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The Thousand and One Nights: Commonly Called, in England, The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, Volume 2 of 3
Translated by Edward William Lane. This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1865 edition by Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, London.
The original concept is most likely derived from a pre-Islamic Persian prototype that probably relied partly on Indian elements, but the work as we have it was collected over many centuries by various authors, translators and scholars across the Middle East and North Africa. The tales themselves trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Indian, Egyptian and Mesopotamian folklore and literature. In particular, many tales were originally folk stories from the Caliphate era, while others, especially the frame story, are most probably drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hazār Afsān. Though the oldest Arabic manuscript dates from the 14th century, scholarship generally dates the collection's genesis to around the 9th century.
Some of the best-known stories of The Nights, particularly "Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp", "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" and "The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor", while almost certainly genuine Middle-Eastern folk tales, were not part of The Nights in Arabic versions, but were interpolated into the collection by its early European translators. (From wikipedia)
The original concept is most likely derived from a pre-Islamic Persian prototype that probably relied partly on Indian elements, but the work as we have it was collected over many centuries by various authors, translators and scholars across the Middle East and North Africa. The tales themselves trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Indian, Egyptian and Mesopotamian folklore and literature. In particular, many tales were originally folk stories from the Caliphate era, while others, especially the frame story, are most probably drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hazār Afsān. Though the oldest Arabic manuscript dates from the 14th century, scholarship generally dates the collection's genesis to around the 9th century.
Some of the best-known stories of The Nights, particularly "Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp", "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" and "The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor", while almost certainly genuine Middle-Eastern folk tales, were not part of The Nights in Arabic versions, but were interpolated into the collection by its early European translators. (From wikipedia)
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* They are traditional stories not attributed to a specific author
* They are religious texts not generally attributed to a specific author
Books whose authorship is merely uncertain should be attributed to Unknown.
See also: Anonymous
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 6, 2025
I recently bought a vintage copy of this book in a junk shop because of the wonderful happenstance of its having been awarded as a Sunday-school prize by a local Methodist church exactly a hundred years ago to the day.
It struck me as being a curious choice for a school prize for several reasons.
It’s a tough book in terms of its readability with no concessions for younger, less confident readers. It’s written in a challenging archaic style - a kind of pompous, cod-medieval English - full of thee’s and thou’s (“What art thou waiting for? Get thee gone! Why dost thou not depart?” p89).
It also uses extraordinary words such as “anthropophagi” (p46) and “barmecide” (p70). And on top of all these obstacles, it’s printed in a small unattractive typeface with great blocks of text, hardly conducive to an easy reading experience.
The stories famously tell of an Islamic world with its religion and customs in full glory. It’s a work where Allah is supreme, not the Christian god. So a surprisingly broad-minded theological choice for a rural Methodist church a century ago - in contrast to the usual didactic tracts published for Sunday-school prizes by the doctrinaire and then all-powerful Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge.
The work is also notorious for its erotic content, with generations of adolescent schoolboys poring over banned copies to find the rude bits. Sadly I found no such sauciness in this version, so presumably some earlier process of bowdlerisation had taken place. Or perhaps I was just missing the sex that was hidden in plain sight? After all, pornography is in the eye of the beholder, as we learned from DH Lawrence.
The book does, however, contain numerous extremely bloodthirsty stories that we probably wouldn’t today consider entirely child appropriate. For example:
- The one-eyed giant who held a human victim “in one hand as I should hold a sparrow, and with the other ran a spit through his body; then kindling a large fire he roasted him and ate him” (p40).
- Captured men are drugged, fattened and eaten live by cannibals (p46).
- Spouses are interred alive with their dead partners in a deep pit where the living kill and eat each other (p50).
- The gruesome tale of the chopped-up body in a trunk (p73), many centuries before the infamous Brighton Trunk Murders.
- In one of the most famous stories in cultural history, the 40 thieves (technically 38 by this point) are in fact systematically burned alive with boiling oil while they’re hiding inside the Ali Baba baskets. This is after they’ve hacked Ali Baba’s brother, Cassim, into quarters and left the body parts nailed up as a gruesome warning (his dismembered body is later stitched back together by Baba Mustapha, the old cobbler - I don’t remember that bit in the pantomime, either).
