prevent three creditors from digging up a corpse. He is joined by a pale stranger, who takes him in a leaden ship to a land where he marries a princess, who is fated to marry no one save a man who comes in this way. The stranger secures, by a lying ruse, a troll's castle for the hero, and, after explaining that he is the ghost of the buried debtor, disappears.
The traces of the Puss in Boots motive[1] are, I think, sufficiently clear, especially in the first of the two variants, since the point of that familiar tale is certainly that the hero marries a woman of high estate by making himself out as of equal rank, substantiating his statements by a succession of clever ruses. That the grateful dead enables him to fulfil the required conditions is an introduction that could easily replace the ordinary one, especially since a helper of some sort is necessary to the story. Just what the relation of these two variants is to other Puss in Boots stories does not here concern us. From the side of The Grateful Dead, however, it is possible to see how the combination—found only in two folk-tales from a single country, it will be observed—may have arisen. The benefits bestowed on the hero show an essential likeness to those found in a widespread compound type to be studied in a later chapter,[2] where the thankful dead helps his friend to obtain a wife by the performance of some feat. Since the combination now in consideration seems to be confined to the region about Denmark, while mediaeval and modern examples of the other are found in many lands, it may be regarded as a mere variation on the better-known compound type, produced by the similarity of the two endings. Yet
