Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange (Hardcover Classics) (2 page)

The Thousand and One Nights
does not contain 1,001 stories. The number of stories varies according to what one counts as story and which edition one is reading, but in Richard Burton’s translation there are perhaps 468 stories, whereas in the Arabic manuscript that Galland used there are only thirty-five and a half stories. The tales are told night after night by Sheherazade to the Sultan Shahriyar in order to delay her beheading. Not only does Sheherazade’s narration frame the stories, but one also finds within that narration stories within stories and sometimes stories within stories within stories. There are tales of love, magic and adventure. There are long, heroic epics, examples of wisdom literature, fables, as well as stories about exemplary piety, adultery, daring criminality, sorcery and cosmological fantasy. Despite the current popularity of abridged and bowdlerized versions, the
Nights
is not a children’s book. Though it is reasonable to ask which story collection is older, no sensible answer can be given to that question, for both story collections evolved and changed over centuries. All this has been a necessary prelude to a discussion of the contents of the
Tales of the Marvellous
.

Tales of the Marvellous
is probably the oldest surviving story collection with material in common with the
Nights
. (Indeed
Tales of the Marvellous
seems to be the oldest of all Arab story collections that have
been discovered so far.) The following stories are found in both collections, though in slightly different forms: ‘The Six Men’, ‘Budur and ‘Umair’, ‘Abu Muhammad the Idle’ and ‘Julnar’. Moreover, ‘The Forty Girls’ in
Tales of the Marvellous
gives an extended version of the core of ‘The Story of the Third Dervish’ in the
Nights
. The motif of the lady kept in a casket by a
jinni
is common to both the frame story of the
Nights
and ‘ ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is’ in
Tales of the Marvellous
. ‘Talha, the Son of the Qadi of Fustat’ is very similar to two stories in the
Nights
in which a feckless spendthrift is rescued by his resourceful slave girl: ‘ ‘Ali Shar and Zumurrud’ and ‘‘Nur al-Din and Miriam the Sash-Maker’. Additionally, we know from the list of contents given in the opening pages of
Tales of the Marvellous
that the missing second part contained ‘The Story of the Ebony Horse’, and that too is also found in Galland’s translation of the
Nights
and in Egyptian manuscripts which postdate Galland.

Setting aside the actual duplication of stories and story motifs in the two collections, there is a broader family resemblance, for
Tales of the Marvellous
, like the
Nights
, contains all sorts of tales that are drawn from a variety of sources, many of which are anonymous. But
Tales of the Marvellous
lacks the elaborate overall framing device that distinguishes the
Nights
and it does not offer anything to match the
mise en abîme
of story within story within story, in which Sheherazade’s talking for her life frames the story of ‘The Hunchback’ and this in turn frames the stories of the stories of the Christian, the inspector, the Jewish doctor and the tailor, and then the tailor’s story encompasses that of the barber, who relates the sad stories of his six brothers. But ‘The Six Men’ in
Tales of the Marvellous
, with its perfunctory opening frame, in which the king lies sleepless for lack of stories, may have furnished the basis of the more elaborately framed stories of the barber’s six brothers in the
Nights
. Also ‘Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle’ contains boxed within it the story of the enchanted gazelle. As in the
Nights
, the Abbasid caliph
Harun al-Rashid
features in several stories, though usually as a witness rather than a protagonist: ‘Muhammad the Foundling’, ‘Budur and ‘Umair’, ‘Abu Muhammad the Idle’, and ‘Ashraf and Anjab’. More surprising is the appearance of Harun’s cousin
Muhammad ibn Sulaiman
, the governor of Basra, in several stories: ‘Budur and ‘Umair’, ‘Ashraf and Anjab’ and ‘Abu Muhammad the Idle’.

