Due To The Dead / Literature

Examples of Due to the Dead in Literature

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• 1632: In The Galileo Affair, Father Mazzare and Lieutenant Taggart find a body. Father Mazzare speaks a benediction over the body and Taggart joins in. Mazzare notes this with some pleasure, since Taggart is a Scots Presbyterian and more likely than not to denounce the Church of Rome as the Whore of Babylon, but also a fundamentally decent man who will not deny the dead what whoever speaks up considers the right words.
• Adrian Mole:
  • Adrian happens to be in a supermarket during the minute of silence for the war dead on November 11th, noting that cash registers are turned off, and an assistant on the cheese counter giggles after thirty seconds.
  • In Weapons of Mass Destruction, the family holds a minute of silence for the death of the New Dog, which everybody (apart from Adrian) believes was brought about by Adrian giving the New Dog a turkey bone.
• Andre Norton:
  • In Witch World, when Simon Tregarth is told that Koris went to bury the two men who died in the shipwreck, he feels ashamed of himself for not realizing that Koris would do that.
  • In The Year of the Unicorn, the Were-Riders laid out Herrel and Gillian's bodies with all honor — except their spirits made it back and revived themselves. Herrel is unmoved; they never respected him like that when he was alive.
  • In Ware Hawk, the heroine nearly stops to bury the dead before going on because they had found one survivor who had to take precedence.
  • In Ice Crown, the heroine sees the queen and her attendants in full mourning. Her ability to describe this clinches the accuracy of the vision in question.
  • In The Zero Stone, Jern and Eet's final destination proves to be a tomb. They talk of grave goods, and burial practices; Jern finds it hard to believe that the multiple species here had a common one, because there is so much in-species variation.
• Animorphs:
  • When the Andalites recover Rachel's body, they wrapped it up in a soft cloth as a gesture of respect, before bringing it back for Cassie and Naomi to identify. Compare to Visser Three, who killed his enemy, Elfangor, by eating him.
  • The death ritual Ax and his father go through counts as well. Ax's father asks if Elfangor died well, and Ax responds that he died in battle. Dad then asks if his killer is dead, and Ax takes the vow to avenge his death. (Tobias could have gotten in on it too, as Elfangor's son, but you don't hear much of the vengeance vow by the time that's revealed to Tobias.)
• This is the entire plot of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.
• In At the Crossing-Places by Kevin Crossley-Holland, sequel to The Seeing Stone, a Jewish moneylender is murdered on the manor of an English lord, ca. 1200. The priest and most of the others want to leave him for the dogs, but the protagonist (the squire to the manor's lord) gets someone to help him move the body inside a building, and when the lord gets home, he has the man buried just outside their own cemetery. A while later the man's young daughter comes looking to find out whether he's dead or alive. The squire shows her his grave, expecting her to be comforted that they gave him a semblance of a Christian burial, but of course she's dismayed because he should have had a Jewish burial by his family.
• The Belgariad: The main characters' friend Toth dies in the climactic confrontation of the Malloreon, so afterwards, they magically transform the site into a beautiful tomb and inter him with his favourite fishing pole.
• Blood Angels:
  • Deus Encarmine begins on, and Deus Sanguinius ends on, shrine worlds that the Blood Angels have dedicated to the graves of their dead. In between, Rafen goes to personally pay his respects to the dead Koris; the chaplain permits it, because while he carries out the proper rites, he is aware that many wish to do such for their friends. Rafen, Talking to the Dead, has Koris's communicator fall to his hand. He uses it, though aware that using a dead man's equipment is forbidden except under the gravest of circumstances; when he confesses to this, his superiors are grave, even though they concede that it was the gravest of circumstances and they must put the question aside until those circumstances are dealt with. Later, he goes to the ship to personally write Koris's name in the Book of the Fallen, which is usually done by the Sanguinary Priests, but is sometimes done by friends — and it's done in their own blood.
  • In Red Fury, a Blood Angel whose forbidden experiments had unleashed mutants was executed, and at the suggestion that his geneseed be removed, Rafen orders him merely cremated, as part of his sentence; later, Rafen and his squad are awe-struck to be in the presence of Sanguinius's tomb and are willing to fight to the death to protect it from mutants, and afterward, one of them is troubled that their Chapter Master opened the doors to let the mutants in, though it was necessary; and votive rolls hang in the Blood Angels chapel for all who died in the defense of the tomb, regardless of chapter, and though no one but Blood Angels had received that honor in living memory, it is nonetheless regarded as fitting, because they all died in defense of their common primarch's tomb.
  • In Black Tide, Rafen and his companions must leave a body, having not a grenade to burn it. Rafen assured him, dying, that he would tell his brothers that he lived to see the death of his foe.
  • In "The Returned", Tarikus, who had wondered why he was forgotten, sees he was properly commemorated with rites for the dead — which is a problem, since his Chapter holds that ghosts do not walk their citadel. Once declared free of taint, his first act is to break the memorial and use the knife there to cross out his name.
• At the end of the Bolo novel Bolo Brigade by William J. Keith, Bolo Freddy fires a salute over the destroyed hull of his companion Bolo, Ferdy.
• The Bone Maker: People of Vos burn their dead on funeral pyres to mourn them and to render their bones magically inert. Bone magic is a common industry in Vos, but the use of human bone is utterly taboo.
• In A Brother's Price, when the heroes find the naked corpse of a man, one of the leaders covers the body with her cloak, and it is arranged for the body to be transported back to the man's home, so that he can be buried with his wives, who were killed in the same attack where he was captured.
• In Brothers of the Snake, the Iron Snakes reclaim their brothers' gene seed and bring their bodies back as ashes to pour into the ocean; when a sea serpent rises from the waves after that rite, they hail it as a good omen, reclaiming the dead. Priad brings back accounts of their deeds, and commends them. Later, Khiron asks to be exposed to the sea serpents; if they ate him, his innocence would be proven, and they would mourn him with funeral songs and rites.
• Jane Yolen's The Cards of Grief depicts a culture where commemorating the dead is the central practice. (The corpses of the dead are exposed, and eaten by vulture-like birds.)
• Ciaphas Cain:
  • In Caves of Ice, Cain has to tell the troopers they cannot return with the body of a fallen soldier but must destroy it. Even Cain seems disturbed by the necessity; recording it, decades later, causes him to reflect sadly on the number of dead he knew, and whom no one else would remember as soon as he died.
  • In Death and Glory, Felicia Tayber carefully lays a vox communicator to rest — out of respect to its machine spirit.
• In The Chronicles of Amber, Corwin discovers the murdered body of a former lover who had been killed for a gift he gave her. He stopped his urgent journey to give her a respectful burial. Her murderer he tossed into the trees for the birds.
• Chronicles of Chaos:
  • In Orphans of Chaos, Quentin insists on burying bodies properly.
  • In Fugitives of Chaos, Morpheus recounts how he has performed, over the eons, the rites for his knights who died in the war — and how an enemy tried to incite his vassals to revolt, even though it would result in the death of Morpheus's son, with the promise that the son would receive full honors.
• The Cinder Spires: In a death world where the only safety is to live in giant spires, the people who traverse between spires in airships for trade or military, are called aeronauts. When they die in combat, both friend and enemy alike, are wrapped in cloth, set on a floating raft a few hundred yards away from the main ship. The ship then fires a blast of energy from their cannon to vaporize the raft to nothing but dust.
• In The Clairvoyant Countess, Madame Karitska lays flowers on Mazda Lorvale's grave.
