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Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange
On the shrouded corpse hung a tablet of green topaz with the 'I am Shaddad the Great. I conquered a thousand cities; a thousand white elephants were collected for me; I lived for a thousand years and my kingdom covered both east and west, but when death came to me nothing of all that I had gathered was of any avail. You who see me take for Time is not to be trusted.'
Dating from at least a millennium ago, these are the earliest known Arabic short stories, surviving in a single, ragged manuscript in a library in Istanbul. Some found their way into The Arabian Nights but most have never been read in English before. Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange has monsters, lost princes, jewels beyond price, a princess turned into a gazelle, sword-wielding statues and shocking reversals of fortune.
Dating from at least a millennium ago, these are the earliest known Arabic short stories, surviving in a single, ragged manuscript in a library in Istanbul. Some found their way into The Arabian Nights but most have never been read in English before. Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange has monsters, lost princes, jewels beyond price, a princess turned into a gazelle, sword-wielding statues and shocking reversals of fortune.
496 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1000
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November 14, 2017
A series of tales (eighteen of them, to be precise) that aren't part of the Thousand and One Nights, but which are from the same medieval Arabian tradition and which could be slotted in there quite comfortably. So you've got your allotment of caliphs, viziers, marids, jinn and 'ifrits, to say nothing of handsome princes and lovely maidens aplenty. And nesting stories -- there's no single, unifying framing story (a la Scheherezade in the original Thousand and One Nights), but several of the individual stories have nested stories, sometimes three or maybe even four layers deep.
The prose is ... fine. It's challenging with this type of story, because it's written as a folk or fairy tale (and, of course, translated from Arabic), so there aren't really lengthy passages of action or description in the same way we're used to reading them now. But the translation is readable enough.
There's also a nice introduction explaining the sources of the stories & putting them into context, and a glossary of potentially unfamiliar terms.
Probably closer to 3.5 stars, were such a thing permitted.
The prose is ... fine. It's challenging with this type of story, because it's written as a folk or fairy tale (and, of course, translated from Arabic), so there aren't really lengthy passages of action or description in the same way we're used to reading them now. But the translation is readable enough.
There's also a nice introduction explaining the sources of the stories & putting them into context, and a glossary of potentially unfamiliar terms.
Probably closer to 3.5 stars, were such a thing permitted.
February 25, 2016
This book is so lovely that I might have bought it no matter what it was about. But then -- it's the first English translation of what is the earliest known collection of Arabic stories, at least a thousand years old, some of which made their way into The Arabian Nights, but many never read in English before.
I bought this book pretty early in my djinn obsession, but I'm very glad that I waited to read it. Even as I was reading these stories, and enjoying (most of) them, I kept thinking that I probably would not have been ready to deal with these a year ago. Stories so old are just different, no matter what culture they're from, and had I not some familiarity with this form, particularly from Al-Shaykh's One Thousand and One Nights retelling, I think I would have been at a loss. You know, with the horrific racism, and the "oh, well, he raped her, but he married her!" and "well, she cheated on me, so I cut off her nose." That stuff.
So, knowing what to expect, I found this peek into the history of storytelling delightful and fantastic. There was only one story that was all prophecies and god-bragging and this tribe shall defeat that tribe until this tribe is defeated by that tribe that was a slog all the way through and never had a moment of magic. It was work, of course, to read, but I felt duly rewarded for the work.
I bought this book pretty early in my djinn obsession, but I'm very glad that I waited to read it. Even as I was reading these stories, and enjoying (most of) them, I kept thinking that I probably would not have been ready to deal with these a year ago. Stories so old are just different, no matter what culture they're from, and had I not some familiarity with this form, particularly from Al-Shaykh's One Thousand and One Nights retelling, I think I would have been at a loss. You know, with the horrific racism, and the "oh, well, he raped her, but he married her!" and "well, she cheated on me, so I cut off her nose." That stuff.
So, knowing what to expect, I found this peek into the history of storytelling delightful and fantastic. There was only one story that was all prophecies and god-bragging and this tribe shall defeat that tribe until this tribe is defeated by that tribe that was a slog all the way through and never had a moment of magic. It was work, of course, to read, but I felt duly rewarded for the work.
January 26, 2017
(This is an abridged review from my blog.)
"Tales" is a collection of Arabic stories discovered by Europeans in 1933 in a manuscript created somewhere between the 14th and 15th centuries based on an original collection which probably came from some time in the mid 10th century with the whole thing translated into English for the first time in 2014.
The title page is missing, half the manuscript has been torn off and lost, the name of the person it was inscribed for is smudged and illegible and the scribe didn't seem to really know what they were doing so they get basic details wrong and occasionally drop us in and out of the stories at odd points.
We are talking here, of something like The 1001 Nights dirtbag tabloid cousin in which the fine qualities of relations between stuff have perhaps been sacrificed in the interests of having just more stuff.
This translation is half-way between "official" academia and popular taste. If you are used to the slightly bowdlerised, abridged and already somewhat-posher 1001 Nights then this may strike you are being janky, common, hectic, oddly written, uneven and really really rapey. There are some complaints about it being a bad translation on Goodreads, it’s possible those people are translation experts but to me it looks more like an accurate translation of a very weird original with all of the strange qualities of medieval text and the sketchy writing left intact. If you are an academic reader, well, if it’s your subject you probably already know about it and have the academic version. If you are an educated nobody (most of my readers) then it should be good enough for you. There is a half-decent index, that excellent intro and a list of potential extra reading.
There is a very good introduction by Robert Irwin, one complete enough that it’s hard not just to summarise it when talking about the text.
Boring Liberal Prophylactic First
There's lots of actual-rape where the writer calls it that, rape which writer didn't think was real rape but anyone reading it now certainly would, creepy stuff with slaves, lots of rather worrying stuff with slavery generally, lots of misogyny and some anti-black racism.
Christians, bizarrely to me, come out pretty well. Christian monks get rolled out as figures of wisdom, one of the final tales has a romance between two Christian rulers in Egypt I think? The storyteller does have the Christians having a chat with an idol of Baal, but this is represented as being just the kind of things Christians do sometimes? Who knows with those guys.
