The Grateful Dead

“ The colour of the thankful dead is a peculiar trait. Yet the element which complicates the question, as mentioned above, is the feat by which the hero obtains his wife. If I am not mistaken, this allies the variant on one side with stories of the type of The Water of Life, where the bride is gained by the performance of some task obviously set as impossible. The questions involving the relations of such motives with The Grateful Dead will occupy the next chapter, so that it needs simply to be mentioned at this point. ”

“ At first sight, it might appear that there was some essential connection between these two elements foreign to the main theme. Such does not seem to be the case, however, when the matter is further considered. At any rate, I am unable to discover any such link, and am inclined to ascribe the simultaneous appearance of these two factors to chance pure and simple. Neither one is more than a rather late and comparatively unimportant phenomenon as far as The Grateful Dead is concerned. ”

“ Before we tackle the vexing question as to why a rock lyricist should be interviewed by the FBI in a computer-crime case, it might be well to say a word or two about the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead are perhaps the most successful and long-lasting of the numerous cultural emanations from the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, in the glory days of Movement politics and lysergic transcendance. The Grateful Dead are a nexus, a veritable whirlwind, of applique decals, psychedelic vans, tie-dyed T-shirts, earth-color denim, frenzied dancing and open and unashamed drug use. ”

“ Let us now consider the tales where a thankful beast plays the part of the grateful dead through at least a portion of the narrative, and where there is still no trace of either The Poison Maiden or The Ransomed Woman. ”

“ Yet if it does not require justification, it may well be of service in the grouping of particular variants.
It is certainly worthy of notice that in eighteen forms of The Grateful Dead a beast appears. That these are of several different compound types would show, if it were not clear from what has been said above, that the appearance of an animal furnishes of itself no evidence of any actual amalgamation of narrative themes. It is rather a case where one stock figure of imagination’s realm is substituted for another. ”

“ Moreover, the grateful dead is replaced by an angel, who indeed commends Tobit for his good deed, but is certainly a substitute for the ghost. Obviously Tobit with such peculiarities as these cannot be regarded as the general source of the widespread folk-tale. At the same time we must not forget that it has been, perhaps, the best-loved story in the Apocrypha, [8] and that its influence on details of the narrative may be looked for almost anywhere in Christendom.
In the Armenian story from Transcaucasia [9] a man finds a corpse hanging in a tree and being beaten by his late creditors. ”

“ Two Danish variants present a curious but not inexplicable combination of The Grateful Dead with Puss in Boots, as was noted by Köhler.25 Danish I. relates how a youth pays three marks, which is his all, to bury the body of a dead man, for whose interment the priest has demanded payment in advance. He is then joined by another youth, who is the ghost of the dead, and goes to a certain city. ”

“ Of the part which The Thankful Beasts as a motive has played in connection with The Grateful Dead it must be said that, on the whole, it has been of very secondary importance. It illustrates, as do The Spendthrift Knight and The Two Friends, how one current theme may touch and even influence another at several different points without becoming embodied with it. This trait or that may be absorbed as the motives meet, yet the two waves may go their way without mingling. [162]
1 See pp. ”

“ Since the elements left by subtracting The Grateful Dead from the variants of the four categories thus discovered are very diverse, we cannot postulate a parent form from which all four classes might have sprung. Indeed, the evidence thus far obtained all points to a separate combination of already developed themes with The Grateful Dead. The test of this will be found in an examination of those variants of those larger compounds, which have also traces of The Water of Life or some allied motive. ”

“ Sometimes the neglect of burial by a person brings unpleasant results to him, as is witnessed by a tale from Guernsey.15 A fisherman neglected [165] to bury a body which he encountered on the coast, and, when he reached his home, found the ghost awaiting him. An Indian tale illustrates the belief that the dead become vampires when funeral rites are not performed.16
In most versions of The Grateful Dead a corpse is left unburied either because creditors remain unpaid or the surviving relatives cannot pay for Christian burial. ”

“ When the old man comes back at the end of seven years, the hero gives up one of his children, and, after offering her whole, is ready to divide his wife. The old man renounces his claim, and disappears.
Every step in the narrative is here clearly marked, even to the conditional agreement with the ghost, which so frequently is wanting. The variant thus appears to be entirely normal as far as The Grateful Dead goes, though it does not have the rescue by the ghost—an important feature of The Ransomed Woman. ”

“ The part of the friend was less well motivated in The Poison Maiden than in The Grateful Dead, so that it was natural for the themes to unite at a common point and produce a compound at once more complete and more thrilling than were the simpler forms. This combination must have been made not by a conscious literary worker, for, had it been, Tobit would surely stand less independent of the later versions than is actually the case, but by the tellers of folk-tales, in a manner quite unconscious and altogether unstudied. ”

“ By all odds the most adequate treatment that The Grateful Dead has yet received is found in Hippe's monograph, Untersuchungen zu der mittelenglischen Romanze von Sir Amadas, which appeared in 1888. [13] Not only did he gather together practically all the variants mentioned previous to that time and add some few new ones, but he studied the theme with such interpretative insight that anyone going over the same field would be tempted to offer an apology for what may seem superfluous labour. Such a follower, and all followers, must gratefully acknowledge their indebtedness to his labours. ”

“ 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.
If the seemingly inevitable conclusion be accepted that The Grateful Dead is an organism with a life history of its own, the question at once suggests itself as to when and where it came into being. As to its ultimate origin, however, only a very imperfect answer can be given. Surmise and theory are all that can aid us here. ”

“ This principle is well illustrated in the history of The Grateful Dead. The marriages of stories seem never to be merely for convenience, except in the hands of conscious writers, but to be the result of attraction and real compatibility. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From these comparisons it would appear that there is something inherently true to humanity in these beliefs, for the revenge ghost and the grateful dead have appeared all along the line. Perhaps human personality is largely the same in all lands and all times, and ghosts have the same elemental emotions however much they may have acquired a veneer of modernity. ”

“ If the division for the sake of purification were then regarded as more primitive and older than the division for the sake of sharing the gains or of testing the hero, it would naturally follow that all the combined types must proceed from The Grateful Dead + The Poison Maiden. ”