The Grateful Dead

The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story is by Gordon Hall Gerould. Chapter I, a review, says that to Karl Simrock is due the honour of discovering the importance of The Grateful Dead for the student of literature and legend. Karl Simrock is said to have examined seventeen other stories, all but two of which have the motive well preserved, though the versions he found came from a limited section of Europe, most of them from Germanic sources.

A list of versions notes that Jagić remarks that the tale must have been widely known in Russia in the eighteenth century, though clearly of foreign origin. The plot of Oliver is told: Oliver, the son of the King of Castille, becomes the close friend of Arthur of Algarbe, the son of his stepmother, and is shipwrecked on the way to Constantinople, but, together with another knight, is saved miraculously by a stag. The book says that after The Grateful Dead was once established as a narrative, its development can be traced with some degree of precision, though not without many gaps here and there.