Flashcards: Medieval legends

The Seven Sleepers (Arabic: اصحاب الکھف aṣḥāb al kahf, "companions of the cave") of Ephesus are legendary people in a story of a group of youths who hide inside a cave outside the city of Ephesus around 250 AD, to escape a persecution.

The Holy Grail is an object that serves as an important motif in Arthurian literature.

A mermaid is a legendary aquatic creature with the head and upper body of a female human and the tail of a fish.

The Nibelungenlied, translated as The Song of the Nibelungs, is an epic poem in Middle High German.

The unicorn is a legendary creature that has been described since antiquity as a beast with a large, pointed, spiraling horn projecting from its forehead.

Amleth (Latinized Amlethus, Old Icelandic Amlóði) is a figure in a medieval Scandinavian legend, the direct predecessor of the character of Prince Hamlet, the hero of William Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

St Patrick's Purgatory is an ancient pilgrimage site on Station Island in Lough Derg, County Donegal, Ireland.

The Holy Lance, also known as the Holy Spear, the Spear of Destiny or the Lance of Longinus, is the lance that pierced the side of Jesus as he hung on the cross, according to the Gospel of John.

The Lorelei (German: Loreley) is a 132 m (433 ft) high, steep slate rock on the right bank of the River Rhine in the Rhine Gorge (or Middle Rhine) at Sankt Goarshausen in Germany.

The Pied Piper of Hamelin (German: Rattenfänger von Hameln also known as the Pan Piper, the Rat-Catcher of Hamelin) is the subject of a legend from the town of Hamelin (Hameln), Lower Saxony, Germany, in the Middle Ages.

Tristan and Iseult is a tale made popular during the 12th century through French medieval poetry, inspired by Celtic legend.

Cockaigne or Cockayne /kɒˈkeɪn/ is a land of plenty in medieval myth, an imaginary place of extreme luxury and ease where physical comforts and pleasures are always immediately at hand and where the harshness of medieval peasant life does not exist.

Rübezahl (Polish: Liczyrzepa, Czech: Krakonoš) is a folklore mountain spirit (woodwose) of the Krkonoše Mountains (Giant Mountains, Riesengebirge, Karkonosze), a mountain range along the border between the historical lands Bohemia and Silesia.

Fionn mac Cumhaill (/ˈfɪn məˈkuːl/ fin mə-KOOL; Irish pronunciation: [ˈfʲin̪ˠ mˠakˠ ˈkuːw̃əlːʲ]; Old Irish: and Middle Irish Find or Finn, mac Cumail or Umaill), sometimes transcribed in English as MacCool or MacCoul, was a mythical hunter-warrior of Irish mythology, occurring also in the mythologies of Scotland and the Isle of Man.

According to rabbinic literature, the Sambation is the river beyond which the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel were exiled by the Assyrian king Shalmaneser V.

The gates of hell are various places on the surface of the world that have acquired a legendary reputation for being entrances to the underworld.

A revenant is a visible ghost or animated corpse that is believed to have returned from the grave to terrorize the living.

Last Roman Emperor or Last World Emperor is a figure of medieval European legend, which developed as an aspect of eschatology in the Catholic Church.

The final act of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is about the hero Beowulf's fight with a dragon, the third monster he encounters in the epic.