These stories you have just read are probably amongst the oldest in the world. Minstrels sang and chanted them down the ages, carried them on long journeys and sometimes altered them so much we cannot always say what they were like originally. But this we know: as soon as humans could think, they grew curious and began to ask questions about their creation and the origins and wonders of the world in which they lived. So people invented gods to explain how they were made, and different people created different gods, but they often played the same roles. As you know, not all myths were about gods or the natural world. Some of the most stirring and heroic grew up around actual events and people like Roland, El Cid and Robin Hood. Their exploits grew over the centuries until it longer by the bards and minstrels of distant ages but by the storytellers of today books, cinema and television.