• Codex Alera:
  • Princeps Septimus is laid to rest in a grand tomb created by his father near where he was killed in battle. As there was not much left for his remains, a marble statue lies on the coffin that contains what they could recover. Also laying there are his seven bodyguards who fell with him. His father, First Lord Gaius Sextus, creates it in one day with his own magical powers. It is filled with ever-burning fires, fresh water, fruit-filled trees, and the armor and weapons of the fallen. Sextus being Sextus, this had multiple purposes: it gave his son a fitting and glorious memorial, the sheer skill and power involved reminded all the nobility of just how powerful he was (and how much of a mistake crossing him would be), and as the protagonists later realise, it's a very useful sanctuary in one of the most dangerous areas of the realm, one where those loyal to him can recuperate and rearm.
  • In Academ's Fury, those who were Taken by the Vord Queen in Calderon are laid to rest in a cave and the cave sealed.
  • The Marat are seen to be barbarians by the human Alerans because they violate this idea and would eat their enemies' remains, some would even eat the people while still alive, to take the dead enemy's strength. However, from the Marat point of view, this is actually a matter of honouring them.
  • For the Marat, the mutilation of the corpse of their clansman, especially scalping, is a major Berserk Button as it is seen as stealing the dead's strength.
  • The Canim people sing blood songs for those who have died. They also sing them to those who have taken the role of Hunter, the spies, assassins, and scouts of the Canim, as to the rest of society, they are now dead. This alleviates them from the bounds of honor and duty the living must follow. When two die in battle taking down a powerful enemy, their brother, a fellow Hunter, doesn't even mourn them. The hero Tavi wonders about this out loud, then realizes there is nothing to mourn, for they died doing their duty and their sacrifices will save thousands if not millions of lives.
  • The Aleran warriors who fight on the northern borders against the powerful and deadly Ice Men are not laid to rest in the cold, hard ground. They are burned in a pyre so their bodies won't suffer the cold the hordes from the north inflicted upon them.
• Count to the Eschaton: In Count to a Trillion, this is the one element of religion that Menelaus admires. He reads a future without religion, and his only serious objection is how to conduct a proper funeral without someone to say something proper over the grave.
• The Daily Grind:
  • The liberated cameracondas keep enteral vigil over the body of the woman who saved them, perfectly preserving her corpse in their paralyzing glare.
  • The orbs of fallen Order members are preserved in a memorial in one of the basements.
• The Dark Profit Saga: Shadowkin burn their dead after a battle, but leave behind the bodies of their enemies to be attended to however the enemy sees fit. This causes a bit of Culture Clash; while Shadowkin know that enemy Shadowkin will allow them to return peacefully to attend to their dead, the Lightlings don't know that, and thus see this practice as an act of cruel disrespect, leaving the dead to rot in the sun.
• In the Darkover novel The Spell Sword, Damon regrets the dead bodies left out on the road; Ellemir consoles him with a proverb to the effect that if they are in Heaven, they cannot be grieved by it, and if they are in Hell, they have too much else to grieve for.
• In Dawn of War, Jonas characterizes the rite "Beacon Psykana" as an honor paid to the dead.
• Deryni:
  • The House of Haldane has a royal crypt below Saint George's Cathedral in Rhemuth. Various characters are seen paying their respects and leaving floral tributes. Kelson has Sidana buried there, despite the extreme brevity of their marriage.
  • The House of Furstán has the Field of Kings, "a vast walled necropolis" located near Toernthály. It includes the Nikolaseum, which is dedicated to Prince Nikola, who saved his elder brother Arkady's life in the Battle of Killingford in the eleventh century. Nikola's effigy is slightly larger than life-sized and is accompanied by a statue of Arkady grieving beside it. Also in the area is the Hagia Iób, a memorial church that contains the tomb of Furstán himself; Torenthi kings are invested at his sepulchre, which thrums with power.
  • Sir Sé Trelawney visits Marie de Corwyn's grave annually, leaving a floral wreath behind. They were engaged to be married when she was poisoned.
  • Morgan and his sister Bronwyn both visit the tomb of their mother Lady Alyce de Corwyn Morgan in Culdi. The tomb features a beautiful carved effigy of Alyce.
  • The twelfth-century Servants of Saint Camber use a series of caves for their tombs, and they retain burial customs from an earlier age. They place netlike shrouds over their dead with tiny stones or shiral crystals tied to the intersections, and the graves also contain offerings of food and drink.
• Discworld:
  • In Night Watch, we learn why some bodies in the cemetery are being treated with extra respect. And why they wear lilac. It was a badge used to distinguish Friend or Foe?, originally.
  • The Discworld's Silver Horde have a word for those who rob the graves of fallen warriors. That word is "Die!"
    • That being said, when the Bard nervously asks about using the skull of a fallen warrior in his new scratch lyre, Cohen - their leader - seems to feel that any ancient hero wouldn't mind as they'd find becoming part of an instrument to sing of great deeds to be one of the most awesome fates imaginable.
  • A nonhuman version occurs in The Fifth Elephant when Gavin, a wolf, went up against [[spoiler: Angua's brother Ludwig, and died. Gaspode finds his corpse, and has a natural instinct overtake his magically enhanced behaviour and howls. The howl carries for miles, and all know.
    "Shouldn't be like this. If you was a human, they'd put you in a big boat out on the tide and set fire to it, an' everyone'd see. Shouldn't just be you an' me down here in the cold."
  • In Men at Arms, we learn that dwarfs have to be buried with a very good quality weapon, to face ... whatever (dwarfs don't have much in the way of superstition, but there's no point taking chances). One dwarfish ghost insists that if it doesn't happen, he will wander the night in torment, despite Death trying to convince him he doesn't have to. Carrot makes sure he gets it.
• Don Camillo: In one of the early stories, the old schoolteacher Signora Christina dies, and asks with her dying breath to have her coffin draped in the flag of the old Italian monarchy. Several leading local political figures, both on the left and the republican right, protest this, until the Communist mayor Peppone declares that it's a good thing he is the mayor and not them, because he will make sure Signora Christina goes to her grave with her flag on the coffin, and personally kick the ass of anyone who tries to start anything over it. In the end, Peppone helps carry Signora Christina to her grave, flag and all, wearing the red scarf he wore as a Communist partisan. The narrator notes that even in places where the living fight for any and no reason, the dead are still respected.
• Dragaera:
  • Distinguished Dragaerans' bodies are brought to Greymist Valley and sent over the Blood River waterfalls known as Deathgate (which is a literal gate to their afterlife). Most often shown being arranged for Dragonlords who fall heroically in battle, even if (like Napper) they were killed with soul-destroying Morganti weapons and there's nothing left of them but a corpse.
  • Also, House Dzur maintains records on all its members who have died heroically, and inscribes their names on an official list in the imperial capital.
• In Dragon Queen, Trava buries her father and then says some words over him.
• In The Dresden Files, this happens a few times:
  • Even years after her death, Harry continues to visit and tend to the grave of Kim Delaney as his refusal to listen to her and her refusal to tell him what she was caught up in lead to her getting in over her head, resulting in her getting eaten by something he later killed (while it was a Mercy Kill and MacFinn was a Tragic Monster who was glad to die, when he reveals this to comfort Elaine, his internal monologue notes that that isn't what she needs to hear right now).
  • In Turn Coat, Warden Donald Morgan dies officially as a traitor to the White Council. No one can attend his funeral for the political implications. Those who knew him best and know he allowed himself to die with falsehoods smearing his name to protect the Council and people he cares for instead had a private wake where stories were told of him in a better light.
  • This is noted by Harry to be a consistent pattern of behaviour with the Winter Court, observing that Winter and Death are close cousins, and it's what tends to draw the most humanity out of them.
    • In Changes, Lea promises Harry to give Susan a good and proper burial Harry believed she was worthy of and would even take Harry there when he was ready. As his narration remarks, even in Winter, the cold isn't always bitter, and not every day is cruel.