There are also prejudices and attitudes aplenty that feel barbaric today. Women are generally treated shockingly, from 12-year-old brides (p19) to execution by jealous husband (p73). But then, too, there’s cruelty and ill treatment, on a scale from overwork to massacre, of animals, children, slaves, disabled folk, black people, enemies - in fact, to be honest, it’s brutal for pretty much everyone in the medieval world.
And if it’s men who appear to be in charge, they usually have powerful women at their sides, who know exactly how to get what they want, from jewels to extra curricular lovers. And of course, the stories only exist because it’s a woman, the super-intelligent and feisty Sheherazade, who devises her clever scheme to get one over her slow-witted and easily gulled husband. How brilliantly feminist is that!
Sheherazade weaves a magnificent tapestry of myths and fables, adventures and fantasy. Her fabulous beasts and monsters include:
- “Serpents so long and large that the smallest of them would have swallowed an elephant with ease” (p36).
- “Hideous savages, entirely covered with red hair, and about two feet high” (p39).
- Huge vicious birds called rocs, so gigantic they look like immense clouds (p52).
The stories tell of miraculous manifestations and transformations such as:
- A ten-year-old boy turned into a calf (p19).
- Two brothers transformed into black dogs (p26).
- The genie “assuming the figure of a large black cat” (p90).
- The aristocratic young Bedreddin Hassan, son of the Vizir, becoming a pastry cook (but through hard work, not magic, p100).
- Bakbarah, the Barber of Baghdad’s not-very-bright second brother, transgenders, having been persuaded by the most beautiful lady in Bagdad to have “his eyebrows painted, his moustache and beard shaved off and to dress like a woman” (p178).
- And perhaps the most famous manifestations in cultural history in the form of the Genie of the Lamp and the Genie of the Ring who appear when summoned, to grant Aladdin his very detailed wishes.
I particularly liked spotting connections with mythology from other parts of the world. For example:
- The island in the ocean that turns out to be a whale (p30) which also appears in the Middle Dutch epic of Sint Brandaan.
- The giant with “a single eye, red and fiery as a burning coal” in the middle of his forehead (p39), known as Cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey.
- The Old Man of the Sea who rides on sailors’ shoulders and strangles them (p54) like the shape-shifting, slippery water god, Proteus, in the Odyssey (and like the elusive marlin in Hemingway’s curious story).
But in a book that’s heavy in gore and violence, there are lighter moments too. I especially enjoyed the tale of the hunchback who choked on a fishbone and whose body the neighbours secretly dump on each other all through the night - a kind of Carry On Hide That Corpse. And the Barber of Baghdad made me smile wryly with his “tiresome conversation” (p165) and total lack of self awareness (how people don’t change).
Other humorous moments for me, not always intentional, were things like this:
- An elegant Persian merchant’s house is described as “terraced” (p26), presumably meaning it had tiered gardens - but it rather made me think of a row of back-street two-up, two-downs!
- Scheherazade explains why she wasn’t able to tell the last part of the Genie’s story with a literal matter-of-factness that made me smile: “As it has not yet come to my knowledge, I cannot repeat it” (p27).
- Bedreddin Hassan, the prince turned pastry cook, is alarmed to discover the reason why he’s to be executed (“Woe is me! Is it a crime worthy of death to have made a bad cheesecake?” p108).
- In a medieval world where bling is highly valued - the stories dazzle with ostentatious (and to be honest, rather tedious) descriptions of material wealth - I chortled at the description of the Caliph’s wife, Zobeide, “so loaded with precious stones and jewels that she could scarcely walk” (p141).
Although the book was awarded as a school prize - or perhaps for that very reason - it didn’t seem ever to have been read. The language, structure and lay-out didn’t make it very tempting. And I have to say, I found it quite hard going myself in places.
I’m not very good with the “mirror in the mirror” thing - in this case, the endless story about a story about a story. It was rather stressful constantly trying to remember where exactly in the narrative we were - who the “I” was, as Scheherazade repeatedly slipped from character to character.
Oddly enough, the thing that made a greater impression on me was listening at one point as I read to Rimsky Korsakov’s orchestral suite, Scheherazade, with its romantic harmony and iridescent chromaticisms …
It struck me as being a curious choice for a school prize for several reasons.
