Thousand and One Nights

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Arabian Nights, The, also known as The Thousand and One Nights (Arabic: alf laila wa‐laila), originally a collection of oriental tales in the Arabic language that developed into a powerful vehicle for Western imaginative prose since the early 18th century (see oriental fairy tales). The collection has a long and convoluted history which mirrors its complex narrative structure; one amazing story evokes another, so that the reader is drawn into a narrative whirlpool. The development of the Nights from the oriental oral and literary traditions of the Middle Ages into a classical work for Western readers is a fascinating one. The notebook of a Jewish book dealer from Cairo around the year 1150 contains the first documentary evidence for the Arabic title. The oldest preserved manuscripts, comprising a core corpus of about 270 nights, appear to date from the 15th century. The tales in the collection can be traced to three ancient oral cultures, Indian, Persian, and Arab, and they probably circulated in the vernacular hundreds of years before they were written down some time between the 9th and 15th centuries.

The apparent model for the literary versions of the tales was a Persian book entitled Hazar Afsaneh (A Thousand Tales), translated into Arabic in the 9th century, for it provided the framework story of a caliph who, for three years, slays a new wife each night after taking her maidenhead, and who is finally diverted from this cruel custom by a vizier's daughter, assisted by her slave‐girl. During the next seven centuries, various storytellers, scribes, and scholars began to record the tales from this collection and others and to shape them either independently or within the framework of the Scheherazade/Shahryar narrative. The tellers and authors of the tales were anonymous, and their styles and language differed greatly; the only common distinguishing feature was the fact that they were written in a colloquial language called Middle Arabic that had its own peculiar grammar and syntax. By the 15th century there were three distinct layers that could be detected in the collection of those tales that formed the nucleus of what became known as The Thousand and One Nights: (1) Persian tales that had some Indian elements and had been adapted into Arabic by the 10th century; (2) tales recorded in Baghdad between the 10th and 12th centuries; (3) stories written down in Egypt between the 11th and 14th centuries. By the 19th century, the time of Richard Burton's unexpurgated translation, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1885–6), there were four ‘authoritative’ Arabic editions, more than a dozen manuscripts in Arabic, and Antoine Galland's translation that one could draw from and include as part of the tradition of the Nights. The important Arabic editions are as follows:

Calcutta I, 1814–18, 2 vols. (also called Shirwanee edn.)
Bulak, 1835, 2 vols. (also called the Cairo Edition)
Calcutta II, 1839–42, 4 vols. (also called W. H. Macnaghten edn.)
Breslau, 1825–38, 8 vols. (ed. Maximilian Habicht)

Galland, the first European translator, published a French translation, Les Mille et une nuits, in twelve volumes from 1704 to 1717. He relied on a four‐volume Arabic collection to which he added some stories told to him by a Maronite Christian Arab from Aleppo named Youhwnna Diab or Hanna Diab, who had also written down others in Arabic for him (‘Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp’ and ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ (1703–13). He had translated ‘The Voyages of Sindbad’ in 1701 and placed it in Mille Nuits after the ‘Three Ladies’. It is supposed that the Sindbad tales originated in Baghdad. Edward William Lane translated a judiciously selected compilation of the frame story into English, 30 of the long pieces, and 55 short stories (1839–41). Burton undertook the monumental task of translating ten volumes, The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night (1885), followed by a six‐volume Supplemental Nights (1886–8). The Burton edition features archaizing prose, frequent colourful coinages when translation failed, and astonishing anthropological footnotes. Enno Littmann translated and edited a scholarly German edition in six volumes, universally praised for its fidelity to the text and for its excellent notes.

The labyrinthine intertwined stories in The Thousand and One Nights are framed by a tale of a jaded ruler named Shahryar, whose disappointment in womankind causes him to marry a new woman every night only to kill her in the morning. The grand‐vizier's clever daughter, Scheherazade, determined to end this murderous cycle, plans an artful ruse. She tells the sultan a suspenseful tale each night promising to finish it in the morning. This narrative device of delaying unpleasant events by means of arousing the curiosity of a powerful figure is a constant feature in the stories themselves, e.g. the three shaykhs whose stories free the trader from the ifrīt, and the culprits who had disobeyed the three ladies' injunction not to question what they saw. Their curiosity compelled them to save their lives by satisfying their hosts' curiosity (‘The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad’).

Just as Scheherazade's tales inspire wonder and astonishment in the public, they awaken the same emotions in their fictitious audience, who typically menace the storyteller with demands for yet another story. Thus the frame story of Scheherazade and the Sultan Shahryar generates a parallel series of interpolated tales told to stave off disaster. Mia Gerhardt points out that the fairy tales in The Arabian Nights are classifiable thematically: powerful demon stories, talisman stories where a magical object protects and guides the hero, quest stories, transformation tales, and tales of demons under restraint.

In this vast collection there is only one true fairy, in the Persian story of ‘Ahmed and Perī Banū’, but there are frequent appearances of ifrīt, variously translated as ‘demon’, ‘genius’, ‘genie’, or ‘jinni’. Gerhardt distinguished fairy tales of Persian origin, in which a supernatural being acts independently and is in control of events, and Egyptian stories where these beings are subject to the possessor of a talisman or other magical object. In ‘The Trader and the Jinni’ a powerful ifrīt seeking revenge for the death of his son is deterred by a series of tales related by three passing shaykhs, who bargain for the presumed assassin's life.

