The helper in a notable group of European and Asiatic tales is a mysterious person known as the grateful dead man. The chain of circumstances by which this helper joins the hero and certain details of his later experience are so uniform and well articulated as to form an easily recognizable motif, or rather cluster of motifs. This fact has caused some confusion to scholars who have not sufficiently distinguished between such a motif and the entire tale of which it forms only an important part. [42]

Though this group of motifs appears sporadically in a considerable number of tales where it may replace other helpers, [43] there are about a half-dozen tales, some of them obviously varying forms of the same story, in which the grateful dead man always plays the leading role.

In all these tales we learn of a hero who finds that creditors are refusing to permit the burial of a corpse until the dead man's debts have been paid. The hero spends his last penny to ransom the dead man's body and to secure his burial. Later, in the course of his adventures, he is joined by a mysterious stranger who agrees to help him in all his endeavors. This stranger is the grateful dead man (E341). The only condition which the dead man makes when he agrees to help the hero is that all winnings which the latter makes shall be equally divided. In all the stories the hero eventually wins a wife and the helper demands his half. Usually the dead man interferes in time to prevent the actual cutting in two of the woman.

It will be seen that this train of events is actually only a framework for the adventures of the hero. The various tales relating these adventures have been studied with some thoroughness by Sven Liljeblad. [44]

Two of these tales, obviously related, refer to a rescued princess. In the first of these (Type 506A) the hero ransoms a princess who has been held in [p. 51] slavery. He has been sent for her by the king who has learned her whereabouts by means of a cloth or a flag which she has sewed, and on which he recognizes the characteristics of her fine needlework. On the way home with the princess the hero is thrown overboard by a rival, but he is rescued by his dead helper and is finally brought to the princess, where he is identified by a ring thrown into a cup, by recounting his life history, or by means of a picture. The tale then proceeds to the point where the grateful dead man asks for his half of the winnings. In some cases this demand is not made until long after the hero's marriage, when the dead man calls for the dividing of the infant child.

In the other tale of the rescued princess (Type 506B) the hero saves her from a den of robbers and flees with her to her father's home. In all other respects —the grateful dead man, the casting of the hero overboard, the recognition by the princess, and the dividing in half—the two stories are alike. The rescue from slavery is much the more popular of the two stories: it appeared in a French collection of exempla as early as the fourteenth century and is known in all parts of Europe, in Indonesia, in North Africa, and in North America, not only among the Indians, but also among the Portuguese settlers in Massachusetts coming from the Cape Verde Islands. On the other hand, the tale involving the robbers seems to be confined to Northern Europe and to have Scandinavia as its primary center of distribution.

The second group of tales concerning the grateful dead man is the one which, because of its embodiment in the story of Tobit, most people think of when the grateful dead is mentioned. The tales in this group have so many identical traits that it seems unreasonable to suppose that they do not represent a threefold development from some common original. All three of the types begin with the regular incident of the ransomed corpse and the joining of the hero by the grateful dead man. And they all end, in one way or another, with the motif of the dividing in half of the bride. In the first of these tales, The Monster's Bride (Type 507A), the hero wooes a princess whose former suitors have all come to misfortune and whose heads he sees stuck upon poles as a warning to him. He may win the princess only if he finds certain objects which she hides and if he succeeds in killing the monster of whom she is enamored. His friend, the grateful dead man, has acquired certain magic powers and comes to his aid. He kills the monster lover and, usually by means of beating, burning, or bathing her, takes away from the princess her remaining magic power.

In the second tale, The Monster in the Bridal Chamber (Type 507B), the hero finds that all the bridegrooms of the princess have perished during the bridal night. His helper, the grateful dead man, advises him to marry her, and keeps watch. When the dragon (or serpent) comes into the chamber to kill the bridegroom, the helper slays him. It turns out that the princess is enchanted and has serpents in her body. When the dead man demands his [p. 52] half of the winnings, they cut her in two and thus break the enchantment. The third tale, The Serpent Maiden (Type 507C), seems hardly more than a variant of the second. All the bridegrooms of the princess have perished during the bridal night. The hero marries her, nevertheless, and the helper saves his life by killing the serpent which creeps from her mouth to strangle the bridegroom. She may be ridded of the serpents by cutting her in two, or by hanging her head downward so that they come out of her mouth.

One interesting thing about this group of three tales is that we have a form of the story as early as the beginning of the Christian era in the book of Tobit. This early redaction of the story is so thoroughly adapted to the Hebrew literature of which it forms a part that it would surely seem to represent the results of a long period of change and adjustment. In this apocryphal story the ransoming of the corpse is done by the pious old Tobit, whereas the romantic adventures are assigned to his son. An angel appears in place of the grateful dead man. In the form closest to the Tobit story (Type 507B) this tale is still best known in eastern Europe and the Near East. The very closely related Serpent Maiden (Type 507C) also has its greatest popularity in southeastern Europe. On the other hand, The Monster's Bride (Type 507A) is popular over northern and western Europe and has been known there in literary form from the sixteenth century. Its general acceptance was greatly increased through the influence of Hans Christian Andersen's "Rejsekammeraten" (The Fellow Traveler). A mapping of the three types in which the bride is rendered harmless by the dead man makes clear that two of these tales are primarily eastern and one of them an essentially western development.

There remains one story of a grateful dead man which seems not to be clearly related to the three which we have just discussed. In this tale (Type 508), after the usual joining of the hero and the dead helper, we have a tournament in which the dead man furnishes his companion with a magic horse and with wonderful weapons. After the princess is won in the tournament there follows the usual incident of the dividing in half. This story is obviously a result of the chivalric romance tradition. It appears as early as the twelfth century in a French romance, an Italian novella, and a German poem, and in the thirteenth century in an English romance and a Swedish prose tale. It is also included in the Italian literary folktale collection of Straparola in the sixteenth century. The tale hardly exists in oral tradition at all.

In spite of the attention devoted to this group of tales by men like Gerould and Liljeblad, the whole group needs a thorough restudy. It is impossible to get at the truth about these tales without subjecting each of the types to an independent investigation. It would seem that we have at least three different tales within the framework of the grateful dead motifs. Nowhere is the problem of the relation of tale type and motif more baffling than in this [p. 53] group. Without such definitive study, it is impossible to say more than that we have here a very old tale which seems to have come into Europe from the Near East. This old tale, represented by the book of Tobit, contained the striking sequence of motifs which we know as The Grateful Dead Man. In some way or other this exact sequence of motifs seems to have been adopted by the two tales of the rescued princess and by the story of the winning of the bride in the tournament. Just how these changes took place and just what relation these stories may have to one another cannot be safely declared without more study.