Personifying death as villains makes it psychologically manageable for children

Evidence

In many children’s stories, death is personified in bad characters. Wicked witches, goblins, trolls, ogres, and the like put shapes and faces on mortal terror; they make the idea of death—something abstract and difficult to imagine—concrete and manageable. Giving death a human form makes it easier to circumvent. If death were a person, he or she could be reasoned with, bargained with, tricked, or overwhelmed by one’s own superior wit or strength or that of a magical intercessor. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 142

Categorization

• XREF: Explains the cross-cultural ubiquity of death-personified gods and monsters; echoes of Voldemort’s name meaning in the next paragraph.

Related

• Children fear death more than parents realize they do (similarity 0.79)