01211-- What is a Myth?

A Myth is a kind of story or rudimentary narrative sequence, normally traditional and anonymous, through which a given culture ratifies its social customs or accounts for the origins of human and natural phenomena, usually in supernatural or boldly imaginative terms. 

The term has a wide range of meanings, which can be divided roughly into 'rationalist' and 'romantic' versions: 

• in the first, a myth is a false or unreliable story or belief (adjective: mythical), 
•  in the second, 'myth' is a superior intuitive mode of cosmic understanding (adjective: mythic).

In most literary contexts, the second kind of usage prevails, and myths are regarded as fictional stories containing deeper truths, expressing collective attitudes to fundamental matters of life, death, divinity, and existence (sometimes deemed to be 'universal').

Myths are usually distinguished from Legends in that they have less of an historical basis, although they seem to have a similar mode of existence in oral transmission, re-telling, literary adaptation, and Allusion. 

[Reference:

The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms

 By Chris Baldick]