Note 4 — Chapter IV · The Grateful Dead and The Poison Maiden.

The Ransomed Woman appears as a separate tale or in combination with other themes than The Grateful Dead more than once. A prolonged study of the motive would probably yield a rich harvest of examples, though it is sufficient for the present purpose to refer to Hippe’s article as establishing the existence of the form. His Wendish folk-tale4 and Guter Gerhard, from the latter of which Simrock started his enquiry, are of themselves evidence enough.5 Neither example has anything whatever to do with The Grateful Dead.6 The characteristics of The Ransomed Woman will appear as we consider the compound type, which contains folk-tales almost exclusively, as was the case with the type studied in the previous chapter, but in most cases from Western Europe instead of from both Asia and Europe.