The literary quality of the tales varies, but if you are an omnireader then the interest in the tales is continuous since even the bad ones give us a glimpse into a really alien and strange world. The morality in the tales, and of the tales, is a little disturbing to modern senses.
Well that's your lot. I put that stuff in for honesty and so anyone sensitive to that stuff isn't tricked into buying it.
Cool Stuff For D&D Types.
Put simply, if they ever re-do the Al-Quadim for 5e then whoever does it will have to read this first. It has All New Ancient Stuff in it, and how often do you get to say that there is New Ancient Stuff?
And there are a lot of Things. Especially the kinds of Things relevant to TRPG's.
Treasure Hunting
Several of the stories in the middle are concerned only and entirely with treasure hunting in ancient tombs. These are so much like a game of D&D that it's fucking ridiculous and also, when you think about it, kind of interesting that they are that much like a D&D game, not only in incident but in the character of the seekers.
The adventures tend to be a bit railroady, usually an Ancient Text is discovered or translated by a handy monk and then out heroes are off on a journey to a forgotten mountain or something. Usually the POV character is following someone who reads from a specific book or text and uses this to find the dungeon and predict its dangers, so, a wierd statue or iron door is discovered and the leader figure checks it out in their book, tells our hero what to do, usually some redshirts doubt their wise guidance and are tempted by gems and die to prove how dangerous the dungeon is and how cunning its creators were. Then they do things the right way and the poison gas or whatever stops and they can move on.
One story has an actual NPC turn up, a horned magic man of an unknown species who lives around the dungeon mouth and whom the hero befriends to mixed effect.
Several tales finish with skeletons holding jade tablets describing the majesty of their former domains and giving exact circumstances in which one dead king thinks it reasonable to loot from his tomb. (All his family were losers and if you managed to break in and survive then you have already proved yourself better than them so feel free, but remember that treasure will only make you miserable in the eeeeennnnd).
Strange Islands
It’s a medieval standby but, thanks to their low latitude, the mystical islands from Arabic stories sound like much nicer places to stay than those in European Saints tales.
Get ready for castaways, more goddammn magic statues (I think *all* of the statues in this are magic), Jinn, freaky animals, odd currents, lost tribes etc. etc.
Speaking of which, there are lots of
Jinnnn!
One of my favourite parts is from the last story, (this is from a story *in* a story *in* a story, which is pretty much expected for "Tales"), the Princess Haifa has lost her Jinn lover who used to disguise himself as a white-footed deer in daytime and then get suggestive with her at night. She is wandering the world looking for him and encounters Hirmas, king of the ostriches (who is not an Ostrich);
“While I was in the shade of the trees, admiring their leaves and their fruit, I suddenly came upon a great red dome set over an ebony couch on which sat a grim-faced and frowning old woman wearing dyed clothes with ten jewelled bracelets on each arm, ten anklets on each foot and ten rings on each finger. She had a crown of red gold studded with jewels of all kinds. She held a sceptre of green emerald and flanking her on each side were two black 'ifrits with hooked iron clubs in their hands.
"I am the old queen of the jinn crows who part lovers and companions. My nature is rude and rough, and I have never shown pity to anyone. It is through me that husbands are parted from their wives, companions from companions, and lovers from their beloveds, and in every land I am represented by an emir of the crows."
That's the coolest one but they do appear in a variety of roles, sometimes as transformed animals with mysterious agendas, sometimes summoned with the use of a magic pearl inscribed with one of the hidden names of god, sometimes as lovers and sometimes simply as super-toughs for those villainous types for whom having 1000 Malmuks with iron clubs just wasn't enough.
Supervillain Hot Girls
We have quite a few horny, evil, magic-using women who use their wiles to bang hot guys but one stands out for joyous, brilliant sociopathy. A girl so evil she gets her name in the title "The Story of 'Arus al-'Ara'is and her Deceit".
'Arus al-'Ara'is so dark that inside the nesting element that borders her story (I forget how many stories deep we go in this one, but it might be the most extreme of all the tales, a story in a story in a story in a story, and possibly that one in another story) a caliphs daughter dies and he is so bereaved that someone promises to tell him the tale of 'Arus al-'Ara' as her deeds are so evil that hearing about them will teach him hatred for all women and girls. So, then he won't feel as bad about his dead kid.
The short of it is a child born under a bad sign and prophesied by 100 soothsayers to bring evil to her kingdom, compulsively fucks, betrays, outwits and murders a long long string of men. Along the way she also arranges the deaths of the 100 soothsayers as well as mass slaughter when she persuades a Jinn to burn her own city to the ground with magic sand because she was bored of it.
She ends up trapped on an island with her djinn lover until our hero gets washed up there. She hides him and sleeps with them both for a while, then gets bored of that and finds a way to kill the Djinn. Then she outright confesses her whole tale (this is about four or five stories down the stack).
She tells him outright that she obsessively sleeps with men and then, as soon as they irritate, oppose or bore her in any way, she arranges their destruction, and she's not promising to reform.
But she's hot so the guy takes her with him when he escapes anyway. You can probably guess the end of the story.
It's an interesting one as its written from a somewhat Lucifer-in-paradise-lost-esque perspective. Everything about the formal construction of the story tells us about how terrible she is but it’s pretty clear that the sympathies of the writer, and the audience, are with 'Arus al-'Ara', and not any of the string of boring men she destroys, and also because she seems broadly aware of her sociopathy, and almost a little sad, neither denying, declaiming or explaining it but simply describing what she is and has to be.
Treasure And Luuuuuxxxxurrrryyyy
The last thing of immediate interest to TRPG-types is the stupendous love of treasure, wealth, luxury, money and sweet high-status living. I seem to remember Rebecca West saying she respected the Islamic passion for luxury, (though she probably said it in a more flinty and condescending way) and that is seriously born out in “Tales”.
There is little here, of Christian worries about wealth and decadence. Having money is good. Having jewels and 'Robes of Honour' is good (people keep handing these out and I have no idea what they are), having more slaves is good, plus dancing girls, plus how about a private garden with imported wild animals, plus multiple thrones, one for when you are feeling merciful, and a death throne with an animatronic vulture that spits lead balls and two tigers (I couldn’t work out if they were automata or not) that tear to death those who have displeased you. (I did not make that one up, I think this one is from the story where a Prince goes to war with several ships full of Lions as his Vizier is a talking Lion, but the lions are beaten in combat because, to paraphrase his advisors; “Animals are dumb”.)