    • At the end of Cold Days, Harry grants permission to Queen Mab to bury the fallen Summer Lady Lily, and her killer, and possessed by an agent of Mab's enemy, Winter Lady Maeve on the island Demonreach. His only stipulation was she gets the island's permission as well.
    • In Battle Ground (2020), Harry invokes/demands this of Mab for Murphy, after the latter is killed by a panicked Rudolph, having just taken out a Jotun with a rocket launcher. Mab, normally not one to take demands well, immediately acquiesces, stating that Murphy has fought by her side and shared her enemies and thus deserves it, and has her laid in state, with several Winter Sidhe warriors unhesitatingly stepping forward as pallbearers and saluting before departing . This, mark you, in the middle of a literally apocalyptic battle. Later, she is also included in a coffin full of pictures of everyone who died defending Chicago, buried in Harry's grave, with a headstone saying 'They Defended Chicago'.
• Dr. Franklin's Island has three teens surviving a plane crash that leaves bodies in the lagoon. Seeing a man she recognizes floating in the water, Semi desperately wants to pull him out and bury him, but they can't manage it. They are able to bury a stewardess who washes up on shore, but lacking good equipment they weren't able to dig a very deep hole.
• Dune: The Fremen place the bodies of the dead into machines which render them down and recover their body's water, which is then added to the tribe's stockpiles. This is regarded as not only practical (since water is so scarce on Arrakis that to let the water in a corpse go to waste is pointlessly foolish) but also a way of honouring the fallen Fremen, since they get to continue to serve the tribe even in death. It is considered a particular honour to be allowed to take the water of a non-Fremen, and the Fremen often dishonour enemies by either slitting their throats (thus wasting their water) or otherwise not reclaiming it since it is their way of saying that a fallen foe's water is not worthy of being drunk by the Fremen. When Paul Atreides attends the funeral of Jamis, the Fremen are awed when he shows the highest level of respect for Jamis by "giving water to the dead" (crying at the funeral).
• In the Eddie LaCrosse book The Sword-Edged Blonde, Eddie wants to test a theory that the king's son wasn't actually killed as alleged, and therefore wants to crack open the tomb. Objections are raised on the grounds that it wouldn't be proper, but King Phil agrees to it — and insists on being present, since then he'll know it was done respectfully. Eddie's right; the bones, on inspection, aren't those of a human baby.
• Eisenhorn: At the end of Malleus, Eisenhorn recounts the funeral rites for all those who died at the climax — varied, because of their varied cultures. They range from a vast library and institution dedicated to the name of one veteran inquisitor, to a single small headstone in a lonely, wind-swept mass grave for a Cadian Inquisitor. (It's a planet where ~90% of the population are in the military, and the graves are exhumed once the names are too weathered to read, to make room for more. Quite a depressing contrast.)
• The Elenium:
  • The knights find the body of a child killed by the Seeker. Kalten doesn't have a shovel, so he digs the girl's grave with his bare hands, and Bevier recites the Elene prayer for the dead.
  • Weaponized by Bevier at one point: after giving a guard captain an on-the-spot execution for insubordination, he intimidates the man's followers into obedience by leading them in prayers for the dead man's soul.
  • After Kurik's death at the end, Sephrenia uses her magic to prevent his body from decomposing prior to his funeral.
  • The weeklong mourning rites that the church goes through following the death of Archprelate Cluvonius.
• In Endless Blue, Mikhail concludes, after their crash landing, that they will have to bury the dead at sea: they cannot leave them about to rot where they must live. He finds it rather hard.
• In Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman's Fabiola, there are several instances of this. First there's Agnes's funeral after her martyrdom, in which her best friend Emerentiana is seen heavily grieving. Later, The Mole Torcuatus walks into the funeral of Cecilia, a blind Christian girl who was tortured to death after his Face–Heel Turn; he's so shocked and remorseful that he immediately returns to the side of good. By the end, we see the former Christian hunter Fulvius returning to Rome after years Walking the Earth, and the first thing he does is to heavily cry and pay his respects to Agnes's grave, since he ratted her out after she refused his marriage proposal and that's what caused her death in the first place.
• Fire & Blood: It's Targaryen tradition to cremate the bodies of their dead with dragonfire. Queen Rhaenyra does so to what's left of her half-nephew Maelor, despite the fact his father has tried to usurp her throne and kill her children, because he's still a Targaryen. Maelor's father shows Rhaenyra no such kindness.
• Gaunt's Ghosts:
  • In Sabbat Martyr, Gaunt insists on a naalwood coffin for Corbec.
  • In Blood Pact, the planet's major industry is commemorating the dead. Gaunt muses on why Ayatani Zweil is their chaplain; a big reason is his care for the dying and the dead. Later, Gaunt proves his identity by recounting how he had covered Sturm's face with a cloth after his death, as a mark of respect. Eyl contemplates how he must treat a dead man's mask with respect, to appease the ghost and the spirits. And at the end Dorden asks Gaunt to have his body brought back to a chapel and buried there.
• Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo Dao Zu Shi: The heroic characters' heartfelt approach towards the dead stands out in a story where many villainous or simply awful people don't bother respecting the deceased (or worse, going out of their way to kill them and desecrate them in brutal fashion).
  • Despite everything he did to Xiao Xingchen, the notorious murderer Xue Yang didn't desecrate his corpse and preserved it in a coffin, hinting that he truly did cherish the person and had some good in him beneath all that evil and murderous intent.
  • The junior disciples lack their parents' malice and grey morality, having very pure hearts and always wanting to show their good intentions even to strangers. This is demonstrated by the lengths they go to respecting the dead despite not knowing them:
    • After the Yi City Arc Villain Xue Yang is stopped and Wei Wuxian tells the junior disciples of what happened at Yi City, they are heartbroken and decide to show their respect to the deceased A-Qing and Xiao Xingchen by burning paper money in their honor.
    • When the Wen Remnants finally pass on and turn into ash, the one surviving member Wen Ning desperately tries to catch them. The junior disciples immediately go help him by emptying their pouches to collect the ashes so that he'll at least have his family's remains. This contrasts with the disciples' parents' generation, who had killed them these people and simply threw them in a blood pool as a sign of their hatred.
  • After Lan Sizhui recovers his memories as a Wen, he and Wen Ning set for (what's left of) Nightless Immortal Capital with plans to build a cenotaph in Wen Qing's honor and also bury the Wen survivors' ashes, finally giving their family the proper post-morterm respect they deserve.
  • Young Master Qin is introduced as a slight jerkass with a dismissive attitude towards servants. He temporarily has an issue with a fierce corpse trying to break into his household, and said corpse turns out to be a servant (specifically his, whom he had taunted and ordered to be beaten up before his passing). After the fierce corpse finally accomplishes its goal after several days of chaos, Young Master Qin is hinted to have seen the error in his ways when he goes out of his way to pay for the corpse's burial services.
• The Grandmother:
  • When the madwoman Viktorka dies, the Gamekeeper takes it upon himself to organize a proper funeral for her. It shows how much she is loved in the community for what she is worth, despite her troubled history.
  • The novel ends with the Grandmother's death at a ripe old age. Her family and the whole village mourn her and a large crowd turns out for the funeral.
• In The Graveyard Book, Liza Hempstock was accused of being a witch and thus was buried without a headstone. As a ghost, she is a bit despondent about this, so Bod attempts to get a stone to memorialize her properly.
• In The Great Divorce, one damned woman grieved so excessively over her dead son — keeping everything in his room the same, etc. — that her husband and daughter revolted. She is convinced that this was merely proper mourning.
