Fable vs. Folktale vs. Myth: What’s the Difference?

Stories have been used for centuries to entertain, educate, and explain different phenomena. While fables, myths, and folktales are all common forms of narratives, they each have defining characteristics. If you struggle to differentiate these story types, you aren’t alone. Here’s a rundown of the differences between them.

What’s a Fable?
What’s a Myth?
How Are Folktales Different From Myths?

What’s a Fable?

Fables are one of the most straightforward narrative forms to define. These stories usually depict talking animals with human-like qualities and showcase a moral at the end. Their purpose is to promote good behavior by finishing each story with a lesson. One of the most popular fables is “The Tortoise and the Hare,” created by the legendary Greek storyteller Aesop. In it, a cocky hare falls asleep during a race against a humble tortoise, only to nap for too long and lose the competition. The takeaway is that “slow and steady wins the race.”

What’s a Myth?

Myths are stories that explain world views, practices, traditional beliefs, or natural occurrences. In short, they help people understand why something happens. The word is often applied to stories of creation from various religions. Myths may also involve gods and goddesses. For instance, the Greek myth of “the Abduction of Persephone by Hades” explained the changing of the seasons.

Its modern secondary definition—“an unfounded or false notion,” per Merriam-Webster—is separate from the way scholars use the word. When referring to an old story, the term myth says nothing about whether or not the events described are true.

How Are Folktales Different From Myths?

The definition of a folktale is where things get a little complicated. Merriam-Webster defines a folktale as a “characteristically anonymous, timeless, and placeless tale circulated orally among a people.” However, scholars have trouble agreeing on the term’s meaning, as it’s similar to myth.

American folklorist Stith Thompson offers one perspective. He believed that myths were a type of folktale that specifically told stories about some of the first sacred events—i.e., creation myths. Some scholars feel folktales are a subset of myths, and others insist that the two are clear-cut narrative forms with few shared characteristics. According to English classicist Geoffrey S. Kirk, myths are stories that serve a purpose, and a folktales are narratives that feed on people’s wants and fears.

There was a classist element separating the two terms in the late 18th century. At this time, European nationalists popularized the word folktale to describe stories circulated by ordinary folk rather than the elite. For example, stories from the German Grimm Brothers were considered folktales because they weren’t as popular among the aristocracy. This introduced a new way to differentiate folktales from myths based on the class of the audience. However, as social structures differ across cultures and historical periods, this classification is less applicable today.

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