Five seconds of random flicking through got me this;
"When we reached the royal palace we went in and, after passing through a series of halls, we halted. Taking me by the hand, she lead me into a house the like of which I had never seen. It was like paradise, with walls plated with gold, and around it and them were statues of women each holding a musical instrument. It was furnished with all sorts of silk brocade, and at its upper end was a dais on which was a throne of red gold inlaid with various types of gems, sapphires, balkash rubies and emeralds.
The queen mounted the dais and took her seat on the throne, taking me up with her and seating me by her side, with her thigh over mine. For a time she issued commands and prohibitions, but then she called up a golden table encrusted with pearls and other gems, to which forty bowls of gold and silver were brought, containing various types of foods. As we ate she put spoonful’s in my mouth, and I kissed her hand until we had had enough. The table was removed, and we washed our hands after which golden trays were bought with scents, and then came girls carrying musical instruments, each of whom went up to one of the statues, with the girl carrying a lute sitting beneath the statue of a lute girl, the girl with a flute sitting beneath a flautist and the one with cymbals sitting under a cymbal player, each one underneath the appropriate statue. They all began to sing in unison until I thought the place was rocking with me as I looked at the splendour of this luxury."
In addition to this we find various magic crowns whose gems cast light that can stun all who look upon them, a variety of Jinn-summoning and controlling gems.
Interesting Structural Choices
From a writing perspective there are a lot of interesting things going on here.
Relentless Nesting
The most obvious and dominant distinctive element of the text is how willing the writer(s?) are to nest one story within another to an extent where the fracturing and interrelationships sometimes seem to take on a life of their own.
So, for instance, a sad Caliph will be unable to sleep and demand a story. His guys go and grab someone interesting-looking from outside, lets say a glass merchant. So ok, now the glass merchant has to tell the Caliph a story.
So they tell the caliph who they are and how they came to be here, and when he asks a question, well, it turns out that in important element of the Glass-Merchants life and adventures turns on meeting this unusual owl, that could talk. Well how did thathappen? Asks the Glass Merchant of the Owl.
So now the owl tells you its story. We get that for a while, but it turns out that at one point the owl was trapped in a tower with a beggar, and the owl asks the beggar (in the owl’s story, which the Glass-Merchant is telling to the Caliph) for his story, so now we get the beggar talking.
But the beggar is actually a ruined prince, and to find out why he’s being transformed we have to have a bit about the family drama with the sorcerer who hates his dad, so the prince (before he became a beggar) says, “Hey dad, how about that sorcerer who hates you? What’s up with that?”
And the dad says, “Well son, that’s quite an interesting story….”
And on we go. I think the deepest down we ever get is about five stories in but I’m not sure.
You could do quite a lot with this I think. You have multiple layers of story and continuity going on at the same time. The effect is weirdly intense and strangifying and quite baroque, especially when combined with;
Poetry Bits
Well you can’t just talk about romance in normal language can you?
So several of the stories have big, BIG, chunks that are given in poetry. Either two lovers talk to each other in poetry, they send each other letters in poetry or, in one particular story, each and every element that either lover wears has poetry embroidered on it and every time they take a pice of clothing on or off, or use a high-status object (which also has poetry on it) the story breaks out into poetry again.
(The translator makes no attempt to rhyme or use any similar structure in the translated verse, but they don’t think it was very good in the original anyway.)
The effect of this is really really odd and interesting. It reminds me a bit of watching Gaszes 6-hour silent film about Napoloean. Something about silent cinema really slows down your cognition to a different rhythm and adds a certain kind of voiceless intensity you wouldn’t get any other way. Like it has its own cognitive pulse.
Person Shifting and The Lacunae
Either because the scribe didn’t really know what they were doing or because that’s part of how it was written, the person of description changes fluidly between described second person, described third person and first person.
So we could have the Glass-Seller above describing how he met the Owl, then him describing the owls adventure like a typical second-person narrator, then suddenly it shifts and we get the Owls voice.
Is the Glass-Seller mimicking the voice of the owl in front of the Caliph? Fuck knows.
We also get some charming lacunae in the text marked (lac) which makes the whole thing even more like a jumpy black and white film where some scenes have been accidently dropped.
All of this combined with the nesting above produces this byzantine structure and feel which meshes really well with the mad, luxurious, violent, precarious, magical culture of the stories. Strange and luxurious in description and luxurious and strange in form as well. If I was going to rip off the genre I would start with those structural elements and see what I could come up with.
Well that’s three hours and its midnight, so farewell.
"Tales" is a collection of Arabic stories discovered by Europeans in 1933 in a manuscript created somewhere between the 14th and 15th centuries based on an original collection which probably came from some time in the mid 10th century with the whole thing translated into English for the first time in 2014.
The title page is missing, half the manuscript has been torn off and lost, the name of the person it was inscribed for is smudged and illegible and the scribe didn't seem to really know what they were doing so they get basic details wrong and occasionally drop us in and out of the stories at odd points.
We are talking here, of something like The 1001 Nights dirtbag tabloid cousin in which the fine qualities of relations between stuff have perhaps been sacrificed in the interests of having just more stuff.
This translation is half-way between "official" academia and popular taste. If you are used to the slightly bowdlerised, abridged and already somewhat-posher 1001 Nights then this may strike you are being janky, common, hectic, oddly written, uneven and really really rapey. There are some complaints about it being a bad translation on Goodreads, it’s possible those people are translation experts but to me it looks more like an accurate translation of a very weird original with all of the strange qualities of medieval text and the sketchy writing left intact. If you are an academic reader, well, if it’s your subject you probably already know about it and have the academic version. If you are an educated nobody (most of my readers) then it should be good enough for you. There is a half-decent index, that excellent intro and a list of potential extra reading.
There is a very good introduction by Robert Irwin, one complete enough that it’s hard not just to summarise it when talking about the text.
Boring Liberal Prophylactic First
There's lots of actual-rape where the writer calls it that, rape which writer didn't think was real rape but anyone reading it now certainly would, creepy stuff with slaves, lots of rather worrying stuff with slavery generally, lots of misogyny and some anti-black racism.