• In the second Green Rider book, Karigan learns of a ritual the original Riders used to honor their fallen while traveling through time. At the end of the book, she restarts the tradition.
• In Grey Knights, Alaric gets permission to go where Ligeia died in order to say a prayer commending her soul to the Emperor. Earlier, his Rousing Speech says, "we may never be buried beneath Titan, so we will build our own memorial here."
• Harry Potter:
  • In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Cedric's ghost (or echo - it's a little ambiguous what he was) asks Harry to retrieve his corpse, and Harry does so, which his parents are deeply grateful for.
  • In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, many students want to attend Dumbledore's funeral.
  • In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry sees fallen Moody's magical eye on Umbridge's office door and is so enraged that he steals it back, which ends up helping to blow their cover. He later buries it under "the oldest, most gnarled and resilient-looking tree he could find", marking the spot with a cross on the trunk.
  • Later in the same book, he insists on digging Dobby's grave by hand, rather than using magic. He and his friends also remove pieces of their own clothing to give to his corpse: Harry himself gives Dobby his jacket, Dean gives Dobby his hat, and arguably the biggest clothes sacrifice of the three, Ron takes off his own shoes and socks, and gives them to Dobby. Griphook takes note of it, and is at least somewhat inclined to listen as a result.
  • This is something even Voldemort respects, allowing the school, besieged by his forces, time to mourn their dead - though that may simply have been part of a play to make him look like a Noble Demon and Harry to look like a Dirty Coward.
• In Orson Scott Card's short story "Holy", a Terran trade diplomat finds himself tasked to complete the death rite of an alien chieftain he is traveling with, namely taking the contents of the man's bowels to the top of the highest mountain. While being pursued by hostile rival tribes. Without use of his technology.
• Horus Heresy:
  • In The Flight of the Eisenstein, Garro finds that the bolter given to him had belonged to his dead comrade Pyr Rahl; he reflects on how the Death Guard pass on their effects from one man to the next, to remember the dead. Then he sees the belongings of his dead housecarl Kaleb, which no one else would want to claim. Though tempted to throw it all out and so be free, that would be ignoble; he goes through it instead.
  • In another novel, Horus is actually somewhat disgusted when Fulgrim presents him with the severed head of Ferrus Manus.
  • In Matt Farrer's "After Desh'ea" (in the book Tales of Heresy), Angron is enraged that he cannot get dirt from where he lost to add to his "rope" — how can he properly commemorate the dead?
  • In Horus Rising, the planet Murder had trees on which the aliens threw dead bodies before they ate them. One Marine was so horrified by the desecration of the corpses that he blew up some trees.
• "The Hound (1924)": Two corpses are treated to final rites.
  • Five hundred years ago, the Dutch graverobber was mauled to death in the graveyard. The locals, who may or may not have known about his illicit activities and may or may not have known him to begin with, buried him in a coffin in that same graveyard along with jade amulet found on his remains.
  • The narrator buries St. John after he was mauled to death in one of the manor's neglected gardens come midnight. As part of the final rites he bestows on his companion, he mumbles "over his body one of the devilish rituals he had loved in life."
• The Hunger Games:
  • Katniss adorns her ally Rue's corpse in wildflowers. Considering the blasé way the tributes' deaths are usually treated, this also serves as a rebuke to the Capitol, humanizing the fallen competitor in the normally disconnected Games.
  • The prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes depicts an earlier Games where the bodies of Tributes aren't removed from the arena when they die. Reaper Ash, the Tribute from District 4, takes it upon himself to arrange the bodies in a respectful way and cover them with flags from the arena walls.
• Hurog: In Dragon Bones, the heroes burn the bandits they encounter without much ado. When Ward finds the dead bodies of the population of a whole village, apparently used for an evil blood sacrifice, he burns them too, but also speaks a prayer, which is shown to actually have a spiritual effect in-universe — the funeral pyre burns much faster than would be normal.
• Inkmistress: Asra and Ina say prayers for the slain villagers together after finding them.
• Into The Broken Lands:
  • In the most popular funeral rite, the dead are buried, each participant adding a handful of dirt and a personal anecdote. People near the Broken Lands add flowers that ward against possession. Lyelee refuses to attend a significant funeral at the beginning, an early sign of her fatal Lack of Empathy.
  • In a flashback, one man's corpse is deliberately left out for scavengers, as his friends know he would want his remains to be scattered free, not confined in a grave.
• In "Iron Shadows in the Moon", in Olivia's dream, the Physical God, arriving too late to save his son, retrieves his body.
• Island's End:
  • After Lah-ame dies, the tribe members decorate his body with stripes of clay, tie him to his sleeping mat with bark ropes, and set him in the middle of the village for everyone to say goodbye to him. His body is left on a platform overnight so his spirit can say goodbye to it, and then buried. Afterwards, the tribe members throw a feast to celebrate his life.
  • After the tsunami kills the three visitors, the islanders scrape together as much of the remains as possible to give them a proper burial.
• Jackelian Series:
  • In The Court of the Air, after a tortured and murdered steam man was thrown into the river, his body was retrieved and given funeral rites before King Steam. Steam men's true names can be pronounced at these rites, though otherwise they remain unknown except to the bearer and King Steam. Thereafter they are recalled in the hymns of their people. When Slowstack laments that the steammen will not believe how the Hexamachina chose him, Molly promises to tell his story in penny dreadfuls to make them.
  • Commodore Black, lamenting his men's death on an island in the Backstory, recounts how difficult it was for him to bury them. (Though clearly it did not stop him.)
  • In The Kingdom Beneath the Waves, a lashlite (a dragon-like humanoid) is exiled for dooming his clan to damnation by not giving them the proper last rites. He pleads that he couldn't, as lashlite death rites require the dead to be eaten by their clansfolk, leaving "nothing for the enemy". He was the last one left alive out of hundreds, so he couldn't possibly eat them all.
• The Johnny Maxwell Trilogy novel Johnny and the Dead revolves about a plan to dig up a cemetery to replace it with a high-rise.
• In The Jungle Book, after Mother Wolf and Father Wolf died of old age, Mowgli kept their bodies in their den and rolled a boulder over the entrance so that their death sleep would not be disturbed.
• In Bernice Thurman Hunter's Lamplighter, a 1987 novel about a boy growing up on a farm in 1880s Northern Ontario, Willie, the protagonist, gets very upset on realizing that Gertie the goose, whom he had considered a friend or a pet, has been roasted for Christmas dinner. He refuses to eat of her, causing an altercation with his father, which his mother ultimately helps smooth over. She subsequently gives Willie the goose's bones, which he later buries.
• In The Last Chancers, Colonel Schaeffer scrupulously pardons all the dead of his penal legion. Not only does it give their families succor, it frees their souls before the Golden Throne.
• In Rick Cook's Limbo System, Father Simon prays for a dead Colonist.
• In Little Fuzzy, a human kills one of the Fuzzies and claims she was just an animal and attacked him. Then the other Fuzzies gather up her body, dig a grave, and gently bury her. A policeman who arrived in time to see the burial — and took off his beret in respect until it was over — takes this as evidence that the human should be arrested for murder.
• In Robert A. Heinlein's The Long Watch, Interplanetary Patrol Lieutenant John Dahlquist, after a superior attempts to recruit him into a coup attempt, instead makes a Heroic Sacrifice by barricading himself in the nuclear armory and manually disabling all the nuclear weapons, taking a fatal dose of radiation in the process. He dies alone, sitting by the door he barricaded. It takes handling gear and a robotic piloted ship to bring his corpse to Earth for a hero's funeral. Dalquist is referenced in a later story with a place of honor that every time the roll call for the patrol is read, his name is always read as on duty.
