To piggyback of off or this; How does one discern the mythic from the made up in such stories? I am asking since where I live there seems to be quite a lot of fairytale invention going on. I just looked up a collection and looking at the index, I saw that several stories were of 19-20 century make. Some politically motivated. How does one sort the sand from the gold nuggets? To use a scene from one of them.

Incidentally, in the collection I found a lot of classic greek stories, how do the Greek myths fit into the sense of the land, not in Greece? (Classical Greek stories like Seven against Thebes, Oedipus and Antigone,…)