SOURCE: Charnon-Deutsch, Lou. Introduction to Death and the Doctor: Three Nineteenth-Century Spanish Tales, translated by Robert M. Fedorchek, pp. 13-28. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Charnon-Deutsch contrasts Alarcón's version of the “Death and the Doctor” tale, “Death's Friend,” with that of Fernán Caballero's “Juan Holgado and Death” and Antonio de Trueba's “Tragaldabas.”

“Death and the Doctor,” an oral tale circulating in the Tyrone, was recorded in Gaelic by Eoin Mac Néill in 1912, then translated and reprinted in Ulster Life in 1992 by Gerard Downey and Gerard Stockman. In this Irish version of a popular European tale designated type 332 in the Antti Aarne classification (D1825.3.1 in Stith Thompson), Death has business in towns such as Belfast where people are killing each other and in need of his services. Meanwhile, oceans away, in 1969, sociologist Judith Friedlander heard a version of the same tale from...