English had the word mythology for centuries before anyone wrote myth
Mythology arrived in English around 1425, in John Lydgate's Troy Book, while the short word myth only surfaced in 1830. Samuel Johnson's dictionary listed one but not the other. And to a folklorist, calling a story a myth says nothing at all about whether it is true.
The Greek mythos meant speech, narrative or fiction, and Plato used mythologia for storytelling of any kind. The fifth-century Latin writer Fulgentius put the word in the title of his Mythologiae, treating the Greco-Roman tales of gods as allegories to decode, not events that happened. From Lydgate until the 17th or 18th century, English mythology meant a moral, fable or parable understood to be false; only in the early 19th century did European languages adopt the narrower scholarly sense of a traditional story about a people's origins, usually featuring the supernatural.
For scholars, a myth is a foundational narrative of a society, often endorsed by religious or secular authorities. The Finnish folklorist Lauri Honko's much-cited definition casts it as a sacred account of how the gods ordered the world, which confirms a society's values and gives a model for behaviour. Creation myths are set in a primordial time before the world took its later shape, origin myths explain how customs and taboos became sacred, and national myths distil a country's self-image.
Boundaries with neighbouring genres are fuzzy. Myths usually star gods or demigods and sit in a remote past, legends feature humans, and folktales such as fairy stories are believed by nobody. Stories migrate across these lines: when faiths change, gods can be demoted to giants, elves or fairies, while history can be promoted to myth, as with the Arthurian Matter of Britain, which seems distantly rooted in fifth-century events.
Because everyday speech equates myth with falsehood, a usage that grew out of dismissing other cultures' beliefs, the label can offend. Some scholars call every religious narrative a myth to avoid favouring any tradition; others avoid the word entirely. Much of what we know comes from mythographers, such as Ovid, whose retellings shaped later culture, the Renaissance compiler Natalis Comes, and Snorri Sturluson, whose 13th-century Prose Edda is the main medieval survey of Norse myth.
Source: Myth
