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)
Since the appearance of Hippe's study no one has treated The Grateful
Dead with such scope as to modify his conclusions. Perhaps the
most interesting work in the field has been that of Dr. Dutz [18]
on the relation of George Peele's Old Wives' Tale to our theme. He
follows Hippe's scheme, but gives some interesting new variants. Of
less importance, but useful within its limits, is the section devoted
to the saga by Dr. Heinrich Wilhelmi in his Studien ueber die Chanson
de Lion de Bourges. [19] Though he added no new versions, the author
studied in detail the relationship of some of the mediaeval forms to
one another, basing his results for the most part on careful textual
comparison. His gravest fault was the thoroughly artificial way in
which he mapped out the field as a whole, a method which could lead
only to erroneous conclusions, since he classified according to a
couple of superficial traits. An English study by Mr. F. H. Groome
on Tobit and Jack the Giant-Killer [20] unhappily was written without
regard to the previous literature of the subject, and simply rehearses
a number of well-known variants.
In this brief review I have touched only on such studies of The
Grateful Dead as have materially enlarged the knowledge of the subject
or have attempted a discussion of the theme in a broad way. In the
following chapter reference will be made to other works, in which
particular versions have been printed or summarized.
CHAPTER II.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
The following list of variants of The Grateful Dead includes only
such tales as have the fundamental traits, as sketched above, either
expressed or clearly implied. Thus Der gute Gerhard, for example, is
not mentioned because it has only the motive of The Ransomed Woman,
while one of the folk-tales from Hungary is admitted because it follows
in general outline one of the combined types to be discussed later,
even though the burial of the dead is obscured. I cite by the short
titles which will be used to indicate the stories in the subsequent
discussion. The arrangement is roughly geographical.
Tobit.
In the apocryphal book of Tobit. According to Neubauer, The Book of
Tobit, a Chaldee Text from a unique MS. in the Bodleian Library, 1878,
p. xv, Tobit was originally written in Hebrew, although the Hebrew text
preserved was taken from Chaldee. Neubauer (p. xvii) quotes Graetz,
Geschichte der Juden, (2nd ed.) iv. 466, as saying that the book was
written in the time of Hadrian, and he concludes that it cannot be
earlier because it was unknown to Josephus. The correspondence with
Sir Amadas, and thus with The Grateful Dead generally, seems to have
been first noted by Simrock, p. 131 f., again by Koehler, Germania,
iii. 203, by Stephens, p. 7, by Hippe, p. 142, etc.
Armenian.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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