Worse, there's as many myths as the number of times told. A storyteller will tell a story differently each time. This will be as the mood moves them, or the audience, or the season of the year, or just because they'd heard a nice phrase and have wrapped it in. The "stronger", "more rounded", "most often told" tales tend to have less variation for the same teller, but even then, they will vary.
If you've never experienced it, seek out a performance by a traditional storyteller (the tradition lives on, even in this age of TV) and see just how powerful a teller can be (for UK performances and clubs try http://www.sfs.org.uk - a site I run for the Society for Storytelling, there's some international links there as well). Try learning and telling stories for yourself - its easier than it sounds, and you'll learn a lot of rules of told myth - why things come in threes, for instance (to remember them), and why you hear echoes of one story in another ('cos you sometimes get confused, or need to cover a slip).
One ambition of mine is to tell the LBQ as a story in the real world to an audience, but I've never quite dared (I'm not that good a teller, for a start off).
-- Kevin Blackburn Kevin_at_...
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