I once asked a linguist what the difference was between a dialect and a language. “Languages,” he quipped, “are dialects that have armies.” Myths are like that, too. When they start out, when they’ve just been invented, they look crazy and incoherent. You might laugh at them. But allow them to settle in for a few generations, get several million people to believe them, teach them in your schools and textbooks, glorify them in your songs and movies, back them up with guns and armies, and, voilà, they become the foundational building blocks of a nation.
