SOURCE: Gerhardt, Mia I. “Structure.” In The Art of Story-Telling: A Literary Study of the Thousand and One Nights, pp. 377-416. Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1963.

[In the following essay, Gerhardt studies the motifs, character descriptions, use of dialogue, and structure of The Arabian Nights, noting that it is difficult for a non-Arabist to easily understand the structural nuances of this work.]

If we define structure, in the largest sense, as the manner in which the material is arranged and presented, it follows at once that not all structural aspects of the 1001 Nights lend themselves to being adequately studied by anyone who is not an Arabist. The basic material of story-telling is words; the choice and arrangement of words, which is what we call, strictly, style, can be duly appreciated only in the original language of a literary work and by one thoroughly familiar with that language. Consequently, even such relatively unsubtle stylistic devices as the use of stock descriptions and of standing formulas in the 1001 Nights will not come into consideration here. It would, no doubt, be rewarding to examine exactly how a given description is applied, adapted and, if necessary, varied in each case; a still more intriguing subject for study of detail would be the manner in which the opening and closing formulas are chosen and worded. But these and all other stylistic matters must necessarily be left to the Arabic scholar.

The non-Arabist literary student can grasp, and legitimately assess, such structural aspects as regard the arranging and presenting of the narrative material: incidents and motifs, characters and plots; in other words, the compositional features of the stories. An exhaustive examination of all such features would, of course, far exceed the scope of this work. On frequent and infrequent motifs, on the number of characters generally involved in an incident, on the means used—and not used—to describe characters and their reactions, on the story-tellers' comments, on the function and nature of the dialogue, on the various denouement devices and on the very patterns of the stories, nearly everything is still to be investigated¹, and much could be elucidated and explained by critical study. In order to fix the limits of the present chapter, however, a restrictive choice had to be made, and one particular subject singled out to the exclusion of many others that would be equally interesting to go into.

For our purposes, the most appropriate subject to choose for closer study seemed to be the telling of stories within the 1001 Nights, in its various modes and functions. For the book is not only a story-book, but also, in many respects, a book about story-telling. One way to sum it up is to say that it contains the stories told by a young woman who, by telling them, tries to save her life. And in its individual pieces, long and brief, sundry forms of narrating and relating and reporting loom surprisingly large. This is what I propose to examine more closely here.

The subject necessitates a preliminary reference to the conceptions prevailing in medieval Arabic literature. The flourishing period of Arabic letters (roughly speaking, the 8th-11th centuries) created and settled, with regard to the relating of events, a peculiar convention, of which a notable characteristic is the well-known “witnessing system”. This was evolved, originally, to preserve and to authenticate the sayings of Mohammed on all sorts of points not exhaustively treated in the Koran². Such a saying could become a well-established “tradition” only if and when it was accompanied by an unbroken chain of witnesses, historical persons who transmitted it the one to the other, beginning with the contemporary who heard it from the Prophet himself, and ending with the trustworthy man who finally committed the saying and its whole witness-chain to writing for definitive preservation. We need not go here into the problems which the gradually increasing number of Traditions of the Prophet and the attendant witnessing system could not fail to create. Essential to our subject is that the same principles were extended also to profane matters such as biography, historiography and anecdote; even, to a certain degree, legend. In all branches of letters, a high regard for authenticity, of which the only adequate guarantee was the witness-chain, went hand in hand with an increasing depreciation of free invention, and consequently, of all unauthenticated fiction³. Thus, Arabic narrative literature, in the widest sense, came to range between two extremes: on the one hand, the anonymous non-erudite fictitious story that begins with some equivalent of our “Once upon a time, there was …”; on the other hand, the account fit to be taken seriously among the learned, which is characterized as historical by beginning with a string of duly-attested names: “A told, on the authority of B who had it from C …, that …”

To the modern observer, perhaps the most striking thing about the witnessing system with its rules and its usage, is the strong awareness of and regard for the individual which it implies. Surely such a system could only develop within a small community, of which each member knew, personally or by report, the other members or anyway their families, and where each man knew his own genealogy and that of the members of his tribe in all particulars. Such was, indeed, the state of affairs among the Arabs immediately before, and for a short while after the rise of Islam. Soon, though, when spectacular conquests had immensely increased the Moslem territories, and the great cities of the Islamic world began to develop, the small-community situation was bound to change. And yet, just as the witnessing system had become an indispensable element of Arabic learning, the trend towards recognizing and particularizing the individual continues to stand out in Arabic writing⁴. The man of note, be it a poet, a traveller, a scholar, a mystic or simply a man of high culture, is remembered by name, and his sayings and doings are remembered in connexion with him, not just for their general validity.

Something of the same trend is recognizable even in popular story-telling. In fact, a distinctive quality of the Arabic story is precisely its sure way of singling out the man from the crowd, of setting the hero apart, unique, neatly outlined, not to be confused with any other. In the Baghdad of the 1001 Nights, a merchant is not merely a member of his estimable class, but always a well-known merchant named so-and-so, son of an equally well-known father. It seems characteristic that the story-tellers hardly ever leave a principal character unnamed. Only when several characters function ex aequo can they be designated by no more than a general appellation: three sheiks, three ladies, three mendicants, seven demon princesses, and in “The Hunchback,” the amusing series of professions. Even in the Egyptian stories, where attention to the individual becomes a shade less marked and in which the anonymous bustling crowd not unfrequently plays a part, the heroes always have their name, and their fame “in the neighbourhood”, in the city-quarter that is the city to them and which, according to the stories, sometimes takes them for an eponym⁵. The intentional namelessness of the tales, with their pensive and pious whisperings about “a man”, stands out by contrast as an almost sacrificial discretion in honour of the ascetic's and the saint's self-effacement.

Seen against the background briefly sketched here, the 1001 Nights is found to represent both the contrasting conceptions indicated above: it offers not only anonymous stories of free invention, but also, thanks to the activity of the compilers, duly witnessed reports.

Several anecdotes and anecdotic short stories, and some tales as well (all in all, about a quarter of the brief pieces), are presented on the authority of a witness named at the beginning; which, historically speaking, is a sure sign that they have been taken from erudite works. Comparison with such works may show that the witness mentioned in the 1001 Nights is merely the first one of the whole chain that originally went with the story⁶. But even the one remaining name is sufficient to set the little piece apart and to confer upon it something of the prestige inherent to the witnessing system. This is especially true if the name is that of a famous ascetic or scholar: Mâlik ibn Dinâr related: … (III, 715); Abu el-Abbâs el-Mubarrad related: … (III, 560). However legendary or romantic the related event may be, the well-known name lends to it a semblance of authenticity, and an additional impressiveness. The reverse, for that matter, also applies: if a fine little piece is introduced by Abu Suwaid related: … (III, 590), it makes us feel that this Abu Suwaid, on whom no information can be found⁷, must have been a remarkable man and that recollections of his were rightly held to be worth while preserving. And when the story tells of an eminently personal experience, the naming of the central character himself as the witness is particularly apt: the anxieties and final rescue of the debt-ridden judge Abu Hassân ez-Ziyâdi⁸ gain in poignancy because the anecdote is headed: Abu Hassân ez-Ziyâdi used to tell: … (III, 331) and ends: I told them the story from beginning to end; and it spread among the people. (III, 335).

An anonymous witness—they are, naturally, comparatively rare—is qualified by social standing or personal merit: One of the Descendants of the Prophet related: … (III, 712); I pious man related: … (III, 749); One of the men of polite education related: … (III, 579); and in each case, the story is well adapted to the outlook of the witness thus described. The effect becomes more curious, in the perspective of the ‘1001 Nights’, when one of the favourite characters of the Harûn cycle is given the witness's part: Abu Ishâk Ibrahîm el-Mausili related: … (IV, 645; IV, 678); Ishâk ibn Ibrahîm el-Mausili related: … (III, 115; III, 550; IV, 674). But, although to the reader they appear in the first place as story characters, Ibrahîm and Ishâk were historical figures, and great celebrities⁹; there is nothing improbable in the supposition that their reminiscences, as told in several short stories of the 1001 Nights, were first taken down from their own mouths. In any case, the personal presentation makes the stories all the more vivid. That the anecdotes about that other celebrity, Abu Nuwâs, are not thus presented, has a good artistic reason: they turn on the witty quips and astounding improvisations of the poet¹⁰, the appeal of which would be somewhat spoiled if he reported them himself. In one instance, it is Harûn's black sword-bearer who gets a witness's part: Masrûr the eunuch related: … (IV, 650); here the interlocking of history, which attests that Masrûr existed¹¹, and fiction, to which he owes his fame, gives an unintentional surprise effect that is very pleasant.

Quite apart from the historicity and renown of the persons named, the scholarly witnessing device furnishes, in the 1001 Nights, a most attractive manner of presenting such little pieces as anecdotes, tales, and anecdotic short stories; it pins them down, gives them weight, and sometimes adds just the personal touch they would otherwise lack.

The full-length stories on the contrary, that were not taken from erudite works by the compilers, but made up by story-telling artists, and which belong properly to the essentially popular collection of the 1001 Nights, are presented in an entirely different fashion. Without any regard for authenticity, historicity or foundation in fact, they ask us all at once to accept on faith the hero and his status: “In Baghdad (or: In Cairo) there lived a merchant …”. Sometimes it is added that he lived long ago, “in times of yore, in bygone days that are no more”, for a story is apt to be more appealing in so far as it is more remote and detached from present-day worries; and occasionally, the Egyptian story-tellers reinforce the distance in time by distance in space, pretending that it all happened “in China” (without, for that matter, making China appear at all different from Egypt). After this plain and unpretentious opening, it is up to the story-teller to interest us in the personalities of the merchant and his offspring, and he will not fail to do so. Not fortuitously, such stories are almost exclusively given to the use of the third person: the freely inventing, all-knowing, allmighty story-teller is the “I” who remains hidden off-stage, and the hero is the “he” whose adventures he imagines and narrates¹². Sometimes only, under the stress of a particularly captivating occurrence, the roles may temporarily be changed, and the central character is made to take up the thread of the narration, saying “So I went …” “I did …” and himself recounting what befell him. But the shifting remains incidental, and it always is the story-teller who concludes the account of the hero's career and assures us, at the end, that he lived on in happiness and prosperity until the inevitable hour of death. This is the, we may well say classical, straight narrative, the most common presentation in story-telling all over the world, and the standard procedure for the popular stories of the 1001 Nights.

However, it must not be supposed for a moment that the 1001 Nights modes of presentation are exhausted with the extremes of erudite witness-story and popular straight narrative. On the contrary: long or brief, the pieces of the collection abound in remarkable and sometimes highly ingenious devices to introduce, to justify, to authenticate the telling of a story, to set it off, to make it serve a purpose. Stories are fitted one into the other like Chinese boxes; characters become witnesses or story-tellers in their turn; kings and caliphs are given, as their most important function, the listener's part, and even fierce demons can be tamed by telling them what happened to people.

Broadly speaking, three structural proceedings can be distinguished throughout the book. A character in a story may assume the function of a witness, relating adventures or repeating accounts of others and thus lending them an apparent guarantee of authenticity; this oblique presentation, as it might be called, is especially frequent in the short pieces of the collection. In the full-length stories, the characters may interrupt the action to tell an incident from their lives or a story, to illustrate a point or just to pass the time: then a small inserted story lies imbedded in the, longer, main story like a nut in a cake. Or also, and frequently, a character is introduced with no other purpose than to make him tell a story: this gives the whole which we call a frame-story, consisting of a, most often relatively slight, framework surrounding one or more framed stories. The three techniques, of increasing literary consequence, will be examined in that order in the following pages.

OBLIQUE PRESENTATION

In the 1001 Nights, it is the brief pieces that display the greatest variety in presentation. The simple act of telling a little story is performed in all sorts of ways, ranging from straight narrative via reporting and framing devices to the witness story proper. As one example among many, the minute series of schoolmaster stories uses, in its three pieces, three different techniques. The first one (96) is a witness story: An eminent man related: Once I passed by a school where a schoolmaster was teaching the children. (III, 533). He proceeds to tell how he made the schoolmaster's acquaintance and was favourable impressed by his learning; but after some time, when paying him a visit, he found him obsessed by a silly fancy¹³. And so I was convinced that he really was a stupid fellow, and I left him and went my way. (III, 535). The second (97) incorporates the witness into the story as a secondary character, but robs him of the reporting part: Once there was a schoolmaster; to him came an eminent man, who sat down with him and tested his learning. (III, 536). The occurrences are then related in the third person, but from the viewpoint of the eminent man: he finds the schoolmaster well-read and accepts an invitation to be his guess only to see him commit an extremely foolish act. The guest left him and said to himself: “He was right who said that a schoolmaster who teaches children never has much common sense, however learned he may be.” (III, 537). The last of the three (98) has neither witness nor secondary character and takes to straight narrating: Among those who frequented the academy there was a fellow who could neither read nor write […]. One day he got it into his head to open a school and teach the children; […] To one child he said “Write!” and to another: “Read!” and in that way they taught each other. (III, 537). The straight presentation of this last piece and the witness's account of the first are both perfectly logical. But there is something slightly unfocussed about the second one, where the character of the eminent man is, strictly speaking, superfluous, since he does not act as a witness. To give him a function, the story ought to have been reported by him; as perhaps it was in a former redaction.

