Note 16 — Chapter VII · The Relations of The Grateful Dead to The Spendthrift Knight, The Two Friends, and The Thankful Beasts.

Yet it by no means follows that the suggestion for the combination was not present in the version of The Grateful Dead, which was used in making Oliver. Indeed, it seems probable that this source or prototype had the division of the child in somewhat the form in which it appears in so many tales. That such was the case is likely from the fact that of the twenty-two folk variants which refer to the child all but two are of the type The Grateful Dead + The Ransomed Woman, to which Oliver is approximated. Considering the alterations which the theme was likely to suffer at the hands of a writer who was more or less consciously combining various material in a romance, the wonder is that the type was not more changed than it seems to have been. In point of fact, the position of Oliver and its literary successors as examples of the compound comes out more clearly16 through this examination of their relationship to The Two Friends.