LEGEND (Lat. legenda, things to be read, lessons) was the name given in early times, in the Roman Catholic church, to a book containing the daily lessons which 'were wont to be read as a part of divine service. Then the narratives of time lives of saints and martyrs, as well as the collections of such narratives, received this name, because the monks' read from them at matins, and after dinner in the refectories. Such legends were also inserted in the breviaries (see BuRvisnx), in order that they might be read on the festivals of the saints and martyrs. Among the mediaeval collee• tions of legends, that up by the Genoese archbishop, Jacobus de Voragine, in the second half of the 13th c., under the title of Legenda Auras (the Golden Legends), or Jlistoria Lombardica, is the most celebrated. But the most compre hensive and valuable work on the subject is that commenced by the Bollandists in the 17th c.—ileta Sanetoram (q.v.)—and still going on. The way in which a credu lous love of the wonderful, exaggeration of fancy, and ecclesiastical enthusiasm, at times even pious fraud, mixed themselves up in these narratives wilt true history, caused stories of a religious or ecclesiastical nature generally to be designated as legends, in contradistinction from authentic ecclesiastical history; and thus the word "legends" also serves to separate religious from secular traditions, and from those wild tales (Ger. nuIrchen) that delighted the peasantry of mediaeval Europe. Legends in this sense of the word, as spiritual or ecclesiastical sagas, found not only in the Roman Catholic but also in the Greek church, and their origin reaches hack to the 'earliest ages of Chris tianity—Christ himself, the Virgin, John the Baptist, the apostles, and other prominent persons of the gospel history having become, at a very early period, the subject of them. But this tendency to mythic embellishment showed itself more especially in regard to Mary, the later saints, martyrs, and holy men and women. From the ecclesiastical literature of the eastern and western churches, especially of the latter, the legends also found an entrance into the national literature of Christian nations. the Ger
mans this was very markedly the case after the second half of the Pith c., although specimens of legendary poems are not altogether wanting at an earlier period. We may mention, for example, the Haiserdironlic (Imperial Chronicle), where the legendary ele ment forms a very important part of the whole; and Werner's versified Ararienleben (Life of Mary), written in'1178, etc. The authors of these works were ecclesiastica;_ but already laymen, too, had appeared in the same field. The poetic versions of the legend of St. Oswald and that of Pilate sprung from this class; and in the following age, when the mediaeval poetry of Germany was in its richest bloom, and the fosterers of the poetic art were emperors and princes, rather than ecclesiastics, the legend was employed by laymen on a grand scale, as the subject-matter of epic narratives. Thus, Hartmann von Aue (q.v.) worked up into a poem the religious legends about Gregory; Konrad von Fussesbrunnen, those concerning the "childhood of Jesus;" Rudolf von Ems, those about "Barlaan and Jostiphat" (q.v.); and Rein hot von Hume, those about " St. George." Between the 14th and 16th centuries, legends in prose began also to appear, such as Her mann von Fritzlar's Von der lleiligen Leben (written about 1343), and gradually sup planted the others. Finally, in the 16th c., when Protestantism began to powerfully influence the whole of German literature, the legend disappeared from German poetry, or passed over into the moral-didactic and also the comic narrative, in which form it was employed by Hans Sachs with the happiest effect. Numerous attempts have been made to resuscitate it in modern times. The first of the recent poets who clearly apprehended the poetic and spiritual elements of the old Christian legend was Herder (q.v.); and his clay many Gem-man poets—for example, the " Romantic School "—have endeavored to give these a new embodiment.