The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story

by Gordon Hall Gerould

The Grateful Dead furnishes an apt illustration of the necessity of such handling. It appears in a variety of different combinations, almost never alone. Indeed, it is so widespread a tale, and its combinations are so various, that there is the utmost difficulty in determining just what may properly be regarded the original kernel of it, the simple theme to which other motives were joined. Various opinions, as we shall see, have been held with reference to this matter, most of them justified perhaps by the materials in the hands of the scholars holding them, but none quite adequate in view of later evidence. The true way to solve the riddle appears to be this: we must ask the question,—what is the residuum when the tale is stripped of elements not common to a very great majority of the versions belonging to the cycle? What is left amounts to the following,—the story reduced to its lowest terms, I take it.

A man finds a corpse lying unburied, and out of pure philanthropy procures interment for it at great personal inconvenience. Later he is met by the ghost of the dead man, who in many cases promises him help on condition of receiving, in return, half of whatever he gets. The hero obtains a wife (or some other reward), and, when called upon, is ready to fulfil his bargain as to sharing his possessions.

Nowhere does a version appear in quite this form; but from what follows it will be seen that the simple story must have proceeded along some such lines. The compounds in which it occurs show much variety. It will be necessary to study these in detail, not merely one or two of them but as many as can be found. Despite the bewildering complexities that may arise, I hope that this method of approach may throw some new light on the wanderings of the tale.

Of my debt to various friends and to many books, though indicated in the body of the work, I wish to make general and grateful acknowledgment here. My thanks, furthermore, are due to the librarians of Harvard University for their courteous hospitality; to Professor G. L. Kittredge for his generous encouragement to proceed with this study, though he himself, as I found after most of my material was collected, had undertaken it several years before I began; and to Professor R. K. Root for his help in reading the proofs.

Chapter I.

A Review.

To Karl Simrock is due the honour of discovering the importance of The Grateful Dead for the student of literature and legend. In his little book, Der gute Gerhard und die dankbaren Todten,[1] he called attention to the theme as a theme, and treated it with a breadth of knowledge and a clearness of insight remarkable in an attempt to unravel for the first time the mixed strands of so wide-spread a tale. Using the Middle High German exemplary romance, Der gute Gerhard, as his point of departure, he examined seventeen other stories, all but two of which have the motive well preserved.[2] Unhappily, the versions which he found came from a limited section of Europe, most of them from Germanic sources. Thus he was led to an interpretation of the tale on the basis of Germanic mythology. This, though ingenious enough and very erudite, need not detain us. It was done according to a fashion of the time, which has long since been discarded. Simrock took the essential traits of the theme to be the burial of the dead and the ransom from captivity.[3] “Wo nur noch eine von beiden das Thema zu bilden scheint,” he said, “da hat die Ueberliefertung gelitten.” Here again he was misled by the narrow range of his material, as later studies have shown. Nearly all the versions he cited have the motive of a ransomed princess, though the majority of the stories now known to be members of the cycle do not contain it.

Three years after the publication of Simrock’s monograph Benfey treated some features of the theme in a note appended to his discussion of The Thankful Beasts in the monumental Pantschatantra.[4] Though he named but a few variants, he found an Armenian tale which he compared with the European versions, coming to the conclusion not only that the motive proceeded from the Orient but also that the Armenian version had the original form of it. That is, he took the ransom and burial of the dead, the parting of a woman possessed by a serpent, and the saving of the hero on the bridal night as the essential features. This was a step in advance.

George Stephens in his edition of Sir Amadas[5] held much the same view. He added several important versions, and scored Simrock for admitting Der gute Gerhard, saying that he could not see that it had “any direct connection” with The Grateful Dead.[6] He was at least partly in the right, even though his statement was misleading. According to his Opinion,[7] “the peculiar feature of the Princess (Maiden) being freed from demonic influence by celestial aid, is undoubtedly the original form of the tale.”