexico City. The serpent in the eagle's beak on Mexico's flag is missing from the oldest pictures of the scene.
Read story 12 min readMost of the Mexica dead set out on a four-year road, past clashing mountains and a wind of obsidian blades, across a river on the back of a yellow dog, to the lord of Mictlan. Sahagún says the road ended in "the nine hells", but the famous list of nine levels comes from a single colonial codex.
Read story 11 min readA ball of feathers fell on Coatlicue as she swept a hilltop, and her daughter Coyolxauhqui led four hundred brothers up the hill to kill her. The god was born armed and cut his sister down, and the Mexica built their great temple as the hill where it happened.
Read story 10 min readHe went down to the land of the dead for the bones of the first people, and he was the wind, the morning star and a king of Tollan who left his city in shame. The feathered serpent is far older than the Mexica, and the story that they took Cortés for him is younger than the conquest.
Read story 12 min readThe Mexica called him Titlacauan, "we are his slaves": an invisible god of night and fate who gave riches and took them back, and whose living image, a young captive, was honoured for a year and then sacrificed. He was neither the devil the friars made of him nor simply the evil twin of Quetzalcoatl, with whom he tore the earth goddess in two to make the world.
Read story 14 min readFour worlds came before ours, and each was destroyed: by jaguars, by wind, by a rain of fire and by a flood, though the old texts disagree on the order. Then at Teotihuacan a god covered in sores leapt into a fire to become the Fifth Sun, the sun that, the elders said, will end in earthquakes.
Read story 11 min readA fine horse grazes by the water, and whoever climbs on its back is carried into the deep. Scots called it the kelpie and Gaelic speakers the each-uisge, and the men who wrote the stories down could not agree whether they were one creature or two.
Read story 12 min readUnder a hill in Snowdonia, says a Latin history written in 829 or 830, a red dragon and a white one fought until the red drove the white away, and a boy explained that they were the Britons and the English. The dragon then became a king's standard, a royal badge and, only in 1959, the official flag of Wales.
Read story 12 min readBefore a death in certain Irish families, a woman is heard keening outside the house. She is the bean sí, the woman of the fairy mound, and in the oldest tales she stands in a river ford, washing the harness of a king who will not live to wear it again.
Read story 11 min readA woman on a white horse carries Oisín over the sea to the Land of Youth, and when he comes home three hundred years later and touches the ground, he is old and blind. The poem that tells the journey was written in County Clare around 1750, but the old man who tells it to St Patrick is centuries older.
Read story 11 min readA prince who spends a year in another king's shape, a giant who lies down as a bridge, a kingdom emptied by a spell and a woman made of flowers: four medieval Welsh tales, each ending "thus ends this branch of the Mabinogi". No medieval book was ever called the Mabinogion; the name comes from a copyist's slip and a Victorian translation.
Read story 15 min readA jealous stepmother turned Lir's four children into swans for nine hundred years, and only a monk's bell released them, as old people on the point of death. The tale is often called an ancient pagan myth, yet the earliest known mention of it is a title in a book list of 1526, and it ends with a baptism.
Read story 10 min readA boy raised in hiding burns his thumb on the salmon of knowledge and grows up to lead the Fianna, the warrior bands who lived by hunting and fighting. Folk tales of later centuries made him a giant who built the Giant's Causeway; the medieval texts never do.
Read story 13 min readShe meets the Dagda in a river at Samhain, fights Cú Chulainn as an eel, a wolf and a heifer, and after the great battle of the gods foretells first peace, then the end of the world. Even the scribes who copied her stories could not agree whether her name meant great queen or phantom queen.
Read story 13 min readAt seven he killed a smith's hound and took its place; at seventeen he held the fords of Ulster alone against the armies of four provinces. The two medieval versions of his saga disagree on much, and modern Ireland has made him a symbol on both sides of its divide.
Read story 13 min readThey came to Ireland in dark clouds, won it in two battles at Mag Tuired and lost it to the sons of Míl, who left them the half of the island that lies under the ground. The Christian scholars who wrote the story down could not decide whether they had been gods, demons or men.
Read story 14 min readA district magistrate pays for a broken peony with his coat, walks into a mountain in the sea and marries a fairy. A year later he comes home to find that more than eighty years have passed on earth, or sixty, by the dates his own story gives.
Read story 11 min readA woodcutter found the tree whose leaves bring back the dead, and it carried him off to the moon. The oldest written telling, from 1886, never calls its hero Cuội, and the oldest Cuội we have found, in a dictionary of 1651, is a liar with no moon at all.
Read story 10 min readA daughter of the Jade Emperor let a jade cup fall, was born in a village of Nam Định and died at twenty-one, then kept coming back until the court that had tried to drive her out gave her a temple and a king's title. The fullest telling was written in the 1730s by a woman scholar, who, scholars broadly agree, reshaped a cult that already existed.
Read story 13 min readKilled by her stepmother's household, Tấm comes back as a bird, two trees, a loom and a fruit until the king finds her again. The tale is often called a Vietnamese copy of Cinderella, yet its oldest written version, printed in 1886, names the heroine Cám, and its second half has no place in Perrault or Grimm.
Read story 13 min readA fisherman nets a blade, a rebel finds its hilt in a banyan, and after the war a golden turtle takes the sword back into a Hanoi lake. The 15th-century chronicle tells only how the sword was found, and the oldest stories of the lake, from around 1800, end with a lost sword and a king draining the lake to find it.
Read story 11 min readA Hùng king promised his throne to the son who brought the best offering for the ancestors, and his poorest son won it with two cakes of glutinous rice, one square and one round. In the oldest text a spirit dictates both cakes, and the square one stands for more than the earth.
Read story 9 min read
