Why Legends Matter: Chesterton’s ‘Ballad of the White Horse’

Why read legends about world events when you could read accurate historical accounts instead? Why choose fables when you can get facts? In the preface to his narrative poem “The Ballad of the White Horse,” G.K. Chesterton gave a cryptic and thought-provoking answer to that question: “It is the chief value of legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment; to see all ages in a sort of splendid foreshortening. That is the use of tradition: it telescopes history.” Chesterton’s comment at the beginning of his ballad requires some unpacking to fully understand.
In this ballad, Chesterton tells of a real king, King Alfred the Great, a Christian Anglo-Saxon leader in Britain who stood against the tide of invading pagan Danes in the 9th century. But Chesterton built his narrative not on historical documents, but on “popular traditions.” He argued that without legends, we wouldn’t remember much about King Alfred. He’d be just another king from the dark, tumultuous times after the fall of the Roman Empire. It’s the legends about him that have kept his memory alive.
While acknowledging that Alfred was a real king, Chesterton asserted, “the legends are the most important things about him.”
Now, how could legends of Alfred be more important than the historical facts? Why embrace legend knowing that it gets some of the facts wrong?
The legend distills the reality of Alfred’s historical situation: Alfred was surrounded by his enemies, alone, unaided, yet he kept alive the song of Christian and chivalric hope. He defied the pagans to their faces even when it seemed victory was impossible. The legend embodies this fundamental truth about Alfred, and it expresses the truth in a higher and more complete sense even than all the historical details of Alfred’s life could do.
Many historians, on the other hand, merely catalogue information without seeing the larger picture that these puzzle pieces form. They have only scattered pottery shards, torn pages, and skeletons, painfully pieced together. The teller of legends, on the other hand, brings the dead back to life.
Of course, in the final analysis, these two ways of looking at the human past—history and legend—need not be mutually exclusive. They can be reconciled. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote  in “The Two Towers”:” “Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight? A man may do both. … For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day!”
In other words, everyday realities and historical and scientific facts are, at the same time, the stuff of legend. Our task is to see them as such, to grasp the larger narrative—the mythic quality—of the events unfolding around us, and the “facts” of science. To be healthy, human nature demands that we find the larger meaning in our lives and the world around us. Paradoxically, then, maybe the trouble isn’t that we attach too much importance to historical or scientific facts, but that we don’t attach enough.