Christians, bizarrely to me, come out pretty well. Christian monks get rolled out as figures of wisdom, one of the final tales has a romance between two Christian rulers in Egypt I think? The storyteller does have the Christians having a chat with an idol of Baal, but this is represented as being just the kind of things Christians do sometimes? Who knows with those guys.
The literary quality of the tales varies, but if you are an omnireader then the interest in the tales is continuous since even the bad ones give us a glimpse into a really alien and strange world. The morality in the tales, and of the tales, is a little disturbing to modern senses.
Well that's your lot. I put that stuff in for honesty and so anyone sensitive to that stuff isn't tricked into buying it.
Cool Stuff For D&D Types.
Put simply, if they ever re-do the Al-Quadim for 5e then whoever does it will have to read this first. It has All New Ancient Stuff in it, and how often do you get to say that there is New Ancient Stuff?
And there are a lot of Things. Especially the kinds of Things relevant to TRPG's.
Treasure Hunting
Several of the stories in the middle are concerned only and entirely with treasure hunting in ancient tombs. These are so much like a game of D&D that it's fucking ridiculous and also, when you think about it, kind of interesting that they are that much like a D&D game, not only in incident but in the character of the seekers.
The adventures tend to be a bit railroady, usually an Ancient Text is discovered or translated by a handy monk and then out heroes are off on a journey to a forgotten mountain or something. Usually the POV character is following someone who reads from a specific book or text and uses this to find the dungeon and predict its dangers, so, a wierd statue or iron door is discovered and the leader figure checks it out in their book, tells our hero what to do, usually some redshirts doubt their wise guidance and are tempted by gems and die to prove how dangerous the dungeon is and how cunning its creators were. Then they do things the right way and the poison gas or whatever stops and they can move on.
One story has an actual NPC turn up, a horned magic man of an unknown species who lives around the dungeon mouth and whom the hero befriends to mixed effect.
Several tales finish with skeletons holding jade tablets describing the majesty of their former domains and giving exact circumstances in which one dead king thinks it reasonable to loot from his tomb. (All his family were losers and if you managed to break in and survive then you have already proved yourself better than them so feel free, but remember that treasure will only make you miserable in the eeeeennnnd).
Strange Islands
It’s a medieval standby but, thanks to their low latitude, the mystical islands from Arabic stories sound like much nicer places to stay than those in European Saints tales.
Get ready for castaways, more goddammn magic statues (I think *all* of the statues in this are magic), Jinn, freaky animals, odd currents, lost tribes etc. etc.
Speaking of which, there are lots of
Jinnnn!
One of my favourite parts is from the last story, (this is from a story *in* a story *in* a story, which is pretty much expected for "Tales"), the Princess Haifa has lost her Jinn lover who used to disguise himself as a white-footed deer in daytime and then get suggestive with her at night. She is wandering the world looking for him and encounters Hirmas, king of the ostriches (who is not an Ostrich);
“While I was in the shade of the trees, admiring their leaves and their fruit, I suddenly came upon a great red dome set over an ebony couch on which sat a grim-faced and frowning old woman wearing dyed clothes with ten jewelled bracelets on each arm, ten anklets on each foot and ten rings on each finger. She had a crown of red gold studded with jewels of all kinds. She held a sceptre of green emerald and flanking her on each side were two black 'ifrits with hooked iron clubs in their hands.
"I am the old queen of the jinn crows who part lovers and companions. My nature is rude and rough, and I have never shown pity to anyone. It is through me that husbands are parted from their wives, companions from companions, and lovers from their beloveds, and in every land I am represented by an emir of the crows."
That's the coolest one but they do appear in a variety of roles, sometimes as transformed animals with mysterious agendas, sometimes summoned with the use of a magic pearl inscribed with one of the hidden names of god, sometimes as lovers and sometimes simply as super-toughs for those villainous types for whom having 1000 Malmuks with iron clubs just wasn't enough.
Supervillain Hot Girls
We have quite a few horny, evil, magic-using women who use their wiles to bang hot guys but one stands out for joyous, brilliant sociopathy. A girl so evil she gets her name in the title "The Story of 'Arus al-'Ara'is and her Deceit".
'Arus al-'Ara'is so dark that inside the nesting element that borders her story (I forget how many stories deep we go in this one, but it might be the most extreme of all the tales, a story in a story in a story in a story, and possibly that one in another story) a caliphs daughter dies and he is so bereaved that someone promises to tell him the tale of 'Arus al-'Ara' as her deeds are so evil that hearing about them will teach him hatred for all women and girls. So, then he won't feel as bad about his dead kid.
The short of it is a child born under a bad sign and prophesied by 100 soothsayers to bring evil to her kingdom, compulsively fucks, betrays, outwits and murders a long long string of men. Along the way she also arranges the deaths of the 100 soothsayers as well as mass slaughter when she persuades a Jinn to burn her own city to the ground with magic sand because she was bored of it.
She ends up trapped on an island with her djinn lover until our hero gets washed up there. She hides him and sleeps with them both for a while, then gets bored of that and finds a way to kill the Djinn. Then she outright confesses her whole tale (this is about four or five stories down the stack).
She tells him outright that she obsessively sleeps with men and then, as soon as they irritate, oppose or bore her in any way, she arranges their destruction, and she's not promising to reform.
But she's hot so the guy takes her with him when he escapes anyway. You can probably guess the end of the story.
It's an interesting one as its written from a somewhat Lucifer-in-paradise-lost-esque perspective. Everything about the formal construction of the story tells us about how terrible she is but it’s pretty clear that the sympathies of the writer, and the audience, are with 'Arus al-'Ara', and not any of the string of boring men she destroys, and also because she seems broadly aware of her sociopathy, and almost a little sad, neither denying, declaiming or explaining it but simply describing what she is and has to be.
Treasure And Luuuuuxxxxurrrryyyy
The last thing of immediate interest to TRPG-types is the stupendous love of treasure, wealth, luxury, money and sweet high-status living. I seem to remember Rebecca West saying she respected the Islamic passion for luxury, (though she probably said it in a more flinty and condescending way) and that is seriously born out in “Tales”.