• The Lost Fleet:
  • The bodies of dead sailors are ejected into space on a course that will take them into the sun. The Alliance's religion is based around The Living Stars, so this is symbolically returning them to the stars from whence they came.
  • Averted for the bodies of traitors which are ejected into Jump Space in order to deny them the return to the stars. Although as one person points out this is mostly symbolic, if the ancestors or living stars want to find someone's soul they can, the Jump Space ejection is more about making a point.
  • In one book they have to deal with a large number of alien corpses but since they don't know what their burial customs are they settle for sending them into the sun as well in order to show respect.
  • Another alien species recovered the body of a human test pilot from one of the early failed Jump Space tests. They preserved it for several centuries until they made contact with humanity and could return the body to Earth.
• Important in Malevil. A day after World War III Colin, Meyssonier, and Peyssou leave the shelter of the castle to investigate their homes and recover their loved ones. They return with the remains of three families that fill a two by one box. Afterwards, they make sure to properly bury the remains of their enemies for both health concerns and to practice better morals and respect than that of brigands. At the end, Gazel is being pressured not to give Fulbert a Christian burial. Emmanuel intervenes because he doesn't want a modern day Antigone.
• A Good Is Not Soft version happens in The Mandarin Cypher after Quiller kills a Red Chinese agent. Their local contact asks for $2000 for Disposing of a Body with the proper rites. Quiller's handler coldly refuses this shakedown "as he was our enemy, not yours" so there won't be any funeral rites.
• In Memories of Ice, the fallen Bridgeburners are entombed in the ruins of Moon's Spawn when it is sent to die over the sea. It goes to show how much Anomander Rake and the other Tiste Andii came to respect them as comrades and friends.
• In Miserere: An Autumn Tale, Rachael and the others make arrangements for Pete's burial. Later, Rachael talks of making a cairn for a dead woman, and then sending someone to retrieve her body. She does this for the dead woman's brother, not for the woman's own sake.
• Hunters in the Monster Hunter International universe are given a ceremony when having fallen in battle that concludes with cutting off their head, when their death was due to an undead creature that reanimates the dead. Cutting off the head is the one absolutely guaranteed method of preventing reanimation or revival of the fallen.
• The Murderbot Diaries: Subverted in Network Effect, to the main characters' shock. An N.G.O. Superpower commander declines their offer to return the body of a subordinate who had been killed, telling them to dispose of it as they like. Their already low opinion of the Corporate Rim falls even further.
• Nero Wolfe:
  • When Nero's friend Marko is murdered at the beginning of "The Black Mountain", Wolfe asks the coroner for permission to honor an old promise he'd make Marko. When permission is given, Wolfe places two small coins on his friend's eyes. (He then heads off to Montenegro to hunt down the murderer, but that's a different trope.)
  • In Fer-de-lance when Maria Maffei goes to Wolfe to ask him to find her missing brother, she tells him that she has over a thousand dollars saved up, and that if he finds Carlo alive she will pay him all of it, but if Carlo is dead, she will pay less, because "First [she] will pay for the funeral." Wolfe not only considers this perfectly reasonable, he commends her for it and says she is "a woman of honor".
  • In the novella "Cordially Invited to Meet Death" (published in the omnibus volume Black Orchids), Wolfe sends a spray of extremely rare^note only three plants exist black orchids to the funeral of a client whose murder he could not prevent.
• The Night Circus:
  • Celia gets many condolence letters and flower because of Hector Bowen's death.
  • Tara Burgess's funeral has many mourners and many flowers.
• Orient Cycle: In the second volume, Durchs Wilde Kurdistan ("Through Wild Kurdistan"), a religious leader of zoroastric sect is killed and everybody helps in building a cairn, sort of, to bury him. This includes the very pious Muslim Hadschi Halef Omar, the servant, protector and friend of the protagonist.
• In the Paul Sinclair book A Just Determination, Herdez sharply tells Paul that they must investigate a sailor's death even though blame might fall on a friend of his; they owe it to the dead man. In Burden of Proof, Paul calls it to mind to encourage him to investigate another death.
• In Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Camp Half-Blood makes shrouds for campers who go on quests. They use them, too: for the corpses on the pyre, if recovered, and in place of the corpse, if it could not be.
• In Plato's Phaedo, when Crito asks Socrates how they should bury him, Socrates jests that they will have to catch him to do that, and then explains that they can't bury him, but only his corpse.
  Be of good cheer, then, my dear Crito, and say that you are burying my body only, and do with that whatever is usual, and what you think best.
• In William Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Turtle", many birds are called to the Meaningful Funeral, to show this.
  To this urn let those repair
  That are either true or fair;
  For these dead birds sigh a prayer.
• In Prince Caspian, the Dwarf Nikabrik teams up with a Hag and a Werewolf to resurrect the White Witch. After all three of them are killed in the melee that follows, Peter orders that the latter two be thrown in a pit, but that Nikabrik's body be given to his own people for burial rites.
• The Purple Cloud: After a Depopulation Bomb kills everyone in England, Adam visits his childhood home and finds the bodies of his mother and sister. He gives them a proper burial, unlike all the other bodies.
• In The Reader (2016), Sefia writes the name of Palo Kanta, the mercenary she killed in self-defense, on the windowsill of a bar he was meant to visit before she killed him, hoping that at least one part of him will survive.
• Zig-zagged for heartbreaking effect in Red Rising. Burying a Red is a crime punishable by death, and as such, the gallows are full of bodies in varying states of decay that no one dares to remove. This doesn't stop Darrow from stealing his wife's body and giving her a proper burial the night after her execution, but he is hung for defying Society law. Don't worry, he gets better.
• The Reynard Cycle:
  • In Defender of the Crown, Reynard shows a defeated Calvarian army a measure of respect by laying their dead to rest according to their custom: The dead are laid out respectfully in concentric circles with their weapons planted in the dirt near their heads. Ironically, his own army sees this as a sign of deliberate disrespect, as the convention in the South is to burn the dead. Leaving corpses out in the open is something they only do to criminals. It's implied that Reynard knew the effect this would have, and is having his cake and eating it too.
  • Later, Reynard requests that Isengrim be treated in a similar fashion (in the same location no less), but one of his Graycloaks objects, because "a blood-guard should be laid to rest with his own sword", and Reynard was going to lay him to rest with the blade that killed him. Reynard refuses to comply, stating: "He was no blood-guard." It's implied that he meant this as a compliment.
• The Riftwar Cycle:
  • In the first book, the only known truce between the Tsurani and Kingdom armies was during the Siege of Crydee. With all of the dead bodies piling up outside the walls, they need to dispose of the bodies before disease spreads. One squad of Kingdom soldiers goes outside the walls unarmed to erect funeral pyres. A few hours later, a squad of unarmed Tsurani soldiers leave their camp and help set up the pyres. After the bodies are burned, the soldiers exchanged salutes and returned to their own lines, at which point the battle resumed.
  • The bodies of the Nighthawks are always given a funeral pyre. This is not due to respect, though. Some Nighthawks are Black Slayers, and if you don't burn them, they'll come back from the dead and attack again.
• Semiosis:
  • As part of their symbiotic relationship with Stevland, a vast sessile Plant Alien, the human colonists on Pax bury their dead to fertilize him. For his part, Stevland grows flowers over the grave of a human with whom he grows especially close.
  • Marie's expedition insists on burying Roland's body and holding a funeral, even though the newly contacted Glassmaker aliens were prepared to eat it. This turns out to be a Secret Test of Character by the Glassmakers, which the humans passed.
