Kim Bates writes this review which I think ran in Mostly Folk.
This is a fascinating, yet ultimately horrifying book for several reasons. It has taken me quite some time to finish it after starting it some months ago, a process that happens more often with music, rarely with books. So why did I keep relegating it to the bottom of the review pile? Simple: sometimes it’s easier not to see certain things that explain so much. First published in 1877, revived with a new introduction written by Norm Cohen this year, The Grateful Dead tells us as much about nineteenth-century folklorists as it does about the persistence of some gruesome beliefs about the nature of women, and duty toward the deceased. Do we still hold these beliefs somewhere in our collective consciousness? Probably, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
The story has several variants, and originated in the Middle East before being spread all over the Eurasian continent. It seems that a young spendthrift comes across a corpse that has remained unburied because the surviving family members can’t pay the deceased one’s creditors. Our hero spends his last pennies for the burial and goes on his way to a contest of arms, meeting a new friend on the road shortly thereafter. The friend urges him to compete even though he cannot afford new weapons, and assists him in obtaining them with the provision that they divide the winnings in half. Our hero wins the tournament, and the hand of a fair maiden, but as he is about to enjoy his wedding night, the friend appears and insists upon dividing the maiden in half, which the hero reluctantly agrees to do. After striking her in half, the hero is horrified to see serpents emerge from within her, monsters that had killed previous unlucky bridegrooms. The new wife is restored, and the friend reveals himself as the grateful ghost of the unburied corpse, now able to rest in peace, and leaves the hero and his bride to live happily ever after.
After reading several versions of the story, I felt that this was a story crying out for a feminist reinterpretation. I wondered how many people, both men and women, must have suffered by listening to stories that demonized the mysterious aspects of human nature. Did people look at their companions and see the evil serpents inside? Yet not all versions of the story share this “Poison Maiden” theme. In others the grateful dead help the hero overcome treachery by family, jealous servants, rivals in arms, and so forth. Sometimes the damsel in distress has been imprisoned by a monster rather than carrying it within her. The story has enough of both human mean-spiritedness and human greatness to explain its longevity as a popular tale, in addition to the intriguing turn of phrase that would later inspire a rock band, whose fans would revive interest in the story.
The other bizarre aspect of this story concerns the treatment of the dead in European society. In reading about the bizarre funerary rituals of today — embalming without a coherent belief in its relation to the afterlife, costly caskets purchased by people sick with grief, decorating the corpse for viewing so as to disguise its dead state — it is easy to bemoan the sheer crassness and commercialism. Yet it appears that before we had the mortician’s professional trade associations, creditors and churches could hold the deceased’s corpse hostage for money, all at a time when people sincerely believed that the dead needed Christian burial to obtain peace in the afterlife. Yuck.
Gerould himself does not delve deeply into the symbolic aspects of the story that so trouble me, but his meticulous categorization and commentary create a rich picture of its origins and the twisting paths that added variations to the basic story. He also leaves the societal implications of funerary rites to others, focusing on the way that motifs have been combined by storytellers, and the folklorist’s holy grail: the origin of the story. He shares the popular nineteenth-century viewpoint that the story itself is interesting, rather than the storytellers, and that such combinations as he finds were spontaneously and unconsciously produced by simple folk with almost no volition on their part. This in itself is somewhat horrifying to the modern reader who is steeped in individualism and the belief in the importance of authors rather than stories. Social science types may miss a structural explanation that focuses on how the various motifs reinforce societal norms.
The truth probably lies somewhere between these viewpoints, because certain stories do have a life of their own, speaking to something shared and something that touches their listeners deeply. If they lacked this connection, storytellers wouldn’t have told them across the centuries because audiences wouldn’t have listened. And if the beliefs didn’t make sense with the norms and rules people followed in order to make sense of ordinary life, the stories would have been stamped out and forgotten, or closely held in secret, possibly to reemerge when the time was right as the fragments of an “ancient” religion. But I digress.
One can find aspects of this story in Hollywood’s treatment of the “Ungrateful Dead” or the “Wronged Dead.” It’s also easy to find a fascination with several themes Gerould explores, particularly the “Poison Maiden.” I wonder if he publication of this book will prompt a revisionist look at the belief system that produced the story, or a study comparing our fascination with the “wronged” dead in film with the grateful dead. We know that people experience the beloved dead after they are gone, and that persistent belief in their assistance is alive and well in modern times, as shown by contemporary folklorists like Gillian Bennett. Gerould makes it easy to see how this fascinating story touched people over twenty centuries, as well. Along the way he reveals other things that perhaps he didn’t intend, things that readers in the new millennium will find useful, inspiring, or even uncomfortable. This new edition will interest folklore enthusiasts, fiction writers looking to add their interpretation of the symbolism within the story, history buffs and possibly fans of the band that gave permission for the original title of the book to be used without infringing on their copyright.
(University of Illinois Press, 2000)
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