The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story

Long before the rock band claimed the name, "The Grateful Dead" was one of folklore's most haunting and resilient motifs: a stranger buries a corpse, and the dead rise to reward his kindness. Gerould's pioneering study traces this tale across continents and centuries, showing how the same essential story reappears in Icelandic sagas, German legends, and medieval romances, each culture reshaping it to reflect its own fears and values. What emerges is not merely a taxonomy of plot variants but a meditation on why humans have always needed stories about the boundary between life and death, about whether the dead remember, and about what we owe to strangers whose stories we may never know. Written in 1907, this remains essential reading for anyone curious about how tales travel, mutate, and endure.