The Fate Of All Legends

Once upon a time, or so the old story goes, a young man had the courage and fortitude to slay a giant that was terrorizing a village and, when he returned from the giants cave, carrying its head upon a cart, everyone cheered his name and drank a toast in his honour and he became a legend; an inspiration to young men for many years to follow.

But then the hero became an old man and died and a new generation was born who didn’t remember him and they started to doubt the legend; accusing the epic storytellers of exaggeration; saying that the giant wasn’t really a giant at all but merely a tall man and they grumbled that the hero had old-fashioned and outdated ideals and that he wasn’t as brave or as strong or as handsome as the legends portrayed him.

Then, over time, the legend became reduced to a joke; something that sophisticated people would lampoon and laugh at or that would make them yawn and roll their eyes.

Of course, that was just what the giant had waited for; all those long years, lying patiently in its grave beneath the ancient hills that had lost most of their greenness and become barren of trees; for people to become cynical again; petty and cowardly; for the flame of heroism and earnestness to die out.

And then, with a deafening roar of laughter, the giant rose up again, bursting from the earth and it picked up its enormous one-eyed and one-horned head, placing it back onto its shoulders and the earth shook once more with the tread of its terrible, gigantic, clawed feet.

Then the grinning mockers and the know-it all cynics stopped their talking and looked up at the sky with terror in their hearts as the shadow of the giant swept, like an enormous wave of darkness, over them.

They screamed; they fainted; they got down on their knees and pleaded for their lives and, seeing this, the giant’s laughter only got louder.

“Are there no more heroes left among you?”, he bellowed as he seized up entire houses in the palms of his hands and devoured them from foundations to chimneypot, “No more visionaries; no more people of faith and passion?”.

No one dared to answer the giant for there was not a living man among them who had the courage to face him but, asleep in the wombs of the young mothers of the village, were new heroes waiting to be born; new legends waiting to be written.

Such is the fate of legends, you see, to be forgotten; to be ridiculed but then reborn.