When the queen (whose adulterous behaviour initiates the whole story) summons her lover, we learn that: When, for instance, a old matchmaker returns with a sad face after a young man has sent her to represent his love to a girl he saw briefly on a 3rd floor balcony, Burton notes that her expression is but a ploy ‘the usual pander-dodge to get more money’.Īt times, reading 1001 Arabian Nights needs a tolerance for attitudes which are quite strange and despicable to a modern audience. Much of the references would be lost upon a modern audience unless they read the translations from Richard Burton, a remarkable traveler and anthropologist whose footnotes to the Nights are often more entertaining than the stories themselves. While familiar stories like Al-a-din (Aladdin), Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, and Sinbad the Sailor weren’t in the original Nights from the 10th century, they are part of the Middle Eastern storytelling tradition and so have squeezed their way into the modern versions of 1001 Nights – and, arguably, deserve their place for the richness of their fantasy and twisting plots.ġ001 Nights (sometimes called 1000 Nights and a Night) drew on old Persian stories, Indian tales from the Panchatantra and elements from Egyptian folklore, all diffused with the spirit of Arabic storytelling, pandering to the prejudices and beliefs of the age.
There are men who fall violently in love at the mere description of a fair woman ‘like the moon at its fullest’, kings whose richness is measured in the number of eunuchs (castrated slaves) that guard their harim, and saintly souls who cast no blame upon their persecutors, attributing all that happens to the divine will of Allah. The Nights are at once a treasure of Middle Eastern storytelling and an anthropological guide to the medieval Arabic world. She continued thus until she had born the king 3 sons and he had quite lost his heart to her and, declaring a grand celebration and inviting the poor to all come and eat at the palace, the king renounced his vow to never trust women and quit his murderous ways. After the marriage had been consummated, they lay back on the royal bed and, to pass the hours until her imminent death, Shahrazad began telling the king wondrous stories of love and destiny, of genies and mermaids, of gossipping barbers and scheming matchmakers – cutting short each tale just before dawn so that the king would let her live another night to hear the end of the story.
So things went on until he married the daugher of his chief advisor, a girl named Shahrazad. Httpv://He had his wife executed and then proceeded to marry every fair lady in his kingdom, making sure to secure himself from the treachery of women by putting each to death the morning after the marriage. There was once a king who discovered that no sooner had he left his palace than his wife called down her lover, a black slave, from the tree where he was hiding and began an orgy in the royal courtyard as all her servants also copulated with the other slaves.
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