It’s a tough book in terms of its readability with no concessions for younger, less confident readers. It’s written in a challenging archaic style - a kind of pompous, cod-medieval English - full of thee’s and thou’s (“What art thou waiting for? Get thee gone! Why dost thou not depart?” p89).
It also uses extraordinary words such as “anthropophagi” (p46) and “barmecide” (p70). And on top of all these obstacles, it’s printed in a small unattractive typeface with great blocks of text, hardly conducive to an easy reading experience.
The stories famously tell of an Islamic world with its religion and customs in full glory. It’s a work where Allah is supreme, not the Christian god. So a surprisingly broad-minded theological choice for a rural Methodist church a century ago - in contrast to the usual didactic tracts published for Sunday-school prizes by the doctrinaire and then all-powerful Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge.
The work is also notorious for its erotic content, with generations of adolescent schoolboys poring over banned copies to find the rude bits. Sadly I found no such sauciness in this version, so presumably some earlier process of bowdlerisation had taken place. Or perhaps I was just missing the sex that was hidden in plain sight? After all, pornography is in the eye of the beholder, as we learned from DH Lawrence.
The book does, however, contain numerous extremely bloodthirsty stories that we probably wouldn’t today consider entirely child appropriate. For example:
- The one-eyed giant who held a human victim “in one hand as I should hold a sparrow, and with the other ran a spit through his body; then kindling a large fire he roasted him and ate him” (p40).
- Captured men are drugged, fattened and eaten live by cannibals (p46).
- Spouses are interred alive with their dead partners in a deep pit where the living kill and eat each other (p50).
- The gruesome tale of the chopped-up body in a trunk (p73), many centuries before the infamous Brighton Trunk Murders.
- In one of the most famous stories in cultural history, the 40 thieves (technically 38 by this point) are in fact systematically burned alive with boiling oil while they’re hiding inside the Ali Baba baskets. This is after they’ve hacked Ali Baba’s brother, Cassim, into quarters and left the body parts nailed up as a gruesome warning (his dismembered body is later stitched back together by Baba Mustapha, the old cobbler - I don’t remember that bit in the pantomime, either).
There are also prejudices and attitudes aplenty that feel barbaric today. Women are generally treated shockingly, from 12-year-old brides (p19) to execution by jealous husband (p73). But then, too, there’s cruelty and ill treatment, on a scale from overwork to massacre, of animals, children, slaves, disabled folk, black people, enemies - in fact, to be honest, it’s brutal for pretty much everyone in the medieval world.
And if it’s men who appear to be in charge, they usually have powerful women at their sides, who know exactly how to get what they want, from jewels to extra curricular lovers. And of course, the stories only exist because it’s a woman, the super-intelligent and feisty Sheherazade, who devises her clever scheme to get one over her slow-witted and easily gulled husband. How brilliantly feminist is that!
Sheherazade weaves a magnificent tapestry of myths and fables, adventures and fantasy. Her fabulous beasts and monsters include:
- “Serpents so long and large that the smallest of them would have swallowed an elephant with ease” (p36).
- “Hideous savages, entirely covered with red hair, and about two feet high” (p39).
- Huge vicious birds called rocs, so gigantic they look like immense clouds (p52).
The stories tell of miraculous manifestations and transformations such as:
- A ten-year-old boy turned into a calf (p19).
- Two brothers transformed into black dogs (p26).
- The genie “assuming the figure of a large black cat” (p90).
- The aristocratic young Bedreddin Hassan, son of the Vizir, becoming a pastry cook (but through hard work, not magic, p100).
- Bakbarah, the Barber of Baghdad’s not-very-bright second brother, transgenders, having been persuaded by the most beautiful lady in Bagdad to have “his eyebrows painted, his moustache and beard shaved off and to dress like a woman” (p178).
- And perhaps the most famous manifestations in cultural history in the form of the Genie of the Lamp and the Genie of the Ring who appear when summoned, to grant Aladdin his very detailed wishes.
I particularly liked spotting connections with mythology from other parts of the world. For example:
- The island in the ocean that turns out to be a whale (p30) which also appears in the Middle Dutch epic of Sint Brandaan.
- The giant with “a single eye, red and fiery as a burning coal” in the middle of his forehead (p39), known as Cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey.
- The Old Man of the Sea who rides on sailors’ shoulders and strangles them (p54) like the shape-shifting, slippery water god, Proteus, in the Odyssey (and like the elusive marlin in Hemingway’s curious story).