• In Sharpe's Tiger, Sharpe shoots the Tippoo Sultan in the head and then starts looting his dying body — but decides not to take the man's jewel-encrusted sword, instead placing it in his hand, deeming him a Worthy Opponent (something he brings up on a couple of occasions in later books).
  "You can keep your sword, for you fought proper. Like a proper soldier." He stood up and then, awkwardly, because of his burden of jewels and because he was suddenly conscious of the dying king's gaze, he saluted the Tippoo. "Take your blade to paradise, and tell them you were killed by another proper soldier."
• In the medieval Chivalric Romance Sir Amadas, Sir Amadas pays a dead man's debts so that he can be buried. A White Knight appears to help him. After Sir Amadas has married a princess, the knight reveals that he is the ghost of the dead man, come to aid him as a reward for his deed.
• In Skin of the Sea, the Mami Wata are mermaids who collect the souls of people thrown from slave ships so they can be returned to Africa and united with Olodumare, the supreme creator. The bodies sink to the bottom of the ocean, where Olokun gives them a proper burial on the seafloor.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • After Tyrion arrives in King's Landing, he notes that the heads of those executed as part of Ned Stark's failed attempt to remove Joffrey, a bastard born of incest, and Queen Cersei from power are on display on the battlements. Tyrion makes a point of removing the heads, reuniting them with the bodies they had come from, and ordering the return all of the remains to their families, particularly the body of Ned Stark. He says, "Even in war, certain decencies have to be observed."
  • Ser Loras Tyrell tells Ser Jaime Lannister in A Storm of Swords:
    "I buried him [Lord Renly Baratheon] with mine own hands, in a place he showed me once when I was a squire at Storm's End. No one shall ever find him there to disturb his rest."
  • A Dance with Dragons has Stannis' army lost in the North as winter descends, and some of the men are driven to cannibalism. Even though it is clear to everyone that the cannibals had not actually killed the men (they were already dead from cold), and that they were literally starving to death themselves, this is considered such an abominable desecration that the cannibals are executed.
  • Thoroughly averted in The Princess and the Queen with the body of King Viserys, who is left to rot in his bedchamber for days, denied last rites and any sort of funeral preparations so the Greens can secure his son's succession over his older sister.
• So This is Ever After: Lila and Sionna insist the princess, along with the Vile One, get the funeral rites the local culture prescripes (cremation on a pyre) after they die. Arek is all for it in the latter case, so the Vile One can't come Back from the Dead with his magic.
• In the Soul Drinkers novel Chapter War, the Howling Griffins have the names of their dead engraved on the wall and carefully kept illuminated at all times.
• In The Stand, Frannie Goldsmith buries her father, a victim of the superflu informally called "Captain Trips", in the garden he tended with utmost care in life. It's a painful ordeal in every way from physical to emotional.
• In the Spiral Arm novel In the Lion's Mouth, Ravn promises Donovan that after they are done, she will personally escort him home, and arrange for a proper burial.
• Star Wars Legends gives us a number of different funeral customs.
  • In the X-Wing Series, the New Republic sometimes shoots dead servicemen into stars. Survivors of Alderaan often shoot their dead into the asteroid field that is all that remains of their home planet. Corellians, during the planet's isolationist era, while unable to return home, would cremate their dead, pressing the ashes into diamonds. Which are then set into the walls of a building on Coruscant, to recreate the star field as seen over their homeworld.
  • In Galaxy of Fear: City of the Dead, Necropolis and its people were cursed long ago and told that something terrible would befall them if they did not respect their dead. Consequently, they bury bodies instead of incinerating them, and insist on burying anyone who dies on Necropolis, tombstone included. They have elaborate traditions built around these things, even though most half believe at best. A villain takes advantage of these traditions to make zombies; he's killed fighting the protagonists, and his assistant dies mysteriously.
• The Stormlight Archive:
  • The Parshendi species consider it sinful to move the body of a fallen warrior from where it lies on the battlefield; noncombatants are wrapped in white linen and given sky burials on stone slabs. Kaladin triggers the Berserk Button of an entire Parshendi army by deliberately Desecrating the Dead and wearing their armour; conversely, Eshonai the Parshendi begins to consider Dalinar a Worthy Opponent when she sees him treat Parshendi dead with respect.
  • Alethi nobility like to honour their dead by dressing them elegantly, transmuting them into stone statues, and displaying them in their mausoleums. Some of them find the practice a bit macabre all the same.
  • The Alethi bridgemen, who are often assigned to menial duties when not being sent to carry bridges into Parshendi arrow barrages, are sent into the deep chasms of the Shattered Plains to recover the equipment of the soldiers who have fallen into the pits. The entire area is regarded with reverence, and while the bridgemen do have to loot the dead, they treat them with as much respect as they can, particularly if they find another bridgeman among the fallen.
• In the Thursday Next books, a wall carries the names of fallen Jurisfiction agents.
• In Till We Have Faces, Orual sets out to find her sacrificed sister's body, for a proper burial.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • In The Lord of the Rings, having no other options, they put Boromir's body in a boat and send it down a waterfall, as the river would keep the orcs from it.
  • In the Appendices, J. R. R. Tolkien recounts the War of the Dwarves and Orcs, which broke out after orcs killed Thrór, heir of Durin and desecrated his body. After the final battle of that war, the dwarves had to cremate their dead, being too numerous to bury them in the traditional stone tombs, and earth burials being unacceptable. As a consequence, to say of one's ancestor that "He was a burned dwarf" came to be a boast that he had fought and died in this battle.
  • It's made very clear that in the eyes of Men, dead Orcs don't deserve respect: at one point the characters encounter a battlefield where the victorious Rohirrim have piled the vanquished Orcs' bodies up and burned them, leaving an Orc's severed head on a spike.
  • Orcs don't respect their killed enemies either; one reason why Saruman fails to beguile Théoden in the chapter "The Voice of Saruman" is that the King is irate about the mistreatment of doorwarden Hama's corpse in the Helm's Deep battle.
  • In The Silmarillion, heroes like Tùrin Turambar are given great burial mounds. In "The Akallabêth" Númenórëans start to build great tombs for their dead after their decline and fall to pride. Their descendants in the kingdom of Cardolan (next to the Shire) reverted back to mounds: hence the Barrowdowns, and the Barrowwights.
  • The Fall of Gondolin: Glorfindel dies as protecting the refugees of Gondolin from a Balrog, and they raise a stone-cairn to remember him and his sacrifice.
• In the Tortall Universe, Stormwings are half-human, half-steel-feathered-bird immortals who thrive on fear and carnage. They'll circle over a site where they expect a battle will be, and after it's over, they eat the remains of the dead or mix them with their own filth and roll around in it. (A running theme in the books is how this isn't evil, it's just their nature, no matter how distasteful it is to humans. They were made to make war more horrific, with the so-far vain hope that it would put humanity off it.) Most victorious commanders will retrieve their own dead for a decent burial but leave the enemies to the Stormwings. Kel of Protector of the Small generally disapproves of this and is careful to dispose of even the enemy dead respectfully, but in Lady Knight, after winning a battle against a necromancer who murders small children so he can use their souls to bring war machines to life and sell them to a militaristic king, she lets the Stormwings have him and his men (saying that someone should get some good out of it). Fridge Brilliance: In Wolf Speaker, Daine learned that because it's so difficult for them to have children Stormwings value the young of every species. Aly even mentions Aunt Daine told her they like children when she sees Stormwings swooping down to rescue children about to be trampled in a mob in Trickster's Queen. Leaving Blayce and his men to the Stormwings could be argued to be one of the more fitting ends for him.
• Treasure Island: According to some of the pirate comments, not even Captain Flint would rifle the pockets of a corpse. This makes the way Allardyce's skeleton is used as a map point even more disturbing to them.
