Death in Folk Tales (A Brief Note)

To explore folktales on the subject of death seems at first sight an impossible enterprise. The themes folktales prefer to deal with are associated rather with learning what life is and how to behave in social relationships. When death figures in stories it generally appears as the final, natural stage in a human life, that of a father who dies just as the succeeding generation is getting ready to take over. It is at the end of a journey - that might be called one of 'initiation' - that the young hero, son of the dead man, has become able to play his adult role fully and found a family in his turn. The succession is assured, and so the order of things is perpetuated. This is the image of a tranquil death that occurs at the right time in the bosom of the family. But it is not the only one

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