Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to talk about death.

But not like death as an abstract concept or as existential reality with which we must all come to terms.

I mean like Death as in the guy, like the character.

He's in stoner comedies.

He's in cartoons.

She's in acclaimed comics.

But this is a book show and he's also in a lot of books.

(upbeat music) There are many bad and inexplicable things that are part and parcel of existing: disease, taxes, poverty.

But disease and taxes rarely get personified into characters.

Death pops up as a player in a ton of our favorite books.

Often he's grim and scary, but increasingly, he's more complex than that.

How we write death as a character can reveal something about how we process one of life's great mysteries, and there's a lot more breadth to how the Grim Reaper is depicted than you might think.

The idea of Death as a personified being is older than the written word, and he or she is entrenched in many traditions, but it's rarely as simple as, you know, here's this guy.

He's here for your soul.

In various world mythologies, sometimes death does do the killing, sometimes he's just a reaper after an outside force does the killing, sometimes he's like a death middleman, sometimes he's a god, and sometimes he's more like an omen spirit thing.

For example, in Scottish folklore, the Cu Sith takes the form of a dog one sees right before they die.

In Breton folklore, there's the Ankou, which sometimes appears as a tall, haggard figure sporting a fabulous wide hat and long, white hair, or as a skeleton with a spinning head that sees all.

In Japan, there are Shinigami, which translates to Death Spirit, and is a term that applies to a, let's just say a really broad array of beings.

And then, of course, we have the various and sundry death-oriented deities.

In the Aztec tradition, there's Mictecacihuatl and Miclantecuhtli and all you Nahuatl speakers out there can have a party correcting that pronunciation in the comments.

They're more or less in charge of the Aztec underworld.

And, of course, there's Hel or Hela, of the old Norse tradition, likewise in charge of the underworld.

And the Greeks have Hades and Persephone.

But while these are gods of the dead and, or underworld, they are personifications of death itself.

In Greek mythology in particular, the distinction needs to be drawn between Hades, the lord of the underworld, Thanatos, who is the personification of death, and Charon, who does the actual work of ferrying the souls of the dead into the underworld.

Death teamwork.

But most influential to our modern depiction of Death as a personified being, is the book of Revelation, the final book in the Christian Bible.

Revelation reads as basically one long fever dream describing an apocalyptic battle and death only pops up the one time riding a pale horse alongside War, Famine, and Conquest, not Pestilence.

Pestilence is not one of the four horsemen in Revelation.

Ahem.

So after he and his buddies show up, that's kind of all we see of Death.

He's basically a glorified cameo, but for whatever reason, he is the most popular of the four horsemen.

The Paul, not the Ringo.

The fact that he was personified in something as foundational as the Bible, has only helped to produce countless literary descendants.

So a lot of what follows this appearance is basically fanfic, distantly inspired by the book of Revelation.

Romantic poets in particular loved the idea of death as an anthropomorphized entity.

In 1773, Gottfried August Burger wrote the poem, Lenore, concerning a young woman waiting for her fiance, William, to return home from the Battle of Prague.

When he fails to show, Lenore basically reads God for a large jerk.

And God, in turn, sends a mysterious hot William look-alike stranger to spirit Lenore away on a horse.

And wouldn't you know, it's not William, but our good friend, Death, come as punishment for Lenore.

Petty you might say, but potent stuff.

According to German language scholar, John George Robertson, "Lenore exerted a more widespread influence than perhaps "any other short poem in the literature of the world."

So now death is romantic all of a sudden, and Lenore inspires the likes of Edgar Allen Poe and his big mood, along with a version of death that appears in his 1842 short story, Masque of the Red Death, wherein a bunch of rich people hole up and have a party in the midst of the plague.

But death still crashes the party, proving there is no escaping him no matter how clever you think you are.

But along with being a romantic force, both in the capital R and little R sense, we begin to see other trends diverge from this characterization of death as an inescapable evil.

First there is the nice, gentlemanly death.

He's here for your soul, but, you know, he's still a pretty chill dude, or lady.