There is little here, of Christian worries about wealth and decadence. Having money is good. Having jewels and 'Robes of Honour' is good (people keep handing these out and I have no idea what they are), having more slaves is good, plus dancing girls, plus how about a private garden with imported wild animals, plus multiple thrones, one for when you are feeling merciful, and a death throne with an animatronic vulture that spits lead balls and two tigers (I couldn’t work out if they were automata or not) that tear to death those who have displeased you. (I did not make that one up, I think this one is from the story where a Prince goes to war with several ships full of Lions as his Vizier is a talking Lion, but the lions are beaten in combat because, to paraphrase his advisors; “Animals are dumb”.)
Five seconds of random flicking through got me this;
"When we reached the royal palace we went in and, after passing through a series of halls, we halted. Taking me by the hand, she lead me into a house the like of which I had never seen. It was like paradise, with walls plated with gold, and around it and them were statues of women each holding a musical instrument. It was furnished with all sorts of silk brocade, and at its upper end was a dais on which was a throne of red gold inlaid with various types of gems, sapphires, balkash rubies and emeralds.
The queen mounted the dais and took her seat on the throne, taking me up with her and seating me by her side, with her thigh over mine. For a time she issued commands and prohibitions, but then she called up a golden table encrusted with pearls and other gems, to which forty bowls of gold and silver were brought, containing various types of foods. As we ate she put spoonful’s in my mouth, and I kissed her hand until we had had enough. The table was removed, and we washed our hands after which golden trays were bought with scents, and then came girls carrying musical instruments, each of whom went up to one of the statues, with the girl carrying a lute sitting beneath the statue of a lute girl, the girl with a flute sitting beneath a flautist and the one with cymbals sitting under a cymbal player, each one underneath the appropriate statue. They all began to sing in unison until I thought the place was rocking with me as I looked at the splendour of this luxury."
In addition to this we find various magic crowns whose gems cast light that can stun all who look upon them, a variety of Jinn-summoning and controlling gems.
Interesting Structural Choices
From a writing perspective there are a lot of interesting things going on here.
Relentless Nesting
The most obvious and dominant distinctive element of the text is how willing the writer(s?) are to nest one story within another to an extent where the fracturing and interrelationships sometimes seem to take on a life of their own.
So, for instance, a sad Caliph will be unable to sleep and demand a story. His guys go and grab someone interesting-looking from outside, lets say a glass merchant. So ok, now the glass merchant has to tell the Caliph a story.
So they tell the caliph who they are and how they came to be here, and when he asks a question, well, it turns out that in important element of the Glass-Merchants life and adventures turns on meeting this unusual owl, that could talk. Well how did thathappen? Asks the Glass Merchant of the Owl.
So now the owl tells you its story. We get that for a while, but it turns out that at one point the owl was trapped in a tower with a beggar, and the owl asks the beggar (in the owl’s story, which the Glass-Merchant is telling to the Caliph) for his story, so now we get the beggar talking.
But the beggar is actually a ruined prince, and to find out why he’s being transformed we have to have a bit about the family drama with the sorcerer who hates his dad, so the prince (before he became a beggar) says, “Hey dad, how about that sorcerer who hates you? What’s up with that?”
And the dad says, “Well son, that’s quite an interesting story….”
And on we go. I think the deepest down we ever get is about five stories in but I’m not sure.
You could do quite a lot with this I think. You have multiple layers of story and continuity going on at the same time. The effect is weirdly intense and strangifying and quite baroque, especially when combined with;
Poetry Bits
Well you can’t just talk about romance in normal language can you?
So several of the stories have big, BIG, chunks that are given in poetry. Either two lovers talk to each other in poetry, they send each other letters in poetry or, in one particular story, each and every element that either lover wears has poetry embroidered on it and every time they take a pice of clothing on or off, or use a high-status object (which also has poetry on it) the story breaks out into poetry again.
(The translator makes no attempt to rhyme or use any similar structure in the translated verse, but they don’t think it was very good in the original anyway.)
The effect of this is really really odd and interesting. It reminds me a bit of watching Gaszes 6-hour silent film about Napoloean. Something about silent cinema really slows down your cognition to a different rhythm and adds a certain kind of voiceless intensity you wouldn’t get any other way. Like it has its own cognitive pulse.
Person Shifting and The Lacunae
Either because the scribe didn’t really know what they were doing or because that’s part of how it was written, the person of description changes fluidly between described second person, described third person and first person.
So we could have the Glass-Seller above describing how he met the Owl, then him describing the owls adventure like a typical second-person narrator, then suddenly it shifts and we get the Owls voice.
Is the Glass-Seller mimicking the voice of the owl in front of the Caliph? Fuck knows.
We also get some charming lacunae in the text marked (lac) which makes the whole thing even more like a jumpy black and white film where some scenes have been accidently dropped.
All of this combined with the nesting above produces this byzantine structure and feel which meshes really well with the mad, luxurious, violent, precarious, magical culture of the stories. Strange and luxurious in description and luxurious and strange in form as well. If I was going to rip off the genre I would start with those structural elements and see what I could come up with.
Well that’s three hours and its midnight, so farewell.
July 29, 2023
An excellent collection of medieval Arabic tales. Unfortunately there are gaps in the stories so some details are lost, but for the most part they are not significant. The translation is very readable and the poetry is moving.
April 12, 2015
I wanted to like this so much--I was very excited to read it.
The stories really suffer from the stiff, unnatural translation.
These stories are a rich source of material, and I am certain I will be using them in my work, but the actual reading experience was not what I had hoped it would be.
The stories really suffer from the stiff, unnatural translation.
These stories are a rich source of material, and I am certain I will be using them in my work, but the actual reading experience was not what I had hoped it would be.
February 13, 2020
Fantastic. Imaginative, refreshingly raw, oddly structured and frequently surprising. This one left me with imagery and story twists not to be found elsewhere. A book to be savored and reread for fun.
January 30, 2015
Firstly the edition itself is a pleasure.
'Tales of the Marvellous' may well be the oldest of all Arab story collections to survive, but some of the sub headings in the introduction by Robert Irwin give a fairly accurate idea of what is to follow: "Flaws and narrative incompetence','Misogyny and Rape', 'Deceitful Women', 'Racism'...The introduction ends '...they do not have the appearance of stories that first circulated orally before being written down, and neither are there indications that they were part of the professional storyteller's repertoire, and were told in the market place or on street corners. Instead, the tales, which display creative ingenuity and even at times erudition, must be classed as literature, Perhaps we should regard them as very early and impressive examples of pulp fiction.'
You could apply some or all of those those subheadings to many famous story collections but the most striking feature here is 'Narrative incompetence'. The danger with applying such a label is that it may simply represent the reader's failure to understand or respond to the narrative conventions that were common at the time. But usually it's possible to relax and acclimatise yourself to a different set of literary conventions over the course of a collection of stories. In this case, the majority of these stories feel like they were written by someone who knew what should go into a tale of wonder, but had no idea how to make the parts work or who to make 'strange'= 'marvellous'..
There are stories of treasure hunts, and the inaccessible treasure is protected by statues that come to life, but the writer simply inserts 'moving statue', then 'hero overcomes moving statue', then 'faces the next problem' which never really seems that problematic. Usually in stories like these there is the feeling that something is happening under the surface, that there is some kind of latent content which the storyteller may or may not be in control of, but which gives the surface details life and resonance. Not in these stories.
In "The story of the Forty Girls" our hero, cast into the desert for annoying his father, stumbles over a magical palace where there are forty beautiful women. They are all virgins. The hero has sex with one a night for forty nights, (and on the forty-first night has sex again with the first one, who is still a virgin.) He then escapes on a magic talking horse, who is the enchanted sister of the leader of the forty girls. Our hero passes a test, marries the younger sister of the talking horse, and after they all live happily ever after, he marries all three sisters. It's a list of events thrown together with a lot of fantasy sex and as such it's like reading the dreary sexual fantasies of a dull adolescent boy with literary pretensions.
Stories about wicked women are common in folk lore, but if none are as wicked as 'Arus Al-'Ara', few have been doomed to such a dull chronicle of their fantastic misdeeds. Her story is told to a grieving father to make him give thanks that his beloved daughter never grew up to be a woman. But if 'Arus Al-'Ara' has a career of evil on a scale that puts your usual wicked woman to shame, it's hard to care for her or her succession of human and non-human victims. Although it's supposed to be a story about female evil, it would be easier to read it as a description of male stupidity and gullibility.
While these stories were written by adults for adults, they may not hold a modern adult reader's attention except as historical curiosities. Or good examples of how a story can go wrong.
'Tales of the Marvellous' may well be the oldest of all Arab story collections to survive, but some of the sub headings in the introduction by Robert Irwin give a fairly accurate idea of what is to follow: "Flaws and narrative incompetence','Misogyny and Rape', 'Deceitful Women', 'Racism'...The introduction ends '...they do not have the appearance of stories that first circulated orally before being written down, and neither are there indications that they were part of the professional storyteller's repertoire, and were told in the market place or on street corners. Instead, the tales, which display creative ingenuity and even at times erudition, must be classed as literature, Perhaps we should regard them as very early and impressive examples of pulp fiction.'
You could apply some or all of those those subheadings to many famous story collections but the most striking feature here is 'Narrative incompetence'. The danger with applying such a label is that it may simply represent the reader's failure to understand or respond to the narrative conventions that were common at the time. But usually it's possible to relax and acclimatise yourself to a different set of literary conventions over the course of a collection of stories. In this case, the majority of these stories feel like they were written by someone who knew what should go into a tale of wonder, but had no idea how to make the parts work or who to make 'strange'= 'marvellous'..
There are stories of treasure hunts, and the inaccessible treasure is protected by statues that come to life, but the writer simply inserts 'moving statue', then 'hero overcomes moving statue', then 'faces the next problem' which never really seems that problematic. Usually in stories like these there is the feeling that something is happening under the surface, that there is some kind of latent content which the storyteller may or may not be in control of, but which gives the surface details life and resonance. Not in these stories.
In "The story of the Forty Girls" our hero, cast into the desert for annoying his father, stumbles over a magical palace where there are forty beautiful women. They are all virgins. The hero has sex with one a night for forty nights, (and on the forty-first night has sex again with the first one, who is still a virgin.) He then escapes on a magic talking horse, who is the enchanted sister of the leader of the forty girls. Our hero passes a test, marries the younger sister of the talking horse, and after they all live happily ever after, he marries all three sisters. It's a list of events thrown together with a lot of fantasy sex and as such it's like reading the dreary sexual fantasies of a dull adolescent boy with literary pretensions.
Stories about wicked women are common in folk lore, but if none are as wicked as 'Arus Al-'Ara', few have been doomed to such a dull chronicle of their fantastic misdeeds. Her story is told to a grieving father to make him give thanks that his beloved daughter never grew up to be a woman. But if 'Arus Al-'Ara' has a career of evil on a scale that puts your usual wicked woman to shame, it's hard to care for her or her succession of human and non-human victims. Although it's supposed to be a story about female evil, it would be easier to read it as a description of male stupidity and gullibility.
While these stories were written by adults for adults, they may not hold a modern adult reader's attention except as historical curiosities. Or good examples of how a story can go wrong.
May 14, 2015
Here comes another set of tales originating from the desert sands of the Middle East. Written along the lines of 1001 Arabian Nights, comes a collection of 18 tales found in Istanbul. The stories were written in Arabic and may have been written before the Arabian Nights collection. The stories themselves were incomplete in certain cases. Prior to launching into the tales the author or translator gives a little bit of a painfully long scholarly dissertation that analyzes the stories you will read.
The author/ translator notes that women are portrayed in a rather cunning trickster like manner . The Jews and Christians while having their religion as praised as decent are themselves written about in both positive and negative characteristics. Several of the stories feature Harun Hrashid , looking for a tale in Baghdad. He does drink and go about on his river boat in the Tigris and Euphrates River. Some of the tales feature beggars both as victims nd con men. Jinn feature larges in this set of tales as do travels by ship to islands on the Indian Ocean. Some of the tales take their travelers all the way to far out places like China and India.
