A Storyteller’s Book Assembled from a Dead Scholar’s Papers

The King and the Corpse is a posthumous book, and its editorial history belongs to its meaning. Heinrich Zimmer died suddenly in the spring of 1943 while still working on the material; the tales existed in more than one version, some in English and some in German, the manuscript margins carried many jottings, three chapters had appeared in earlier forms in Europe and India, and none was in a final state. Joseph Campbell, who records all of this in his foreword, coordinated the scattered notes, amplified the narratives from the original sources, and revised on the basis of numerous conversations with Zimmer during the months preceding his death; Ananda K. Coomaraswamy read the galleys and supplied supplementary notes that appear in bracketed footnotes over his initials. The book Bollingen published in 1948 is therefore Zimmer’s voice carried through Campbell’s hand — the same editorial partnership that produced Zimmer’s other posthumous volumes. The collection itself moves across an astonishing range: Abu Kasem’s slippers from the Arabian Nights; the Irish wonder tale of Prince Conn-eda set beside the legend of Saint John Chrysostom; four romances from the cycle of King Arthur (Gawain and the Green Knight, the Knight with the Lion, Lancelot, and Merlin); the Sanskrit title tale of the king and the corpse; and, in a second part, four episodes from the Hindu Romance of the Goddess with a closing chapter on the Sipra shore. What binds the assortment is the subtitle’s claim, which the book treats not as a slogan but as a recurring structure in the tales themselves.

The Dilettante Among Symbols States the Method

The opening essay is a methodological manifesto disguised as an apology. Zimmer derives dilettante from the Italian dilettare, to take delight in, and declares that the essays are for those who take delight in symbols, like conversing with them. The argument behind the self-deprecation is serious: true symbols are inexhaustible, their meanings shift with every cultural setting and must be constantly reread, and so the interpretation of folklore cannot be reduced to a dependable system. The moment the interpreter abandons the dilettante attitude and begins to feel certain about proper interpretation, Zimmer writes, “we deprive ourselves of the quickening contact, the demonic and inspiring assault that is the effect of their intrinsic virtue.” The images of folklore and myth “are not corpselike, but implike,” mocking the specialist who imagines he has them pinned to his chart; what they demand is “not the monologue of a coroner’s report, but the dialogue of a living conversation.” The tales are “the everlasting oracles of life,” which each age must question anew with its own set of problems. Zimmer accordingly calls the book “a conversation primer, a reader for beginners, an introduction to the grammar of a cryptic but readily enjoyed, pictorial script.” The essay even names its emblem in advance: the hero of the key story, a king who finds himself conversing with the implike inhabitant of what he had taken to be a mere dead body, models the posture the reader is asked to adopt toward the moribund divinities hanging from the tree of the past. This is why the commentary in this book rides inside the retellings rather than following them as apparatus — the method is the delight.

The Title Tale Is the Soul’s Dialogue with Its Own Dark Counterpart

The key story comes from the Vetalapancavinsati, the Sanskrit cycle of the specter in the corpse, whose hero Zimmer’s note identifies as the legendary king Vikramaditya, “The Sun of Valor.” For ten years a beggar-ascetic presents the king with a daily fruit, which the king accepts without examination; the fruits conceal gems, the ascetic is a sorcerer, and the debt draws the king into a night errand — fetching a hanged corpse from the cremation ground, a corpse inhabited by a mocking specter that tells riddle-tale after riddle-tale, forcing the king to answer and, with each answer, sending the corpse back to the gallows tree. Zimmer’s reading turns every element inward. The sorcerer confronting the guileless king is his own production: “the two were one,” and the king had “created him as the counterpart of his own spiritual blindness.” The burden itself is memory: “The corpse is a concretion of our own past—the neglected, the forgotten.” And the voice within the burden is the book’s central discovery. The specter, Zimmer writes, “represents the high judge within ourselves who keeps record of everything, and, in deep wisdom, foreknows all”; “It is a wiser ego than the one we know.” He reaches for Blake’s line about the specter around me night and day to name the universality of the figure. The resolution is neither exorcism nor victory. The specter warns the king of the sorcerer’s plan at the last moment, the king cuts the deceiver down, and the two night-companions part as mutual redeemers: “Each saved the other, and by virtue of that mutual rescue the entire universe was given redemption.” The daylight king and the ghostly voice of the dark depth, Zimmer insists, belong together; separated, both would be impotent.

The Western Tales Carry the Same Argument

The Arthurian and Irish chapters show the identical structure wearing Christian and Celtic dress. In Gawain and the Green Knight, Zimmer identifies the towering green challenger from the “cursedest kirk” as the great reaper, Death, and the dazzling temptress who tests Gawain in his bed as “Life, Death’s bride” — and he sets beside the romance the legend of the Buddha under the Bo-tree, where Mara arranges for the lure of life and the terror of annihilation to assault the hero simultaneously. Gawain’s cry when his one small failure is exposed, “Fear and Desire! You are the destroyers of manly valor and heroship,” states the tale’s psychology in a sentence, and the green girdle he keeps is the mark of a humanity that survived its own testing. In the Merlin chapter, Zimmer calls the wizard “a perfect example, by the way, of the archetype of the Wise Old Man, the personification of the intuitive wisdom of the unconscious,” the “Master of the Enchanted Forest, that is to say, of the realm of the unconscious with all its powers and enigmas,” kin at once to Orpheus, to Lao-tse, and to the Hindu guru. The Irish tale of Conn-eda gives the developmental version: a prince so guileless that he knows nothing of the sinister other half of existence must learn “that completeness consists in opposites co-operating through conflict,” his quest “an allegory of the agony of self-completion through the mastery and assimilation of conflicting opposites,” his savior the croaking voice of his enchanted alter ego inside the shaggy little horse, a relationship Zimmer explicitly equates with that of the king and the specter. The paired legend of John Chrysostom presses the point into hagiography: “No one but the sinner can become a saint.”

Even the Gods Are Not Permitted to Remain What They Are

The second part leaves the hero tale for Hindu myth — four episodes from the Romance of the Goddess, in which Brahma is made ridiculous, the god of love finds himself commanding an army of hate, and Shiva, the detached ascetic, is swept into lust, rage, and grief by Sati. Zimmer’s summary sentence generalizes the whole collection: “The point of the myth of the Romance of the Goddess seems to be that no one is long permitted to remain what he is.” A footnote makes the psychological register explicit, observing that this meaning resembles the main aim of analytical psychology — to throw into contact forces of the inner being that have been inclined to remain isolated, and by these crises to keep the energies of the psyche in creative flow. Read backward from that note, the soul’s conquest of evil names a precise operation repeated in every chapter: evil is never finally an external enemy but the neglected, disowned, or untested portion of one’s own being, and it is conquered when it is recognized, carried, and answered. “Nothing is far from us. Nothing can be treated as alien,” the commentary on the title tale declares, in a sentence that could stand as the collection’s epigraph.

Among its neighbors on this shelf, Zimmer’s book is the storyteller’s pole of the tradition that von Franz’s The Interpretation of Fairy Tales and Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales occupy as method, and that Stith Thompson’s The Folktale occupies as classification: the same materials, held by delight rather than system. The Campbell connection is direct rather than analogical — the editor who assembled these tales from a dead scholar’s papers built his own The Hero with a Thousand Faces on the same conviction that the world’s tales rehearse one initiatory pattern, and the Jung–Kerényi Essays on a Science of Mythology supplies the theoretical frame Zimmer deliberately declined to systematize. Read The King and the Corpse first among these: it demonstrates, before any theory, what it is like to sit down with a tale for an extended chat.