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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tilla the Hun (work)" data-source="post: 1616168" data-attributes="member: 14214">There's a difference between legendary and 'foreign/mythical' when you're talking medieval ages...Still the point is true.  It'll take a whole lot less time than you'd think for something to become truly legendary.Study the Celtic culture origin sometime, it does cover what you want rather surprisingly well.  As a real world series of events, it'll show you several times over that it can take less than 3 generations - that's less than a hundred years - for a culture with nothing but oral traditions to 'legendize' (to coin a word) a remote land or people.Carthage or Troy both make another good example of a 'long' time period in a much more 'enlightened' time.  It took modern archeologists actually 'finding' the place to admit it wasn't a legend...  yet latterday Greeks of a mere 150 years after the fall of Troy thought it was mythical or fictional!!Early Gangtze civilizations in southern china, as documented by vedic scriptures, indicate a civilzation off the coast of India that was warred/traded with, but dissappeared in only 2 generations, fading into myth/legend.  Heh, even the early Harappan civilization only a little ways west of there - over 200 cities have been found - dissappeared in a single generation and become legend by the third.When your talking a culture without any means of verification, and little to no education, and no written records - the increasing number of differences and the distance between the cultural areas inversely reduce the time required for them to become 'mythical' to each other very quickly.For an excellent story regarding this, try the "Far Kingdoms" series ("The Warrior Returns" among them) - I can't remember the author, but it's a story of 'exactly' what you've described about 2 cultures that traded arduously, then were seperated by cataclysm, then re-discovered when a merchant pursued a myth...For that matter, consider the difference in time between Leif Ericson and Christopher Columbus...  Columbus pursued a myth as well, if you read his journals, you could argue that the myth he pursued was Leif Ericson's discovery of the new found land <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Magellan pursued a myth as well - the straits of Magellan.  Only funny thing was, he had 'charts' of the straits...  But they were 'mythical' to sailors of the time...Enough rambling.  It'd take less than 3 generations given the right circumstances, for the foreign country to become a 'legend'.  Less than that for it to be 'exaggerated' or 'hyperbolized' as some would say <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />.  After all, when you're a Dad whose been there, and your sons want to hear stories about it - aren't you going to dramatize it a little bit?  Or your drinking buddies want to hear it, so you aggrandize it a little bit?  OR your a bard who just wants a hit song, so you blow it way out of proportion?It happens _very_ quickly...  It's called propaganda <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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