Several of the tales in
Tales of the Marvellous
do have a rudimentary frame in which a ruler who is bored or depressed consequently needs to be told a story in order to rescue him from his mood. At the end of the
narrative we are to understand the fact that the story did the job with the ruler and the storyteller was well rewarded is a guarantee of its merit. Exceptionally ‘ ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is’ (‘The Bride of Brides’) contains an unusually complex set of framed stories, as, after a king’s baby daughter dies, a blind man sets out to comfort him by telling the story of ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is, which will surely lead the king ‘to hate scheming women and treacherous girls’. The blind man heard the story of ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is from his father, who heard it from his grandfather, a police chief, who heard about it from a man who was in prison for attacking women and who would rather stay there than re-encounter ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is. The prisoner then tells how, before he met ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is, he set out travelling as a merchant and after strange and supernatural adventures at sea he alone survived a shipwreck and came to be marooned on an island. After ten days a
jinni
arrived on the island with a lady in a glass chest. After spying on them and witnessing strange things, the merchant was eventually detected in his hiding place by the lady and he was forced to supply her with a ring, which she used to kill the
jinni
. A little later ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is tells the man the story of her birth, her subsequent adulterous and murderous career and how, after engineering many deaths, she was locked in a chest and pushed out to sea. Eventually the
jinni
rescued her from the wooden chest only to keep her captive in a glass chest. One of the stories she tells the merchant, purportedly to explain the making of the wooden chest she was cast out to sea in, is a story lifted from the Arabic
Alexander Romance
. In that story a king was trying to build a city on a coast, but night after night monsters came out of the sea to destroy it, until that king had talismanic images carved to repel the monsters, making it possible to complete the building of Alexandria. During her enforced sojourn with the
jinni
he told many stories of the wonders of the sea, and some of these she also relates to the marooned merchant. She also tells of how she got the
jinni
to use magic sand to destroy her home city and of her affair with another castaway and what happened to him after he raped a mermaid. Then she transmits the
jinni
’s story of how his father was killed by the monstrous
daran
and tells more about her time with her demonic captor and how she earlier tried to use the
daran
to kill him but failed. Finally, we are back in real time as, once her narrative has finished, the besotted merchant decides to stay with her and bring her to his home town. Though more sexual and homicidal adventures ensue, once they have left the island we have found our way out of the series of bizarrely boxed
stories (though we never get back to the blind man who was relating all this to the bereaved king). The story describes itself as ‘a long, remarkable and curious story’, and it certainly is that.

Although there are many overlaps and similarities between
Tales of the Marvellous
and the
Nights
, there are also subtle and not so subtle differences. The stories in the
Nights
often pretend to have a didactic aim, and in some cases that is clearly actually the case. The exordium of the manuscript of the
Nights
used by Galland boasted (not very convincingly) of its instructional purpose: ‘the purpose of writing this agreeable and entertaining book is the instruction of those who peruse it, for it abounds with highly edifying histories and excellent lessons for the people of distinction, and it provides them with the opportunity to learn the art of discourse, as well as what happened to kings from the beginnings of time’.
Tales of the Marvellous
makes no such claim, but only promises wonders and strangeness. Then, though both collections contain plenty of marvels and magic, arguably
Tales of the Marvellous
offers madder marvels, which come on thick and fast. There are other more incidental differences. The Umaiyad caliphs and their governors and generals feature more prominently in
Tales of the Marvellous
than in the
Nights
, and so do Christians. The fact that protagonists in
Tales of the Marvellous
frequently invoke the name of ‘Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, as well as the fact that ‘Ali is given a heroic role in two of the stories, might suggest that the compiler had Shi‘i sympathies. On the other hand there is no sign of any particular hostility towards the Umaiyad caliphs, which one might have expected from a Shi‘ite.

Besides belonging to the category of
‘aja’ib
, many of the stories in
Tales of the Marvellous
can also be described as belonging to the genre of
faraj ba‘d al-shidda
, or ‘relief after grief’. In this kind of story the protagonist or protagonists undergo many hardships or tests before attaining success and happiness. The most famous collection of such stories was made by the Iraqi judge and anthologist al-Tanukhi (940–94). ‘Relief after grief’ can be seen as a quasi-religious genre in which the protagonists’ patience and trust in God will ultimately be rewarded by Him. (It is easy for a modern, secularized reader to miss how the tales of marvels,
magic, adventure and thwarted love in both
Tales of the Marvellous
and the
Nights
are suffused with an Islamic religiosity.) In
Tales of the Marvellous
the characters who suffer before attaining a happy end are often separated lovers. Examples of the tribulations endured by lovers and their ultimate happy reunion include ‘The King of the Two Rivers’, ‘Talha, the Son of the Qadi of Fustat’, ‘Sul and Shumul’, ‘Miqdad and Mayasa’ and ‘Budur and ‘Umair’. In the opening of this last story the restless and depressed caliph Harun al-Rashid demands to be told ‘a story of infatuated lovers and of a happy outcome to affliction’. Of course, just as the protagonists in this kind of story must bear their hardships with patience (
sabr
), so too must those who read or listen to these tales. It is striking how anxious the compiler is to signal in the titles to the tales those stories which, after troubles, will end happily. The description ‘relief after grief’ occurs repeatedly in the titles of a majority of the stories (but this excessive repetition has not been reproduced on the English contents page).

Patience must be the correct response to a tale of suspense. In Beatrix Potter’s
The Tale of Peter Rabbit
, the rabbit is told by his mother: ‘You may go into the fields or down the lane, but don’t go into Mr McGregor’s garden.’ The person who reads this does not want the rabbit to go into Mr McGregor’s garden for he knows that if the rabbit does so something bad will happen to him, and yet at the same time he does want the rabbit to break the interdiction, for otherwise there will be no story. So it is with ‘The Forty Girls’ in
Tales of the Marvellous
, where the prince is told by the sorceress that he may explore every room but one. It is as if he is compelled by that very interdiction to go through the forbidden door. Prolepsis is a closely related way of generating narrative suspense. Thus, if at the beginning of a story an astrologer predicts some dreadful thing, the reader or listener waits and, as he waits, he wants and does not want the predicted disaster to happen.

Delaying the climax is the stock-in-trade of the love stories. These tend towards the lachrymose, and verses mostly of a melancholy kind adorn these stories. Poetry was the language of love, for prose was seen as a poor vehicle for the expression of the emotions. Poetry both conveyed passion and served to instruct lovers on the etiquette of love. In
medieval Arab storytelling love comes at first glance (a second glance would count as ogling and would therefore be sinful). It is even possible to fall in love by report as in ‘Julnar’, in which Badr falls in love with Jauhara as soon as he hears her described. Or one might fall in love through seeing a portrait, as with Mahliya, when she sees a painting of Mauhub. Regular dating and the slow growth of love over weeks, months or years was not envisaged by the storytellers. Although passion is celebrated, the sexual act is not lingered over. Customarily in these romances love is fated, as are the painful separation and ultimate blissful reunion.

The ninth-century lexicographer al-Asma‘i,
⁴
who travelled among the Bedouin in order to clarify the meanings of Arabic words, reported that ‘some of the Arabs say “
’
Ishq
(passion) is a kind of madness” ’. The
Qanun
, the famous medical textbook by the eleventh-century philosopher and physician Ibn Sina (Avicenna), discussed lovesickness as a delusionary form of madness akin to melancholia. The plight of several lovers in
Tales of the Marvellous
seems to bear out Ibn Sina’s diagnosis. In ‘Budur and ‘Umair’, we are introduced to the case of Budur, whose ‘letter comes from one who spends her nights in tears and her days in torture. All day she is bewildered and all night she is sleepless. She takes no pleasure in food, cannot take refuge in sleep, does not listen to rebuke and cannot hear those who speak to her. Longing has mastered her …’ For the most part, the exalted code of love was reserved for the nobly born; it was not for bakers, washerwomen, porters and seamstresses. In ‘The Six Men’ in
Tales of the Marvellous
there is nothing noble about the hunchback tailor’s attempt to have sex with the merchant’s deceitful wife, and he does not get to spout poetry, but is handed over by the merchant to the police chief so that he can be flogged. Similarly, the paralytic’s desire for a beautiful young woman results in him ending up with dyed eyebrows, shaven and naked in the street, an object of mockery.