Quhen he hes all, than, vnder his cure,
And Father and Mother boith ar dede,
Beg mon the babis, without remede:
They hauld the Corps at the kirk style;
And thare it moste remane ane quhyle,
Tyll thay gett sufficient souerte
For thare kirk rycht and dewite.[17]
This evidence for the widespread belief in the pious duty of burial and for the custom of withholding burial in cases where the dead man was poor, though it might easily be increased in bulk, makes very clear at least two matters. The tale of The Grateful Dead might have arisen almost anywhere and in almost any age since the time of the Egyptians. Again, when once it had been formed, it was likely to be reinforced or changed by the beliefs and customs prevalent in the lands to which it came.
The first matter at once suggests the question as to whether, after all, the märchen has not been more than once discovered by the imagination of story-tellers,—whether it has not sprung up again and again in different parts of the world like different botanical species, instead of being a single plant which has propagated itself through many centuries. In spite of the evident possibility that such sporadic development might have taken place, I cannot believe that it happened so. If we had to do with some vaguely outlined myth in which only the underlying idea was the same in the several groups of variants, and if this vague tale were narrated among peoples of absolutely no kinship to one another, say by the Indians of North America and the Zulus, one could have no reasonable doubt that similar conditions had produced similar tales. Such stories exist in numbers sufficient to render untenable the old hypothesis of Oriental origins in anything like the form in which it was held by Benfey or even Cosquin.
In cases like that of The Grateful Dead, however, the matter is entirely different. The theme is comparatively a complicated one, and it is found only in lands whose inhabitants are connected either by blood or by social and political intercourse.[18] It has preserved its integrity for nearly a score of centuries, though suffering many changes of details, and a variety of combinations with other themes. To my mind such an involved relationship as that worked out in the preceding chapters proves conclusively that the story is one, that the connection between variants is more than fortuitous. Inductive logic makes the belief inevitable. Any other theory would involve us in a bewildering net of contradictions, from which escape could be found only in the avowal that nothing whatever can be known about narrative development.