But in a book that’s heavy in gore and violence, there are lighter moments too. I especially enjoyed the tale of the hunchback who choked on a fishbone and whose body the neighbours secretly dump on each other all through the night - a kind of Carry On Hide That Corpse. And the Barber of Baghdad made me smile wryly with his “tiresome conversation” (p165) and total lack of self awareness (how people don’t change).
Other humorous moments for me, not always intentional, were things like this:
- An elegant Persian merchant’s house is described as “terraced” (p26), presumably meaning it had tiered gardens - but it rather made me think of a row of back-street two-up, two-downs!
- Scheherazade explains why she wasn’t able to tell the last part of the Genie’s story with a literal matter-of-factness that made me smile: “As it has not yet come to my knowledge, I cannot repeat it” (p27).
- Bedreddin Hassan, the prince turned pastry cook, is alarmed to discover the reason why he’s to be executed (“Woe is me! Is it a crime worthy of death to have made a bad cheesecake?” p108).
- In a medieval world where bling is highly valued - the stories dazzle with ostentatious (and to be honest, rather tedious) descriptions of material wealth - I chortled at the description of the Caliph’s wife, Zobeide, “so loaded with precious stones and jewels that she could scarcely walk” (p141).
Although the book was awarded as a school prize - or perhaps for that very reason - it didn’t seem ever to have been read. The language, structure and lay-out didn’t make it very tempting. And I have to say, I found it quite hard going myself in places.
I’m not very good with the “mirror in the mirror” thing - in this case, the endless story about a story about a story. It was rather stressful constantly trying to remember where exactly in the narrative we were - who the “I” was, as Scheherazade repeatedly slipped from character to character.
Oddly enough, the thing that made a greater impression on me was listening at one point as I read to Rimsky Korsakov’s orchestral suite, Scheherazade, with its romantic harmony and iridescent chromaticisms …
October 6, 2011
This is the story about Scheherazade who marries the sultan in order to stop him from killing his wives. He was married previously, and found out that his wife was cheating on him, so in order to get revenge, he would marry a new wife every day and have her killed the next morning. Scheherazade would tell the sultan a story each morning and end with a cliff hanger so that the sultan would want to hear the ending the next day. It reminded me of how television shows end the season with a cliff hanger in order to lure you back into watching it the next season. Who can forget the summer when we couldn't wait to find out who shot J.R. on Dallas? After telling story after story for 1001 nights, the sultan decides to keep Scheherazade around.
This was a very old edition of this book, and one thing I liked about it was the fact that it had a lot of footnotes explaining the terminology or the history of specific parts of the story. Something that disappointed me in the stories was the fact that in so many of the stories there is a beautiful, rich girl who is the most beautiful girl in the world, or the most beautiful girl ever seen. How realistic is that? Also, there seemed to be wealthy sultans or merchants in every story with rooms full of gold and jewels. It even mentioned one girl who wore so many jewels that she could hardly walk. Again, this was very unrealistic. But if you view these as fairy tales, then I guess you can have all the gold, jewels, and beautiful girls you want in them.
This was a very old edition of this book, and one thing I liked about it was the fact that it had a lot of footnotes explaining the terminology or the history of specific parts of the story. Something that disappointed me in the stories was the fact that in so many of the stories there is a beautiful, rich girl who is the most beautiful girl in the world, or the most beautiful girl ever seen. How realistic is that? Also, there seemed to be wealthy sultans or merchants in every story with rooms full of gold and jewels. It even mentioned one girl who wore so many jewels that she could hardly walk. Again, this was very unrealistic. But if you view these as fairy tales, then I guess you can have all the gold, jewels, and beautiful girls you want in them.
January 13, 2015
Volume 2 was even worse than 1. At least with 1, I had an expectation that I might encounter something interesting or enlightening, only to be disappointed. With this volume, the reading experience began and ended with disappointment, with a whole lot of disappointment in between. I wish I could be more linquistically descriptive about this awful experience, but my theasaurus is used up for words standing in for garbage, immorality, uselessness, and vacuousness. You know what this was? The Biblical Tohu v'vohu, chaos and emptiness. Much, much emptiness.
March 28, 2007
I was so young that i read it
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews