Myth
Myth has it that the Devil built the bridge at Tarr Steps and still has sunbathing rights on its stones. The myth says that the devil swore he would kill anyone who tried to cross his bridge. The terrified locals got the parson to face him. A cat was sent over the Bridge but was vaporised in a puff of smoke. The parson then set off and met the Devil midway. The Devil swore and intimidated him but the parson reciprocated equally and finally the Devil conceded to let people pass except when he wants to sunbathe.
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Famous quotes containing the word myth:
“One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fibre of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardy.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)
“That, of course, was the thing about the fifties with all their patina of familial bliss: A lot of the memories were not happy, not mine, not my friends’. That’s probably why the myth so endures, because of the dissonance in our lives between what actually went on at home and what went on up there on those TV screens where we were allegedly seeing ourselves reflected back.”
—Anne Taylor Fleming (20th century)
“Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there.... Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.”
—Italo Calvino (1923–1985)