The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story (review)

This book is a welcome reprint of Gerould's seminal study of the Grateful Dead theme in folktales, first published in London by D. Nutt in 1908 for the Folklore Society. The "grateful dead" is one whose corpse has been left unburied because he or she has died penniless:

A man finds the 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 fulfill his bargain as to sharing his possessions. [p. xxxii]

Gerould undertakes a historical-geographical study of the tale in an attempt to trace its diffusion and find its geographic origin. In doing so, he provides the first systematic, comparative study of 108 variants and compounds of the Grateful Dead theme in folktales and literature stretching back over two thousand years and including much of eastern and western Europe and Asia.

Gerould explains that it is a basic belief in many societies that no obligation is more binding than to pay proper respect to the dead. The notion that a soul separated from its body needs peace goes back to antiquity, as in Iliad 23.71 ff., where the ghost of Patroclus appears to Achilles to request proper burial. It is, therefore, not surprising that the Grateful Dead theme is so varied and widespread. The Grateful Dead tale (AT 505) almost never appears alone, but rather in a variety of combinations, most frequently with the Poison Maiden (AT 507), the Ransomed Woman (AT 506), and the Water of Life (AT 551). All these tales contain the underlying idea that burial of the dead is a pious act and a sacred duty that will meet a fitting reward (p. 28). As noted by Norm Cohen in his introduction to this reprint edition, Gerould realized that several of his stories lacked the actual appearance of the grateful dead man. On the basis of other characteristics, he concluded that these were fundamentally Grateful Dead tales and that they had simply lost the overt presence of the grateful dead character in the course of oral transmission (p. xv). One such story is also one of the earliest Gerould cites, the apocryphal story of Tobit, in which the grateful dead is replaced by the angel Raphael.

Another problem is that Gerould separated the tales into clusters according to major theme but did not distinguish tale-types from motifs. Cohen addresses this difficulty in the introduction, providing a list of Gerould's themes identified by tale-type or motif-numbers. Gerould also dismissed the influence of individual storytellers on the development of the tales. "Whatever serious changes take place in its form are not fortuitous, mere whimsical alterations due to the fancy of story-tellers," he said, "but are due to capabilities of expansion or combination in the plot itself" (p. 173). As Cohen notes, Gerould also completely (and wrongly) dismissed the social context of the tales as inconsequential (p. xvi).

Based on the date of the Tobit story (which has since been pushed back to at least the third century B.C.E.), Gerould deduced that the Grateful Dead theme first appeared early in the first century C.E. or earlier, in western Asia, and was soon combined with the Poison Maiden theme from India. It then migrated to other parts of Europe and Asia and eventually combined with the Ransomed Woman and other themes. Some aspects of the theme disappeared, such as the burial of the dead debtor, but the essential plot remained unimpaired during transmission.

The first and second chapters provide a review and bibliography of the Grateful Dead theme up to Gerould's time (other variants of the tale have been discovered in the last...