The Thousand and One Nights
The
Thousand and One Nights, also called The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment, this is a collection of Oriental stories of
uncertain date and authorship whose tales of Aladdin, Ali Baba, and Sindbad the
Sailor have almost become
part of Western folklore.
As in much medieval European literature, the stories—fairy tales,
romances, legends, fables, parables, anecdotes, and exotic or realistic
adventures—are set within a frame story. Its scene is Central Asia or “the
islands or peninsulae of India and China,” where King Shahryar, after
discovering that during his absences his wife has been regularly unfaithful,
kills her and those with whom she has betrayed him. Then, loathing all woman kind,
he marries and kills a new wife each day until no more candidates can be found.
His vizier, however, has two daughters, Shahrazad (Scheherazade) and Dunyazad;
and the elder, Shahrazad, having devised a scheme to save herself and others,
insists that her father give her in marriage to the king. Each evening she
tells a story, leaving it incomplete and promising to finish it the following
night. The stories are so entertaining, and the king so eager to hear the end
that he puts off her execution from day to day and finally abandons his cruel
plan.
Though the names of its chief characters are Iranian, the frame story is
probably Indian, and the largest proportion of names is Arabic. The tales’
variety and geographical range of origin—India, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, and
possibly Greece—make single authorship unlikely; this view is supported by
internal evidence—the style, mainly unstudied and unaffected, contains
colloquialisms and even grammatical errors such as no professional Arabic
writer would allow.
The first known reference to the Nights is a 9th-century fragment. It is next
mentioned in 947, of legendary stories
from Iran, India, and Greece. It is
clear that the expressions “A Thousand Tales” and “A Thousand and One…” were
intended merely to indicate a large number and were taken literally only later,
when stories were added to make up the number.
By the 20th century, Western scholars had agreed that the Nights is a composite work consisting of
popular stories originally transmitted orally and developed during several
centuries, with material added somewhat haphazardly at different periods and
places. Several layers in the work, including one originating in Baghdad and
one larger and later, written in Egypt, were distinguished in 1887 by August
Müller.
The first European
translation of the Nights, which was also the first published
edition, was made by Antoine Galland as Les
Mille et Une Nuits, contes arabes traduits en français. Galland’s
main text was a four-volume Syrian manuscript, but the later volumes contain
many stories from oral and other sources. His translation remained standard
until the mid-19th century, parts even being retranslated into Arabic. The
Arabic text was first published in full at Calcutta (Kolkata), (1839–42).
Aladdin.
The
son of a deceased Chinese tailor and his poor widow, Aladdin is a lazy,
careless boy who meets an African magician claiming to be his uncle. The
magician brings Aladdin to the mouth of a cave and bids him enter and bring out
a wonderful lamp that is inside, giving him a magic ring for his safety in the
meantime. Aladdin goes in and returns with the lamp but refuses to hand it over
to the magician until he is safely out of the cave. The magician thereupon
shuts him inside the cave with the lamp and departs. Wringing his hands in
dismay in the dark, Aladdin finds that he can summon up powerful jinn, or
genies, by rubbing the ring. He returns home and soon finds that rubbing the
lamp also produces genies. These supernatural spirits grant him his every wish,
and Aladdin eventually becomes immensely wealthy, builds a wonderful jeweled
palace, and marries the beautiful daughter of the sultan. After defeating the
attempts of the frustrated African magician and his even more wicked younger
brother to recover the lamp, Aladdin lives in longtime marital happiness,
succeeds the sultan, and reigns for many years, “leaving behind him a long line
of kings.”
The
story of Aladdin—like several other popular stories in The
Thousand and One Nights, such as the adventures of Sindbad the Sailor—was
not part of the original story collection.
Ali Baba. Fictional
character, the hero of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, one of the best-known stories in The Thousand and One Nights. Ali Baba is a poor woodcutter who secretly watches as 40 thieves hide
their booty in a cave, the door to which can be opened only by the verbal
command of “Open, Sesame!” He later uses this magic phrase, steals riches from
the cave, and lives a prosperous life. The thieves eventually suspect Ali Baba,
and they hide themselves in large oil jars that, with the unsuspecting Ali’s
permission, are stored overnight in Ali Baba’s courtyard.
When
the slave Morgiana goes to extract oil from one of the jars, she hears a robber
whisper. Morgiana realizes that the jars contain not oil but robbers lying in
wait to kill her master. She pours hot oil into each jar, thus killing the
robbers. Morgiana later saves Ali Baba’s life a second time, and in gratitude he
frees her. She marries Ali Baba’s son, and the entire family lives prosperously
on the wealth obtained from the cave that only they can enter.
