The term “legend” (German Sage) emerged as a scholarly category around 1800 through the classification of heterogeneous, mostly written traditions. Before this, the word did not denote a literary genre, but simply a narrative of events (since the 17th century, especially implying fictitiousness). From the early 19th century, however, the term came to denote a piece of the supposedly oral so-called folk literature that was highly prized in Romanticism. Until this period, “legend” tended to be used synonymously with “fairy tale,” but the collection of Deutsche Sagen (“German L…