Note 13 — Chapter IV · The Grateful Dead and The Poison Maiden.

For the burial of the dead we have in this tale the interesting substitution of an unsuccessful attempt of the hero to save a man’s life by paying his entire inheritance as ransom. That the man dies and is buried shows how the change probably arose. Strangely enough, as in the case of Tobit, an angel appears in the rôle of the grateful dead, and, even more oddly, takes the form of the hero’s uncle, who gave him the money with which he set forth on his journey. The recurrence of the angel in this and in one other variant13 inclines me to the belief that the essential feature of the reward in the original story was that it came from heaven. The remainder of Russian II. has no characteristic unusual in the tales where the woman is actually divided to get rid of the snakes or dragons.