• Ultramarines:
  • Uriel goes to pay his respects before his primarch, Roboute Guilliman in stasis.
  • In Dead Sky, Black Sun, Uriel and Pasanius must restrain Leonid when he tries to prevent Ellard's body being eaten by the Unfleshed; they remind him that he swore to join their oath and that the dead man is before the Emperor and does not care about his body. Later, Uriel promises the dying Colonel Leonid that if he escapes, he will light a candle to help his soul wing its way to the Emperor. On the other hand, Uriel watches in complete indifference to the Unfleshed tearing apart the Iron Warriors and eating them; then, given the experiments that they had performed (and on the Unfleshed), he thought they deserved their fate.
  • In the short story Consequences Uriel spends five days inscribing the names of his fallen men into the stone pillars of the Temple of Correction. Afterwards, when he is arrested for breaking the Codex Astartes he thanks the Captain coming for him that he was allowed to finish writing the names. The Captain (who doesn't like Uriel) replies that it was not to do him a favour, but out of respect for the dead.
  • And in The Chapter's Due, after the renegade Vaanes died helping Uriel in a hopeless battle, Captain Shaan of the Raven Guard orders the apothecary to take Vaanes' gene seed, effectively acknowledging him as part of the Chapter for one last time, thus proving that Vaanes was not as alone as he thought.
• Under Heaven: Shen Tai picked his task of burying soldiers left on a distant battlefield as his form of respect for his father, who had died (before the start of the book). Later on, when the First Minister is killed, certain soldiers are relieved that he'll be buried, but without full honors. The burial (versus random unmarked grave, or even scattered ashes) is considered important, to avoid a vengeful ghost.
• The Undertaker: It is a point of personal honour for Barnaby Gold — who was an undertaker before becoming a Gunslinger — that he personally buries the bodies of every person he kills.
• An Unkindness of Ghosts: After Giselle's death, bystanders gather around and cover her with jackets. They carry her away on a stretcher to the Shuttle Bay, where Aster takes her to Earth and gives her a proper burial.
• In The Vampire Chronicles, Creepy Twins Maharet and Mekare are introduced in flashback visions, ominously kneeling on either side of an old woman's cooked corpse, holding its heart and brain on trays and preparing to eat her. As the visions get clearer, it falls out that consuming the body was their duty as the woman's daughters, as in their culture this was the only respectful way to handle the dead, the idea being that "what was human should remain with humanity".
• Vampire Hunter D: At the end of Pilgrimage of the Sacred and Profane, mercenary Granny Viper is murdered by an assassin after completing her last job, escorting a girl named Tae to safety. The next day, Tae drives a wagon carrying Granny Viper's coffin to the graveyard, with D escorting it, hat removed (despite him suffering greatly when exposed to sunlight). The lawyer who arranged the assassin expects the Bullow Brothers to kill D while he's vulnerable. Instead, they doff their hats and join the procession.
• In Variable Star, Joel carefully considers how to bury the body of a colonist who died in an accident. The soil on the farming deck isn't deep enough for a proper burial, and he worries that the goats will dig it up and drag it around. He ends up burying it as deep as he can, and placing bent springs and broken glass around the body to keep the livestock away. Later, another character shows considerable disrespect to a dead body by punching it in the face. Granted, this was because the man was a suicide who had just condemned them all to a slow death in deep space.
• In Velveteen vs. the Junior Super Patriots, Aaron jollies Velma into attending Diva's funeral out of respect for the dead.
• Villains by Necessity: Arcie, Sam and Kaylana all say prayers after Arcie's protege Kimi is killed while giving her a brief funeral before burying her, while Blackmail gently touches her body in a farewell. Even Valerie, who's been usually callous toward anyone else, says Kimi had guts and it was a pity she died.
• Vorkosigan Saga:
  • Barrayaran culture calls for burning offerings to the dead. They get mentioned a few times:
    • When Cordelia, in Barrayar, persuades a scientist, who considers himself above such superstition but feels haunted by the death of a colleague murdered in his laboratory, to gain mental peace by making an offering to the colleague anyway, and moves the surviving scientist to a new lab.
    • In "The Mountains of Mourning", after Miles had an infant disinterred to confirm that she'd been murdered, he realizes he doesn't have anything with him to burn. He thinks: Peace to you, small lady, after our rude invasions. I will give you a better sacrifice, I swear by my word as Vorkosigan. And the smoke of that burning will rise and be seen from one end of these mountains to the other. This tradition plays a part in the eventual punishment of the culprit.
    • When Miles burns an offering to his grandfather (with a bit of Rage Against the Heavens, as he's including his proof that he graduated the military academy, and yells "Are you happy now?").
    • An attempt to burn an offering to the same infant in Memory helps spark Miles's recovery from his life going off-kilter.
    • We hear in Komarr that prior to that book, Miles went with Duv Galeni to burn an offering at the site of the Solstice Massacre — where Duv's aunt died, and for which Miles's father was (mostly unjustly) blamed.
    • In Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, it's mentioned that at Aral Vorkosigan's funeral, his widow Cordelia cut off all her waist-length hair "nearly to the root" to burn as an offering. No protests were made and no questions asked.
  • In The Warrior's Apprentice, Miles Vorkosigan insists on burying Sergeant Bothari's body in a grave he dug himself. He explains to his mother that Bothari told him that "blood washes away sin," and he feels responsible for the death, so he literally works until his hands bleed. Cordelia's relative silence is interesting, given that she was the one who told Bothari that, in a very different context—to help him recover after he'd saved her life by killing his sadistic commander. This exchange also opened with Cordelia telling Miles that he could dig the hole in a few seconds with a plasma arc, something that Aral had told her when they dug the grave for her dead crewman, on the day they met.
  • Cetaganda takes place during the funeral rites of the Empress Dowager of Cetaganda. Miles and Ivan were sent to pay proper respects.
  • In A Civil Campaign, after some advice from Cordelia, Ekaterin gets Miles to agree to a small wedding: since she's a widow, they would have to wait for a large one.
  • In Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, it is explained that Lady Alys burns an offering for her late husband every year on the anniversary of his death, on the exact spot where he died (she has enough pull to get traffic diverted for an hour or so at dawn). Even worse, her husband was shot in the head with a nerve disruptor, which burned his hair, meaning she is reliving the same scent over and over. After Ivan gets married, she passes on the chore to him, if he wants to continue the tradition. (He decides not to, as it is a depressing way to start a birthday.)
  • Barrayarans also use funeral pyres for the most highly regarded of their dead: a young Gregor Vorbarra lights both his grandfather Ezar and his mother Kareen's funeral pyre.
• Warhammer 40,000 Expanded Universe:
  • In the Imperial Guard novel Cadian Blood, the Imperial forces are supposed to pray for the dead they find, and see to it that the bodies are burned, in order to give them some chance at redemption; they do not like it because it interferes with fighting.
  • In Anthony Reynolds' Word Bearers novel Dark Apostle, Brigadier-General Havorn of the Elysian Drop Troops explains that his men honour their dead by placing funerary tokens on their eyes and cremating their bodies. Magos Darioq of the Adeptus Mechanicus considers this an illogical waste of resources, and requests permission to recycle the dead into a nutrient paste for Darioq's Skitarii warriors. Havorn, furious, tells him to go to hell.
  • In Steve Parker's Imperial Guard novel Gunheads, when they find the murdered slaves, the Guardsmen stop to pray for them, and Bergen orders that their confessors see to the bodies, although they will have to be burned.
    • Colonel Strum tells van Droi that the men who died in a tank that fell over a cliff will be properly commemorated.
    • When his squad admit to Wulfe that they knew about the Dead Person Conversation that saved their lives, and that they were hurt that he didn't trust them with it, one says that they could have joined him in praying for the dead man.
