Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange (Hardcover Classics) Read Free

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 havebeen 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 thenarrative 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