Reaper Man

37

The harvesting battle between Death and the Combined Harvester has echoes of various similar contests in American folklore.

There is for instance the story of the legendary American lumberjack Paul Bunyan and the Lumber Machine. According to that legend (as told in the Disney cartoon, ahem), Paul realised, after a magnificent battle at the end of which the Machine had won by a quarter-inch more timber, that the age of the great lumberjacks was over, and he wandered off with his steed Babe the Blue Ox, never to be seen again.

There’s also the much older American folk song ‘John Henry’, which describes a similar contest in which John Henry beats the new steam-driven pile-driver (he was a railway builder, and drove in the spikes that held the rails down), but dies of the effort.