He had read about evil in Efanor's little book, and how it permeated the doings of Men, but he had never foud such doings evil, rather good and bad..… - C. J. Cherryh

Trouble didn’t just come in threes: it gathered passengers as it went, and crashed nastily into bystanders.

“You’ve behaved very highhandedly, Captain Mallory. Is that the custom out here?”
“The custom is, sir, that those who know a situation handle it and those who don’t watch and learn, or get out of the way.”

When the legend is retold, it mirrors the reality of the time, and one can learn from studying how various authors have attempted to retell the story. I don't think we have an obligation to change it radically. I think that if we ever move too far from the basic story, we would lose something very precious. I don't, for instance, approve of fantasy that attempts to go back and rewrite the Middle Ages until it conforms to political correctness in the twentieth century. That removes all the benefit from reading the story. If you don't understand other people in their time and why they did what they did, then you don't understand your own past. And when you lose your past, you lose some potential for your own future.