Folk Philosophizing: Death Edition

Folk Philosophizing: Death Edition Thursday, April 27, 2023 I wasn't able to get any work with folktales last week because I had to join my sister in visiting my parents in their assisted living home to help make some difficult decisions. So it was good to get back to work today. The last of the LF archival folktales from Haldia turned out to be misidentified, ATU 400, from Patras rather than Pontos (much less Haldia), so I started looking for Haldian folktales that I could translate and found a series of fables in Arheion Pontou 15 that I'd clearly overlooked, as the pages were still uncut. They weren't listed as folktales, but as light tales, which is probably why I'd ignored them when I'd translated the paramythia in the same collection years ago. But these mythoi contain a number of brief animal tales ("The Horse and the Donkey", "The Camel-Driver and His Camels," and "The Human and the Bear," among others, as well as a familiar tale about an old woman and death. In this version, an old woman has lost two of her three young sons to Death and her youngest falls seriously ill. She prays that God will take her soul in exchange for his, but when her neighbor's rooster flies through her window and she mistakes him for the angel of death, she begs it to take her son's life instead of hers. There are two related tales, another one from Haldia that also finds a distressed parent changing her mind at the last minute about whom death should take. The other is from Santa: an old man runs into the countryside to flee death, but when death finally catches up with him, he goes easily with him. Simos Lianides valued this variant highly enough (told by one of his older female relatives) that he included it in his collection of Pontic folktales.  (There may be another version in the database--from an unknown location--as it has the title "Death is Sweet".) Death obviously is not uncommon in Pontic folktales (or any other culture's folktales, as far as I know). Among the Greek folk repertoire, they're known as particularly bloodthirsty. Death tends to occur mid-tale for villains, who may be chopped into small pieces, burst from ill-nature, or be offered the sword or the horse as the manner of death. Maria Tatar said of German folktales that the villain's dying in the most painful possible way is a precondition for the hero's happiness. That can also be said of Pontic tales from Santa, which tend to end in death rather than weddings.  But here we have narrators offering the closest thing we might get to different philosophies around dying. The first is that everyone, however much they may talk about self-sacrifice, is secretly terrified. And the other is that, however much you may run from it, it turns out to be a welcome encounter.  Two very different takes! Here's hoping other variants appear so that we can discern some kind of nuance.