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Death in Folk Tales (A Brief Note)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Micheline Galley
Micheline Galley*
Affiliation:
CNRS, Paris

Abstract

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A dramatic image of death is reflected from a cycle of folktales (Aarne-Thompson Types 505 to 508) in which a man dying in debt is refused burial, until the hero of the tale pays the ransom and fulfills the ancestral funeral ritual. Then the tale may develop into a further sequence centred on the Grateful Dead. The texts alluded to here come from both Northern Europe and the Mediterranean area, and from ancient and modern tales.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , February 2005 , pp. 105 - 109
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2005

References

Notes

1. Medieval European literature is proof of this.

2. For example, in Aarne-Thompson’s international classification, types 505 to 508 and in the index of Turkish tales, Type 63 (W. and P. Boratav, Typen des Türkischer Volksmärchen). Greek versions are given in Anna Angelopoulos’s article (1999), ‘Un homme nu le couteau à la main’, Cahiers de Littérature Orale (CLO), no. 46, pp. 101-25; Arabic versions are listed in Hasan El-Shamy (1995), Folk Traditions of the Arab World: motifs Q 271.1 and E 341.1.

3. See A. De Felice (1954), Contes populaires de Haute-Bretagne, Paris, p. 122.

4. We should remember that a legal form of slavery for debt existed in pre-Solon Athens and in Rome in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Insolvent debtors became their creditors’ slaves. Their bodies repaid their debt in accordance with what in Rome was called ‘bodily constraint’. I am inclined to think that the clauses in the contract thought up by the usurer Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (a pound of flesh to be taken from the body) echo those practices hyperbolically. As for folktales, they seem to invoke the right of seizure which could be exercised, not on the living body but on the corpse. In this context it is interesting to point to the facts reported by Nicole Belmont (CLO, op. cit., p. 133) on the basis of work by historians: sanctions incurred in the 15th century in Dauphiné, where insolvent debtors risked excommunication and a ban on being buried in the ‘holy precinct of the graveyard’.

5. Translated into French by François Mortier. See CLO, op. cit., p. 220.

6. See Virginie Amilien, ‘Jean la Guenille’ or ‘Le Fils du roi’, CLO, op. cit., p. 79.

7. See Eberhard and Boratav (1953), Type 63.

8. The encounter with an unknown dead person (at the start of a journey resembling an initiation) is the occasion for our youth to prove himself: giving generously of his money and his aid, he insists on fulfilling his duty to the deceased.

9. A motif listed under Q 271.1 ‘Debtor deprived of burial’ (El-Shamy, op. cit).

10. Iliad, XXII, 336-41. It is the pressure applied by the gods from Olympus that will make Achilles decide to hand over to Priam his son’s body.

11. Ibid.

12. Oral tale collected in Algiers by Micheline Galley. See ‘Le sultan qui possédait une fortune’ in Le Figuier magique, Éditions Geuthner, 2003, pp. 119-47, 251-5 and compact disk in fine.

13. A requirement that was always felt and still is. We find terrible evidence for this in the present day. Televised images show us the efforts of those who scrape together the smallest morsel of human flesh after a fatal attack. And for decades families try untiringly to discover the fate of loved ones who were seized by the authorities and remain unburied.

14. See A. Mouliéras (1965), Légendes et contes merveilleux de la Grande-Kabylie, translated into French by C. Lacoste-Dujardin, Paris, p. 88.

15. Ibid., pp. 529-30.

16. A special issue of CLO (no. 46) is devoted to this.

17. See in the index by El-Shamy, op. cit., E 341.1.1H.: ‘Dead grateful for having been spared indignity to corpse’.

18. I, 16-17.

19. A painting by Botticelli shows Young Tobias with the angel.

20. See ‘La maison des richesses’ in M. Galley, op. cit., pp. 49-72 and 239-42.

21. See El-Fasi and E. Dermenghem (1926), Contes fasis, pp. 80-1.