"To bury someone twice" [closed]

Does anyone know what the expression to bury someone twice means and where it comes from?

Solution 1:

The phrase could have a number of meanings, depending on context. In your example (of a person being constantly attacked, asking “why bury me twice?”) it suggests going too far, making more effort than is needed. Overkill would be a near synonym (and also death-related!).

The phrase features in a number of song lyrics, in the form of “you’re gonna have to bury me twice” or similar. Here it seems to be an example of hyperbole—the rhetorical use of exaggeration: “I’m so tough you’ll have to kill and bury me, then dig me up and kill me again”:

But take my advice; you'll have to bury me twice/ Cause the first time I won't rest easily

(Don’t Let Me Die, Flogging Molly)

Or perhaps “I’m so utterly dead burying me once won’t be enough”:

I’m so dead, you’ll have to bury me twice

(Bury Me Twice, Fear Death Experience)

The nearest to the phrase I can find in Shakespeare is similarly hyperbolic; perhaps this is the reference your friend was thinking of?

No, great king:/ I come to thee for charitable licence,/ That we may wander o'er this bloody field/ To look our dead, and then to bury them;/ To sort our nobles from our common men./ For many of our princes—woe the while!—/ Lie drown'd and soak'd in mercenary blood;/ So do our vulgar drench their peasant limbs/ In blood of princes; and their wounded steeds/ Fret fetlock deep in gore and with wild rage/ Yerk out their armed heels at their dead masters,/ Killing them twice. O, give us leave, great king,/ To view the field in safety and dispose/ Of their dead bodies!/

Henry V (act 4, scene 7)

Solution 2:

A Google Books search for the versions of the phrase "bury [someone] twice" produces only three unique matches, the first of which focuses on the question of what becomes of people supernaturally brought back to life by miraculous intervention. From "The Saints who rose with Jesus," in The Evangelical Repository (June 1859):

What became of these risen saints after their resurrection? Did they die again, was it immediately after their appearance to many, or did they live for some considerable time, and occupy themselves again with the world's affairs, as did Lazarus? If they died immediately, how were they buried? Had friends to bury them twice? Or did they return themselves and lie down again in the tombs from which for a little they had risen? If they went to heaven what may be the nature of their position there? Are they in the possession of fully glorified bodies, or are they still "waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God" in order to enter on complete enjoyment? These are not the least interesting questions connected with the subject. And it would ill become us, or indeed any, fathers or others, to speak dogmatically.

The "burying twice" in this instance is clearly not figurative—nor is it in the next example. From James G. Frazer, "Lecture II," in Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship (1905):

Again, if fate has decreed that a young girl should hereafter become a wife and mother, and should see her children descend before her with sorrow to the grave, she can avert the calamity as follows. She kills a grasshopper, wraps it in a rag to represent a shroud, and mourns over it like Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted. After burying the insect, she retires from the grave with the air of a person plunged in grief. Thenceforth she looks cheerfully forward to seeing her children survive her ; for it cannot be that she should mourn and bury them twice over.

The third instance seems to be figurative and perhaps an allusion to a commonplace, but I haven't been able to learn anything more about it. From William A. Fraser, "Owners Up," in Bulldog Carney (1919):

"I'm goin' to orate ; I'm gettin' plumb hide-bound 'cause of this long sleep in Walla Walla. To-morrow I'm pullin' my freight down the trail to the outside where men is. I got a cow-hocked whang-doodle on four hoofs named Horned Toad that can outrun anything that eats with molars in Walla Walla, from a grasshopper's jump to four miles. Now I've said it, ladies — who's next?"

A quiet voice at his elbow answered almost plaintively: "If you will take your paw off those yellow boys [a stack of gold pieces that the first speaker is offering as a bet on his horse] I'll bury them twice."

The meaning of "bury them twice" isn't clear here, though perhaps it amounts to "cover the money twice"—that is, "double the bet." In any case, I haven't been able to find any reference work that includes "bury [someone or something] twice" as an idiom.

On a separate tangent, I note that in some of the medieval Icelandic sagas, Icelanders had to bury a wicked or magically powerful person twice if the dead person showed signs of "walking"—that is, wandering about and making trouble at night after death. This was particularly a problem with bad people who were (foolishly) buried upright in their graves. The cure was to rebury them lying down, perhaps with a weight on their chest to hold them in place. If this, too, failed, other countermeasures might be tried. An instance of this phenomenon occurs in Grettir's Saga, as described in George Dasent's translation, excerpted in Archaeologia Aeliana (1865):

'There is a cairn upon the Ness,' said Oedun, 'which is both large and built up with heavy balks of timber, and therein is laid Kārr the Old, the father of Thorfinn. Father and son at first owned only one farm on the island, but since Kārr died he hath so walked again that he hath driven off all the bonders who owned farms here ; so that now Thorfinn owns them all ; but none of these bonders came to hurt over whom Thorfinn held his hands.' Grettir said he had spoken well, and 'I shall come here in the morning, and have those tools ready then to dig.' ... Grettir now broke up the [burial] mound, and he worked right well till he came down to the timber work, and by that time day had begun to appear. And then he tore up the timbers. Oedun now earnestly besought him not to go into the cairn, but Grettir bade him attend to the cord 'for I will learn,' he said, 'who dwells in this mound.' Now Grettir went down, and it was dark therein, and by no means a good smell. ... Grettir took all the treasure, and bore it away to the cord, and as he made his way out of the mound, something gripped him fast from behind. ... The 'cairn dweller' attacked furiously, and now Grettir saw it would no longer avail to spare his strength. ... Grettir took now the sword Jökuls-naut, and cut off the head of his opponent, placing the head behind the body to to hinder him from walking again ; and he went to the cord with the treasure, but found that Oedun was gone.

So Kārr might fairly be described as having been "twice buried"—once with his head on his shoulders, and once with it behind him.