Why do we hang on "like grim death"?

Question

The idiom to "like grim death" is widely understood to mean something such as:

like grim death = With great determination.
Oxford Lexico
‘we had to hold on like grim death’

Hence we find:

To hang on like grim death or hang on for grim death means to do something with extreme determination, to hold onto something very firmly. The idioms hang on like grim death and hang on for grim death appear around 1850, though the term grim death was coined by Shakespeare. The term grim death first appeared in The Taming of the Shrew, a play written in the very early 1590s. In the Induction, scene one, the Lord says: “Grim death, how foul and loathsome is thine image!” In this instance, the word grim means fierce, merciless or cruel, it is often used in this sense in the term grim reaper which is an anthropomorphization of death. The character in question in The Taming of the Shrew is not actually dead.
Grammarist

These two examples come from many similar. In none that I have found do I see any explanation why grim death, whether anthropomorphised or not, should hang on. and if so, hang on to what?
Any suggestions?

Greybeard · Accepted Answer

The adjective "grim" was a later, emphatic addition:
OED

P8(b)b. colloquial. Also like grim death. Frequently with to hold on, to hang on, etc.: with great determination or tenacity. Originally with allusion to death personified; cf. sense 1c (below).
1786   R. Burns Poems 25   Then Burnewin comes on like Death, At ev'ry chap.
1804   Lit. Mag. & Amer. Reg. June 178/1   Some one, in order to illustrate the obstinacy with which a bailiff adhered to an ill-fated debtor, observed, that he stuck to him like grim Death to a dead cat.
1867   Illustr. Mag. 23 118/1   He clung to the poacher like grim death.
2007   C. Stross Halting State (2008) 140   She ducks, still holding on to her hilts like grim death.

1.c.(Death) Regarded as an animate agent, often (frequently with capital initial) as a personification (usually visualized as a skeleton, now esp. one with a black hooded cloak and a scythe; cf. grim reaper n. at grim adj.

Death was seen as a relentless pursuer - one who would never fail to capture and never release his victim.

LPH · Answer

From time immemorial, all that has been endowed with life is as soon as its birth promised to death, never free from the menace of death until, always, a final decisive onslaught; there is no exception, and this inexorable action of death which is rendered by "grim", meaning "sternly serious", is figuratively seen as the inescapable possessive grip (hold on) of a relentless entity (death) on all that lives.

Answered by LPH on September 26, 2021

Why do we hang on "like grim death"?

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