Grateful dead is a folktale

Folklore

Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...

 present in many cultures throughout the world. The most common story involves a traveler who encounters a corpse of someone who never received a proper burial

Burial

Burial is the act of placing a person or object into the ground. This is accomplished by excavating a pit or trench, placing an object in it, and covering it over.-History:...

, typically stemming from an unpaid debt. The traveler then either pays off the dead person's debt or pays for burial. The traveler is later rewarded or has their life saved by a person or animal who is actually the soul of the dead person; the grateful dead is a form of the donor

Donor (fairy tale)

In fairy tales, a donor is a character that tests the hero and provides magical assistances to the hero when he succeeds.The fairy godmother is a well-known form of this character...

.

The "grateful dead" story is Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 505.

The oldest known variant is Cicero

Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero , was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.He introduced the Romans to the chief...

's account of Simonides

Simonides

* Simonides of Ceos, , a lyric poet* Semonides of Amorgos, an iambic poet* Flavius Simonides Agrippa, son of Roman Jewish Historian Josephus* Constantine Simonides, 19th-century forger of 'ancient' manuscripts...

.
Another old variant is the Book of Tobit

Book of Tobit

The Book of Tobit is a book of scripture that is part of the Catholic and Orthodox biblical canon, pronounced canonical by the Council of Carthage of 397 and confirmed for Roman Catholics by the Council of Trent...

. The chivalric romance Amadas

Amadas

Amadas, or Sir Amadace is a medieval English chivalric romance, one of the rare ones for which there is neither a known nor a conjectured French original, like Sir Eglamour of Artois...

has the title knight pay his last coins for such a burial. It appears in various fairy tales, such as the Italian Fair Brow

Fair Brow

Fair Brow is an Italian fairy tale collected by Thomas Frederick Crane in his Italian Popular Tales.Italo Calvino included a variant from Istria in his Italian Folktales. He noted that the grateful dead man was a common medieval motif.-Synopsis:...

, the Swedish The Bird 'Grip'

The Bird 'Grip'

The Bird 'Grip is a Swedish fairy tale. Andrew Lang included it The Pink Fairy Book. It is Aarne-Thompson type 550, the quest for the golden bird/firebird; other tales of this type include The Golden Bird, The Greek Princess and the Young Gardener, How Ian Direach got the Blue Falcon, The Nunda,...

and H. C. Andersen's The Traveling Companion.

External links

• Gerould, G. H.
  Gordon Hall Gerould
  Gordon Hall Gerould, B.A., B.Litt. was a philologist and folklorist of the United States.Born in Goffstown, New Hampshire, he joined the faculty of Bryn Mawr College and was a professor of English at Princeton University. In 1910 he married fellow writer Katharine Elizabeth Fullerton Gerould. He...
  
   The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story, Folk-Lore Society, 1908. D. Nutt, London.
• The Grateful Dead: folktales of Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 505, various folk tales