The first story talks about two kingdoms owned by the same king . His son travels to th second kingdom and finds himself imprisoned wrongly by the vizier. The vizier gets his just deserts when the prince is free. The second tale is about the son o a quadi who parties away his inheritance and has to sell his beloved slave girl to survive . Later he wants her back and goes through all manner of adventure to retrieve her. The third tale tell the plight of six unfortunate beggars and how the sultan redeems them for telling a tale. The strange stories go on and on.
Several titles were missing and so they just use the first line of the story as a title. Almost all the stories strt with a prayer to Allah the most compassionate. While most of the stories had value and were entertaining some were really hard to follow sometimes switching scenarios with out warning and all of the sudden you are dealing with different characters and different scenes. The dampened my enjoyment of the tales. As all of you know giving a summary of a collection is rather tedious and difficult so if reading about the Jin and their world of the desert sand you may well find that this book is written for you.
The author/ translator notes that women are portrayed in a rather cunning trickster like manner . The Jews and Christians while having their religion as praised as decent are themselves written about in both positive and negative characteristics. Several of the stories feature Harun Hrashid , looking for a tale in Baghdad. He does drink and go about on his river boat in the Tigris and Euphrates River. Some of the tales feature beggars both as victims nd con men. Jinn feature larges in this set of tales as do travels by ship to islands on the Indian Ocean. Some of the tales take their travelers all the way to far out places like China and India.
The first story talks about two kingdoms owned by the same king . His son travels to th second kingdom and finds himself imprisoned wrongly by the vizier. The vizier gets his just deserts when the prince is free. The second tale is about the son o a quadi who parties away his inheritance and has to sell his beloved slave girl to survive . Later he wants her back and goes through all manner of adventure to retrieve her. The third tale tell the plight of six unfortunate beggars and how the sultan redeems them for telling a tale. The strange stories go on and on.
Several titles were missing and so they just use the first line of the story as a title. Almost all the stories strt with a prayer to Allah the most compassionate. While most of the stories had value and were entertaining some were really hard to follow sometimes switching scenarios with out warning and all of the sudden you are dealing with different characters and different scenes. The dampened my enjoyment of the tales. As all of you know giving a summary of a collection is rather tedious and difficult so if reading about the Jin and their world of the desert sand you may well find that this book is written for you.
December 17, 2025
Marvelous and strange to be sure. I bought this in an airport when I was eighteen and was so enchanted by it that in fact I did not touch it for another twelve years. Now has proved to be the perfect time. (Eighteen tales make good companions during a four-day illness.)
December 13, 2020
Fans of the 1001 Arabian Night anthologies take note! Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange is definitely from the same pedigree as Arabian Nights, and it is technically an older collection. It is a mysterious manuscript that was found in library in Istanbul around the 1930s. No one is actually sure how old the manuscript itself really is, but conservatives date it back to the 10th century. Even more mysterious, we cannot even be sure of the true title of this book as the title page was missing. Its current title comes from the first sentence of the first available page of the manuscript... So even before we begin reading the stories within we are greeted by ancient mysteries of the manuscript itself! And what a collection of stories! Just as the title suggests, this is a collection of Medieval Arabic fantasy stories. Very much in line with those you would find in a 1001 Arabian Nights anthology. In fact, a handful of the stories in this collection do appear in certain versions of Arabian Nights. Most of the stories however, are only to be found in this collection. And as with Arabian Nights, magic, Jinn, Viziers, and opulent treasures abound in the stories. Everything from love stories, fantastic travelogues, prophesies and the like can be found within these pages. And as the title suggest, all stories contain elements of the fantastical and aim to bring a sense of wonder to the reader. This is ancient Arabic pulp fiction! The particular edition I read was translated into English by Arabic scholar Malcolm C. Lyons, who renders the stories in a modern style. He provides an extensive glossary to aid understanding and he introduces the work with a fairly extensive look at common themes throughout the stories. 18 stories make up this collection, and a lot of them are in English for the first time. Many of the other reviewers keep comparing this to Arabian Nights, saying this is an inferior book. But I think they miss the point that the Arabian Night anthologies are not all the same, with many including or omitting stories from the original vast collection of stories that make up its canon, and also having various translations. The stories from this particular collection would not be out of place in any Arabian Nights anthology at all! And they clearly share the same sources anyway coming from the same period and culture. Although lacking the over-structure of Scheherazade telling the stories to save her life, I could easily imagine her relating these stories to keep her Sultan amused and keep her own head on her shoulders. Those who truly enjoy Arabian Nights owe it to themselves to check this book out as well. You will find it feeling very familiar!
Did not finish
November 11, 2020I read a fair chunk, out of historical interest, but the stories are so repetitive, cruel and uninteresting I can’t be bothered.
One think that stood out though, was how passive all these Princes are. Everyone else arranges the adventure for them, then when they get in difficulty they get rescued by a woman who has fallen for their beauty ( and then the Prince ***** her and every other woman he can access and finds to his surprise and delight they were still a virgin. Every time. I did say repetitive ). I guess this was written for people who thought of difficulties as something servants dealt with.
One think that stood out though, was how passive all these Princes are. Everyone else arranges the adventure for them, then when they get in difficulty they get rescued by a woman who has fallen for their beauty ( and then the Prince ***** her and every other woman he can access and finds to his surprise and delight they were still a virgin. Every time. I did say repetitive ). I guess this was written for people who thought of difficulties as something servants dealt with.
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July 24, 202410th
= كتاب الحكايات العجيبة والأخبار الغريبة
https://www.orient-institut.org/publi... ed. by hans wehr
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...
= كتاب الحكايات العجيبة والأخبار الغريبة
https://www.orient-institut.org/publi... ed. by hans wehr
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...
August 5, 2018
Fascinating to glimpse tales from over a millennium ago, but disturbing at the same time. I treasured reading "1,001 Arabian Nights" decades ago, but now I may need to return and refresh memories because I hope the tales were not replete with so many undeserving outcomes.
The primary difference between the two works is the underlying theme of Scheherazade..."Tales of the Marvellous" is simply a collection of short stories and suffers from the lack of the brilliance of that prompt for the tales. But what disturbed me was continuing references to women as little beyond objects of lust and how so many folks who emerge prosperous from the adventures were undeserving. In many stories people who committed sins, lacked trust, or demonstrated qualities well below virtuous emerged with blissful endings. Presuming these tales were linked to religious endeavors prompting high moral standards, the collection falls well short of the mark.
