Myths and Legends

Links

• Euromyths - What is the real story?
• FCO - Europe: Facts and Fairytales
• Myths&Legends - hypertext tour of classical myths
• The cathouse Urban Legends Archive (cathouse.org has closed down)
• Alt.Folklore.Urban Frequently Posted Legends
• net.legends FAQ
• Greek Mythology

Some myths (urban or otherwise)

• Laura Spence and the University of Oxford
  Myth: that she was refused a place to read medicine by the University of Oxford because she was from a state school.
  Reality, as reported in the quality media but not widely known: what type of school she was from was irrelevant. Magdalene College, not the University, invited the best candidates along to interview, based on A-Levels and equivalents, as all Oxbridge colleges do, to choose the best for the small number of places they had available (something like 5-8?). Oxbridge colleges only have enough places for around one third of applicants with three or more As at A-Level. She didn't make the small group selected for medicine but she could have chosen to change to biochemistry as they had spare places for that. Instead she followed up an offer from Havard, which has no undergraduate medicine course, to read biochemistry there.

• The Oxbridge "Master of Arts" degree

• Posh
  Supposedly stands for "Port Outbound, Starboard Homebound", from the days of long sea voyages between Britain and India, and embodies the recommendation for choice of cabins. Actually posh was part of the language in Elizabethan times, referring to a dandy.

• "The Internet was designed to withstand a nuclear war"
  It is fairly resilient but ARPAnet and its descendents were not so designed. A spur off ARPAnet, at the Rand Corp. I think, was so designed. There's a FAQ somewhere on the Net describing this - I'll add the URL when I come across it again.

• The Spanish Inquisition
  (This is drawn from the BBC2 Timewatch programme on the subject, shown about Christmas 1994.)
  The perception of the Spanish Inquisition's brutality, mass murdering, torture, etc. was largely created by Protestant propaganda and made possible by the newly-invented printing press, which was used to great effect in Protestant countries. That's not to say there wasn't a lot of mayhem, just not as much as in the myth.

  In fact the Spanish Inquisition was far more tolerant than equivalent bodies in France, England and other countries, killed far fewer people, tortured very few people (no-one more than twice) and was not a sinister, dominant force in Spain.

  It was staffed by University lawyers plus clerks and they demanded legal-quality proof of assertions. When asked to investigate witchcraft, they declared it to be a delusion, since no legally-valid proof could be provided.

  The massive archives of the Spanish Inquisition are now being studied by scholars, and the current estimate is that the Inquisition killed somewhere around 40,000-50,000 people in its 350-year history, whilst in the rest of Europe inquisitions killed about 150,000 people in one period of 10 years alone.