In The Nightingale by Hans Christian Anderson, death is so moved by the titular nightingale's song, that he allows the dying emperor of China, whom she used to sing for, to live.

You see a more modern example of a nice death in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series.

Here, death is a gentle, kind person, who really treasures humanity and visits people as they are born.

She also subverts expectations.

She's not a scary, intimidating reaper, but a perky, goth gal pal, who lives and dies once every century just so she can empathize with mortals.

There's also a tradition of death as a gambler.

You can play a game with him for your life as seen in the Ingmar Bergman film, The Seventh Seal.

In this trope, Death is someone to outwit fool or best In the Bavarian story, Der Brandner Kaspar, by Wolfgang Xavier Franz Ritter von Kobell, someone tricks the Grim Reaper into playing cards for more years of life then gets the Reaper drunk and cheats to win even more years.

In Samuel Taylor Coleridge's, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Death plays a game of dice with another highly specific personified concept, Life in Death.

Death wins the ship's crew, while Life in Death wins the Mariner, giving him a fate worse than death.

Death is even personified in Richard Adams', Watership Down.

Yes, the book about rabbits.

Battle rabbits.

Rabbit mythology tells of a rabbit death god, who the hero of a fable escapes by exchanging his life for the lives of all of the other rabbits in his warren.

In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, we have the tale of the three brothers.

Death feels cheated because these brothers survive a dangerous feat.

Pretending to congratulate them for their ingenuity, he offers them rewards which ultimately lead to their undoing, except of course, for the humble brother who lives a full life, and at the end greets Death as a friend.

And that's where Harry's invisibility cloak comes from, Death.

And then there's the cliche that most of us are familiar with, Death the Reaper.

He reaps souls, like Charon.

It's nothing personal, he's just doing his job.

In Christopher Moore's 2006 novel, A Dirty Job, the business of death is the involuntary career path for many people who were once normal humans.

They become so-called death merchants and often they are quite comically inept at their job.

In Philip Pullman's His Dark Material series, deaths, emphasis on the S, act as ushers of human souls into the afterworld, but they're also tertiary characters.

They passively accompany a person throughout their lives like a demon, but stay hidden so as not to freak them out.

In The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, Death narrates as he watches the life story of a young girl growing up in Germany during World War II, and as he watches the often horrible events of her life and those around her unfold, he can't do anything about it.

Death notes that ultimately he is haunted by humans, and as he says in the book, "Even death has a heart."

And sometimes, Death appears as an actual main character, a hero even.

Yep, it's time to talk about Terry Pratchett.

Perhaps the most popular and beloved character of this type is Death in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series.

Over the course of the series, Death goes from a minor comedic character who's not very nice into a fully developed protagonist.

He takes on an apprentice.

He fosters cats.

He names his dear pale horse Binky.

He adopts a daughter and he has to watch her die and is powerless to stop it.

He reaps souls, but he has no more idea what happens after death than anyone else.

The idea of a complex nuance personification of Death ended up being comforting to a lot of readers.

Pratchett even received correspondence from terminally ill fans who felt some solace from his fictionalized Death.

In Pratchett's own words, "Sometimes I get nice letters "from people who know that they're due to meet him soon, "and hope I've got him right.

"Those are the kinds of letters that cause me to stare "at the wall for some time."

And when Pratchett died in 2015, his Twitter account announced his passing in the voice of a fictionalized Death that he himself created.

For most people, death is a hard, painful thing to even think about, and I think Pratchett's depiction of death, along with all of these examples to some extent or other, speak to people's desire to cope with it.

We will all die, and death itself is about as final and incomprehensible as a concept can get.

But exploring its relationship to living beings, whether figuratively or literally, speaks to our pressing need to understand it, our need to muse about it, put a face to it, even have fun with it.

The personification of Death, whether he's helping us laugh in the face of mortality, or even when he's a magnificent jerk, can be a comfort.

We've made Death a being so that we aren't alone, and so that we, in the words of Beedle The Bard, "May greet him as an old friend."