The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk StoryGerould, Gordon Hall
General
The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story
Gerould, Gordon Hall
Dead -- Folklore; Folk literature -- Themes, motives; Grateful dead (Tale)
The third story is Servian VI. An uncle of Adam, who honoured God
and the "Vile," [40] was so good a man that God came to him in human
form one day. After a battle between the good and evil in the world,
the latter would not bury the slain. The Vile told Tuegut that this
would not do, so he hitched up his wagon and carried the slain to their
graves. Then God came to earth, told him to put all he possessed in
his wagon, and carried him on a cloud to heaven, where he was made
the constellation now called Driver Tuegut's Heavenly Wagon.
Of these three tales the Annamite does not fulfil the usual condition
that the dead man shall be a stranger to the one who does the good
action. Together with Simonides, all of them vary widely in the reward
given the hero. In Simonides he is warned against embarkation, and
thus saved from shipwreck; in the Jewish he is actually rescued from
a storm-tossed vessel by the ghost, which masquerades as a rock and an
eagle, and afterward promises him further rewards here and hereafter;
in the Annamite he is provided with earthly glory; and in Servian
VI. he becomes a part of the galaxy of heaven. Only the underlying
idea is the same,--that the burial of the dead is a pious act and
a sacred duty, which will meet a fitting reward. [41] This belief
is so widespread and ancient that it is not difficult to surmise how
stories inculcating the duty might have grown up independently in many
lands. At the same time, the very diversity of reward in these simple
tales allies them to one or another of the compound types, which,
though multiform and widespread, are yet unmistakably the offspring
of a single parent form, or better, of a chance union between two
motives. [42] Thus Simonides and Jewish recall the combination of
The Grateful Dead with The Ransomed Woman, since they have the hero
rescued from drowning by the ghost, and they suggest one point of
union between the two themes. It therefore seems best to include
them in our list, not only for the sake of completeness, but because
they point to the reason which sometime and somewhere gave rise to a
more developed form of the motive,--to the maerchen as we shall study
it. A consideration of these basal principles can be undertaken,
however, only after the story theme in its various ramifications and
modifications has been thoroughly discussed.
The probability that The Grateful Dead once existed in a simple,
uncompounded form, which became the parent on one side of the more
important combined types, is strengthened by the minor compounds in
which it is found. How can the correspondences of detail seen in
a considerable number of different compounds, as far as they run
parallel, be otherwise explained? Surely it is more reasonable to
believe in the existence of such a parent form than to suppose that
an originally complicated form was hacked and hewn asunder to produce
new compounds. This will become clearer, I hope, as we proceed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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