Most of the stories are creative and enchanting, but was "1,001 Arabian Nights" also populated by vagabonds reaping riches they did not deserve? My disappointment will likely drive me to revisit the earlier work...
The primary difference between the two works is the underlying theme of Scheherazade..."Tales of the Marvellous" is simply a collection of short stories and suffers from the lack of the brilliance of that prompt for the tales. But what disturbed me was continuing references to women as little beyond objects of lust and how so many folks who emerge prosperous from the adventures were undeserving. In many stories people who committed sins, lacked trust, or demonstrated qualities well below virtuous emerged with blissful endings. Presuming these tales were linked to religious endeavors prompting high moral standards, the collection falls well short of the mark.
Most of the stories are creative and enchanting, but was "1,001 Arabian Nights" also populated by vagabonds reaping riches they did not deserve? My disappointment will likely drive me to revisit the earlier work...
May 21, 2017
I do not think there is a proper way to review this book. As said in the introduction; this is not a book of fantasy stories, but one of stories that happened a long time ago according to the Arab culture.
Filled with religious elements, this felt a bit like reading passages from the bible. Marvellous tales with morals and belief.
For me it was a great collection to read, but sometimes a bit repetitive. The first story was less than the others and the last story was really good. The title says it all for me, marvellous tales with strange encounters.
It was very good for me to read something I wouldn't usually pick up and also something I don't see a lot of people reading. So overall this was a interesting and rewarding reading experience over the course of one week.
Filled with religious elements, this felt a bit like reading passages from the bible. Marvellous tales with morals and belief.
For me it was a great collection to read, but sometimes a bit repetitive. The first story was less than the others and the last story was really good. The title says it all for me, marvellous tales with strange encounters.
It was very good for me to read something I wouldn't usually pick up and also something I don't see a lot of people reading. So overall this was a interesting and rewarding reading experience over the course of one week.
July 21, 2018
I'm glad that I read this because it introduced me to ideas and ways of thinking with which I'm not that familiar, but since living in Indonesia I can relate more easily and appreciate more of the cultural nuances that stem from the concepts of hospitality and similar. Some of the stories are wordy and cumbersome, but most of them are engaging and interesting, as well.
June 14, 2020
A prototype of the Arabian Nights. Translated well by Malcolm C. Lyons and introduced by the prominent scholar Robert Irwin, I like this book despite of the hard-to-read font used awakwardly by the publisher for each Chapter. I enjoy my reading and thank you to Robert Irwin it is possible to me to imagine such intertextual reading with the Arabian Nights.
March 27, 2023
This is a fascinating collection of ancient tales, full of djinn, magic statues, talking animals, violence, war, and all sorts of adventures. The comparison with The Arabian Nights is intriguing, too.
November 15, 2024
The most notable story in the collection involves a highly antagonistic character named Arus al-Aris, who exhibits a penchant for malevolence. She just can't help herself! She's a regular black widow!
October 22, 2018
This is a extended collection of the 1001 Nights with more fantastic elements to the stories.I needed to find special edition for my personal collection.
May 4, 2019
Good, but long, and not as polished as The Thousand Nights And A Night.
June 24, 2021
I asked my library to purchase this in audio format. I found the translations excellent.
The Narrator, I found had a very pleasant voice.
The Narrator, I found had a very pleasant voice.
April 8, 2024
An interesting set of stories that are a sort of precursor to the 1001 Nights. They're not nearly as well polished or as intricate, but they have a lot of the same ideas.
April 17, 2015
A collection of Arabian tales from about 1,000 years ago probably from Constantinople (now Istanbul), former capital of the Byzantine Empire. They are strange by modern standards, are generally unpolished, and vary in quality, with a family resemblance to the Tales of the Thousand and One Nights and other ancient Arabic collections, some of these tales in common with those. The empire had experienced a golden age, becoming the largest and wealthiest city of Europe, but was coming into greater conflict with the Arab empire. The tales are not about the historical events of the time.
The authors of the tales liked magic, caves, handsome young men who could slay thousands single-handed, precious gems, virgins, the rising sun, the full moon, good food and drink, slaves, dirty tricks, fate, Muhammad, and God.
You might give this three stars only, unless you have a particular interest in Arab literature or history.
The authors of the tales liked magic, caves, handsome young men who could slay thousands single-handed, precious gems, virgins, the rising sun, the full moon, good food and drink, slaves, dirty tricks, fate, Muhammad, and God.
You might give this three stars only, unless you have a particular interest in Arab literature or history.
October 18, 2016
I like folk tales, myths, and legends, so I was excited to read this book. Many of these stories are wonderful, but overall the book suffers from some unevenness and a bit of repetition. (I recommend taking a break now and then for some other reading - coming back after some time away will renew your interest.) In some stories you will also have to suffer through some racism and misogyny which will be off putting for modern readers. But if you are willing to stick with it and give these stories your time, many of them will win you over. The narrative structure of many of them is very uneven, with abrupt changes in fortune and sudden interventions from God (not to mention nested stories within stories that sometimes seem to forget the original narrator), but this generally just adds to the charm of these fascinating tales.
October 2, 2016
I enjoyed reading 1001 Arabian nights as a child and it was fun. I remember retelling those stories to my younger cousins . This book has stories that are very similar. I like the idea that this is written potentially from the 10th century and it's overall exotic quotient but it isn't good literature. The stories fall into a few templates and characters and their society overall are very chauvinistic as you can imagine. My patience ran out after the first two stories .
February 6, 2017
Wonderful stories within stories. Amazing landscapes with a lot of treasure hunting. Some of the tales of women of deceit were at times a little disconcerting for a modern reader.
September 27, 2016
This certainly lives up to its title! The stories get a bit repetitive, but I took my time with it and ended up being delighted. Many thematic parallels to Shakespeare and general folklore, it was wonderful to steep myself in the stories of another culture.
March 26, 2015
Delightful stories that are done an injustice by clunky translating and screwy editing. Worth reading but requires more patience than I possess.
June 2, 2015
Arabic tales reminiscent of, but not as good as, those collected in The Thousand and One Nights. The translation reads very smoothly. A useful glossary is inluded.
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July 8, 2016892.73 T1438 2014
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