A number of the tales deal with the transformation of humans into animals (frequently reversible). In ‘The Trader and the Jinni’, ‘The First Shaykh's Tale’ relates how a wife had changed her stepson into a calf and the boy's mother into a heifer. As a punishment she was transformed into the gazelle with whom he is travelling. In ‘The Second Shaykh's Tale’ his two black dogs had been his two unreliable brothers, before his wife, an ifritah, had transformed them. In ‘The Third Shaykh's Tale’ his adulterous wife sprinkles him with water and casts a spell that turns him into a dog. The daughter of a stall‐owner releases him from the spell and helps him transform his erring wife into a she‐mule, his travelling companion. ‘The Fisherman and the Jinni’ concludes with the tale of ‘The Ensorcelled Prince’ whose angry wife cast a spell changing him into a man of half‐stone, half‐flesh. She also transformed his entire realm into a lake, and his subjects into fish distinguishable chromatically (Muslims, white; Christians, blue; Magians, red; Jews, yellow). Galland had added two typical quest stories of Persian provenance in which the protagonist seeks a special object, ‘The Envious Sisters’ and ‘Ahmed and Perī Banū’, and also the familiar talisman tale ‘Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp’.

In regard to the development of the fairy tale as genre in the West, The Thousand and One Nights played and continues to play a unique role. From the moment Galland translated and invented Les Mille et une nuits, the format, style, and motifs of the so‐called Arabian tales had a profound effect on how other European and American writers were to define and conceive fairy tales. In some respects, the Nights are more important and famous in the West than they are in the Orient. Robert Irwin discusses this point in his chapter on the European and American ‘children of the nights’ in his critical study, and he shows how numerous authors were clearly influenced by The Thousand and One Nights: in France, Anthony Hamilton, Thomas‐Simon Gueulette, Crébillon fils, Denis Diderot, Jacques Cazotte, and Voltaire; in England, Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, William Beckford, Horace Walpole, Robert Southey, Samuel Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, George Meredith, and Robert Louis Stevenson; in Germany, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Hauff, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal; in America, Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe, and Herman Melville. In recent times such gifted writers as John Barth, Jorge Luis Borges, Steven Millhauser, and Salman Rushdie have given evidence of their debt to the Nights. In addition there have been numerous popular films based on the Nights such as The Thief of Baghdad (1924, 1939) and Disney's Aladdin (1994) as well as unusual contemporary anthologies, Susan Schwartz's Arabesques: More Tales of the Arabian Nights (1988) and Mike Resnick and Martin Greenberg's Aladdin, Master of the Lamp (1992), in which some of the more gifted American and British fantasy writers have experimented with motifs and characters from the Nights.

Bibliography

• Caracciolo, Peter L. (ed.), The Arabian Nights in English Literature: Studies in the Reception of The Thousand and One Nights into British Culture (1988).
• Gerhardt, Mia A., The Art of Story‐Telling: A Literary Study of the Thousand and One Nights (1963).
• Grossman, Judith, ‘Infidelity and Fiction: The Discovery of Women's Subjectivity in The Arabian Nights’, Georgia Review, 34 (1980).
• Hovannistan, Richard and Sabagh, Georges (eds.), ‘The Thousand and One Nights’ in Arabic Literature and Society (1997).
• Irwin, Robert, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (1994).
• Mahdi, Mushin, ‘Remarks on the 1001 Nights’, Interpretation, 2 (1973).

— Harriet Goldberg

Richard Burton
1885

The Arabian Nights, also known as The Thousand and One Nights and known in Arabic as Alf Layla wa Layla, is a collection of fables, fairy tales, romances, and historical anecdotes of varying ethnic sources, including Indian, Persian, and Arabic oral traditions. While their specific origins are unknown, it is certain that the stories were circulating orally for centuries before they were written down in the fourteenth century in a Syrian manuscript, housed at the Bibliotèque Nationale in Paris as of 2004.

The first printed edition of the tales, which was based on the Syrian version, was published by Fort Williams College in Calcutta and edited by Shaikh Ahmad ibn-Mahmud Shirawani, an instructor of Arabic at the college. The first European translation was by the French statesman Antoine Galland, whose editions appeared in twelve small volumes between 1703 and 1713.

The public response to Galland's work was positive and immediate: translations and versions of the tales spread throughout Europe. The first English translation was made by Edward Lane in 1841, followed by John Payne in 1881 and, most famously, by Sir Richard Burton in 1885. Burton, who relied heavily on Payne's earlier work (and is even said to have plagiarized much of it), published his version in ten volumes as a private edition of one thousand under his imprint of Kama Shastra Society. He later added an additional six volumes of supplemental material, which he called SupplementalNights. Burton's edition quickly sold out, providing him with his first profit ever as a writer, and he was in the early 2000s credited as the popularizer of the tales among English-language readers.

Historically considered by Arabic scholars as a form of "low brow" literature and rarely regarded for its literary merits, The Arabian Nights, in its many incarnations, was in the twenty-first century considered nonetheless a classic of Western literature and continued to be one of its most influential works.

The Plot Summary, Characters, Themes, and Style sections below discuss the stories from Book 1 of the The Arabian Nights.

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: a collection of folktales in Arabic dating from the 10th century
  Synonyms: Arabian Nights' Entertainment, Thousand and One Nights