Note 5 — Chapter III · Tales with the Simple Theme and Miscellaneous Combinations.

Of these three tales the Annamite does not fulfil the usual condition that the dead man shall be a stranger to the one who does the good action. Together with Simonides, all of them vary widely in the reward given the hero. In Simonides he is warned against embarkation, and thus saved from shipwreck; in the Jewish he is actually rescued from a storm-tossed vessel by the ghost, which masquerades as a rock and an eagle, and afterward promises him further rewards here and hereafter; in the Annamite he is provided with earthly glory; and in Servian VI. he becomes a part of the galaxy of heaven. Only the underlying idea is the same,—that the burial of the dead is a pious act and a sacred duty, which will meet a fitting reward.5 This belief is so widespread and ancient that it is not difficult to surmise how stories inculcating the duty might have grown up independently in many lands. At the same time, the very diversity of reward in these simple tales allies them to one or another of the compound types, which, though multiform and widespread, are yet unmistakably the offspring of a single parent form, or better, of a chance union between two motives.6 Thus Simonides and Jewish recall the combination of The Grateful Dead with The Ransomed Woman, since they have the hero rescued from drowning by the ghost, and they suggest one point of union between the two themes. It therefore seems best to include them in our list, not only for the sake of completeness, but because they point to the reason which sometime and somewhere gave rise to a more developed form of the motive,—to the märchen as we shall study it. A consideration of these basal principles can be undertaken, however, only after the story theme in its various ramifications and modifications has been thoroughly discussed.