In 1965 the San Francisco band the Warlocks needed a new name after learning another band was already using theirs. Their guitarist, Jerry Garcia, the legend goes, opened the 1955 edition of The Funk and Wagnalls New Practical Standard Dictionary, Britannica World Language Edition to a random page and launched his finger at an entry. He landed on “The Grateful Dead,” and what came next, as they say, is history.
What came before is also history. What was this preexisting “Grateful Dead” that had already earned an entry in the dictionary?
The term that Garcia landed on referred to a specific genre of folklore. The structure of a “grateful dead” tale is easy to follow, best captured in a story Cicero recounts in On Divination, first published in 44 bc. The poet Simonides, Cicero writes, “once saw the dead body of some unknown man lying exposed and buried it. Later, when he had it in mind to go onboard a ship, he was warned in a vision by the person he had buried not to do so and that if he did he would perish in a shipwreck. Therefore he turned back and all the others who sailed were lost.”
A more fleshed-out version of the story appears in the late thirteenth-century romance Richars li biaus (Richard the Handsome), which tells the story of the eponymous wandering knight. Setting off through a foreign land in pursuit of glory, Richars wastes so much of his father’s money that he can’t enter a tournament for the hand of a maiden. A benefactor gives him a horse, attendants, and some gold to compete, but en route he spends part of his money giving a great feast at a city in Austria. At the feast he is astonished to discover a corpse suspended from the beams and is told that the dead man owed the lord of the house a great sum of money. Richars gives away everything he has, including his armor, to pay the debt and bury the man. With no means to compete in the tournament, he wanders hopelessly. He then meets a mysterious White Knight who provides Richars with a new set of armor and a better horse. Richars wins the tournament, and then offers the White Knight either the hand of the maiden or the property won. The White Knight refuses both, reveals himself to be the ghost of the indebted man, and disappears.
The plot element was well known to nineteenth-century folklorists, but the stories featuring this arc weren’t examined together until the folklorist Gordon Hall Gerould published his 1908 book The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story. Gerould found evidence of the Grateful Dead story in folklore and myth from Siberia to Spain and from Iceland to Armenia. The narrative is so old and widespread that it was almost impossible to divine its origins—yet until Gerould’s book, no one had thought to bring them together for study. “The combination of narrative themes is so frequent a phenomenon in folk and formal literature,” he wrote at the time, “that one almost forgets to wonder at it."