    • In Nick Kyme's novel Salamander, Tsu'gan fights fiercely to protect his dead captain's body; the next chapter features all his company attending his funeral.
  • In Graham McNeill's novel Storm of Iron, Leonid cries at Vauban's funeral, not so much for the death as for the spontaneous attendance of his men. Vauban had said his men did not love him, but now he knows that to be false.
  • In the Ben Counter story "Words of Blood", Valerian objects to retreating. Athellenas threatens him with not only execution, but striking his name from the book of honor, no mention at the Feast of the Departed, and not reclaiming his geneseed.
• In Warrior Cats, a vigil is held overnight for the family and friends of a fallen warrior to say their last goodbyes, and in the morning, the Clan elders bury the body. There have been occasions where enemy warriors have been returned to their own Clans for their Clan to mourn them. There are exceptions, however. When Clawface (who had murdered a medicine cat) was killed in battle, it was decided that a couple of apprentices would bury the body, and no elders need be present, as his actions meant he did not deserve a funeral.
• Kit from What to Say Next wears one of her late father's work shirts to school about twice per week as a tribute to him.
• The White Bone: When an elephant dies, her family stands around her and sings mourning songs, sometimes for hundreds of verses.
• In Andy Hoare's White Scars novel Hunt for Voldorius, the White Scar scouts find unburied bodies and are distressed by the lack of respect for the dead; one wishes to bury the dead — even hesitating over a direct order — and his sergeant admits they should, but they cannot.
• In Lois McMaster Bujold's World of the Five Gods series, funeral rites involve using sacred animals — or a helpful saint — to determine which of the five gods has taken up the dead person's soul. This is taken up to another level entirely towards the end of The Hallowed Hunt.

Evil

• Andre Norton:
  • In The Time Traders, the prehistoric tribe is set to cremate their chief with great honor. Too great: they intend to kill Ross Murdock on it as a sacrifice.
  • In The Beast Master, Hosteen Storm taunted a character he had realized was an alien: recounting all the aliens' funerary customs and how he won't get them, because no one will realize he died.
  • In Forerunner Foray, Ziantha revives in the past the body of a war captive offered in Turan's tomb. Her companion revives Turan — and when they confront his widow, accuses her of disloyalty, since she had often pledged that she would bury herself with him, and instead sent him a mortal enemy.
• Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: The day after the British destroy a secret Hermes Society base, the main characters are horrified beyond words to see the British looting the ruins, leaving the dead in the rubble.
• One of the first scenes in the Belisarius Series is a vision Belisarius has of a Bad Future where the Malwa attack Constantinople using the bodies of Belisarius's wife Antonina, his stepson Photius, and his best friend Sittas as their banners. Belisarius isn't really disturbed by this: he believes that Sittas, Photius, and Antonina are in Heaven and doesn't care all that much what happens to their bodies — except that he does note that in this world, Antonina died of the plague, and the Malwa priests who dug up her body and are carrying it around probably aren't doing themselves any favors...
• In Stephen Hunt's The Court of the Air, steam men decry that humans loot their bodies. Silver Onestack is regarded as an abomination because humans cobbled him together from three steam men, whose souls are therefore held captive. King Steam and the steam men, while not willing to kill him, refuse to help him, and Silver Onestack thinks it's cowardice on his part not to free them by dying.
• As per history, Griboyedov's corpse is torn into pieces and mutilated in other fascinating ays while being paraded across Tehran by an angry mob in The Death of the Vazir Mukhtar.
• In L. M. Montgomery's Emily of New Moon books, the founders of a family, a couple, were immigrating, until the woman declared that she would not get back on the ship: "Here I stay." When she died, her husband had it written on her gravestone. (His family have therefore made it a rule that you never hold grudges against the dead, and always attend the funeral and the like.)
• Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series:
  • Ghostmaker, patrolling Ghosts find one of their number not only dead but mutilated.
  • In Blood Pact, Chaos forces unpack; they had used corpses and blood to seal up what they shipped — some of it inside the corpses. Later, Gaunt recounts how Slaydo's body had been mutilated after his death.
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: During the Battle of Hogwarts, Voldemort tries to make himself into the good guy by pausing the battle, supposedly so the heroes could collect their dead. Really, though, he's just waiting for Harry to come face him — and then proceeds to desecrate Harry's corpse after killing him. Except that Harry's still alive. Also, several characters express disgust at the fact that Voldemort broke open Dumbledore's tomb to obtain the Elder Wand.
• In The Iliad, Achilles secured Hector's body to his chariot after killing him, and circled the city thrice with the corpse in tow. For the era, this was regarded as crossing the Moral Event Horizon, and sealed his doom in the eyes of the gods. Now, Achilles is known more for how he died than how he didn't. However, after Priam, Hector's father came to him in person, Achilles regretted his actions, and gave Hector's body to him, so he did eventually have a proper funeral.
  • Said proper funeral is, in fact, the concluding episode of the Iliad; the final words of the epic are (up to slight variations in translation) "Such were the funeral rites of Hector, tamer of horses."
• In The Odyssey, Agamemnon tells Odysseus:
  As I lay dying, the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades.
• In Terry Pratchett's Pyramids, Pteppic is presented the case of a handmaiden who refused to be killed for the last king's funeral. When he asks if it was voluntary, the priest agreed that yes, it was, and she didn't volunteer.
• In The Silence of the Lambs, after shooting his captive prey Buffalo Bill skins (and in one case scalps) their corpses and dumps them in a river, where they wash up on the muddy shores bloated, rotting and nude. Hannibal Lecter, the novel's other serial killer, butchered, cooked and ate parts of some of his victims, but he also did other things with their bodies, often with an artistic element. When he escapes he kills the two officers guarding him and uses a pocketknife to cut the face off one of them to use as a disguise to get himself carried out of the building. In the movie the other officer is partially skinned and strung up on the bars of Lecter's cage to resemble a butterfly. Not only is this a reference to two important elements of Buffalo Bill's M.O., it is also a reference to a Francis Bacon painting.
• In A Song of Ice and Fire, after murdering Robb Stark in the Red Wedding, the Freys desecrate his corpse by decapitating it and sewing the head of his direwolf Grey Wind in its place.
  • Also as part of that same incident the Frey's dumped the body of Robb's mother, Catelyn Tully Stark, in the river as a mockery of the funeral customs of House Tully. That one is going to come back to haunt them...
  • In the fifth book, Lady Dustin reveals to Theon that if she gets her hands on Eddard Stark's bones, she'll feed them to her dogs.
• In "Sonnet 68" William Shakespeare laments the decline from the Good Old Ways; they did not use to take hair from corpses for wigs.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • The Lord of the Rings:
    • The siege of Gondor features heads, struck from the dead, being launched into the city via catapult to horrify the defenders.
    • In Two Towers when Théoden throws off Saruman's enchanting voice, he cites the mutilation of Hama's corpse (along with the dead children) as proof that Saruman does not deserve peace.
  • In The Silmarillion, we have such examples as Fingon's body being beating into the ground even after he dies, and Finduilas' body being pinned to a tree for her rescuers to find The Children of Húrin. And after the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, the bodies of the fallen Men and Elves are piled up into a hill as a monument to Morgoth's victory. There's also a thwarted example. After killing Fingolfin, Morgoth ordered his werewolves to tear apart his body and eat it, only for Thorondor to swoop in and carry Fingolfin's body away to where it could be properly honored.
• Under Heaven: At one point, Shen Tai is accused of Desecrating the Dead, by a Taguran soldier, but the soldier's commander upbraids him as an idiot that doesn't know what's going on.

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