Even the witness stories proper display various possibilities of presentation, similar to those found in the other brief pieces, and determined by the position of the witness in relation to the facts of his story. He may remain entirely outside the event; after the mention of his name at the beginning, his report follows in the third person, just like any other story, save that it now goes on the authority of a definite individual. The sherif Husain ibn Raiyân related: One day the Commander of the Faithful Omar ibn el-Khattâb sat in his chair of justice … (III, 512). On the other hand, he may give a purely autobiographical report, naturally in the first person, like Abu Hâssan ez-Ziyâdi, already mentioned¹⁴, or Abu el-Hasan ed-Darrâj in the tale that bears his name (135). And frequently, the witness reports events in which he played a part, but only a small one, while other people are the protagonists. Abdallâh ibn Ma'mar el-Kaisi related: One year I made the pilgrimage to the holy House of Allah … (IV, 616); there he met a young man whom he helped to win his bride, and whom he later saw treacherously slain¹⁵.

Now there are a considerable number of brief pieces—mostly short stories—where a secondary character has exactly this same function: he assists at the occurrence, plays a small part in it, and afterwards reports it. Only the express mention of his name at the beginning, rudiment of a scholarly witness-chain, is lacking. Strictly speaking, therefore, such pieces are not witness stories, although it would seem that sometimes the omission is simply a matter of redaction. Their technique, however, is essentially a witnessing technique. The facts of the narration are not presented straight, but obliquely, through one of the characters, who tells them in the first person, while playing but a subordinate part in the story. No doubt, the deep-rooted preference for having memorable sayings reported by someone who heard them at first hand, and events by someone who saw them with his own eyes, explains this characteristic oblique presentation, which enhances the charm of several short stories in the 1001 Nights.

Let us take as an example “The Lovers from the Tribe of Udhra,” an early Arabic lovers' tale incorporated in the Harûn cycle by means of the framework. Harûn has the poet Jamîl ibn Ma'mar brought in¹⁶ and asks him to tell a curious happening, preferably one at which he was present himself. Jamîl then relates with much personal detail how in the desert he met a cousin of his, who camped there to be near the girl he loved; she was married by her parents to another. She visits him secretly every night, and Jamîl sees them sitting together, lamenting their lot¹⁷. He is still there when, a few nights later, the girl is killed by a lion and his cousin consequently dies of grief. He buries them in a common grave.—Now in this story, the very plot makes the presence and the report of a witness a plain necessity. If the lovers had died in the desert all alone, their secret love and their sad end would, logically speaking, have remained unknown; a story about them in straight narrative would therefore be clearly marked as an invention. Only by means of a surviving secondary character could it be presented as something that really and indubitably happened. To the modern reader, if decidedly not to the Arabs, the distinction is inessential in itself; but the oblique presentation makes a literary difference that vitally affects the story. The adventure becomes more interesting by being seen through the eyes of Jamîl and coloured by his reactions: curiosity, emotion, pity and sorrow. The fate of the lovers becomes something else as well: a personal experience of the poet.

Although rather often, it is not always the logical need for a survivor that determines this presentation. In “Jubair Ibn Umair and Budûr,” for instance, a bystander to report the lovers' emotional crisis is not strictly indispensable: they live to tell about it themselves. Yet the presence of the nice old gentleman who becomes their confident, tries to mend their quarrel, and finally sees them happily married is an asset to the story, and it is fitting that he is the one who tells it. It is better seen from the outside than through the eyes of the interested parties themselves, who are too deeply engaged in it; let us note in passing that Jubair's own explanation of his sudden reversal of feeling hardly makes sense, except, of course, to himself¹⁸. The outsider, at once sympathetic and detached, is the proper person to describe the strange behaviour of the temperamental and headstrong lovers.

Occasionally, the various devices which the 1001 Nights employs in order to have stories told entail a certain implausibility, in supposing a strength of memory and a gift for talking far beyond the ordinary person's capacities. In “The Man from Yemen” the caliph asks one of his table-companions, Mohammed el-Basri, to tell something interesting; the latter obliges by reproducing a whole debate held by the Yemenite's six accomplished slave-girls¹⁹, thus repeating from memory a tremendous lot of quotations, proverbs, verse, rhyming prose and other such verbal fireworks. Still, however improbable, the presentation is not absurd: we need only suppose that Mohammed el-Basri was endowed with an excellent memory and was willing to give a stunt performance²⁰. Such high-quality entertainment as provided by the six girls assuredly deserved to be recorded, and may well have been unforgettable to a listener who knew how to appreciate it. So, charmingly, he repays a debt of gratitude to the girls and their master by his faithful report.

The full-length stories of the 1001 Nights are generally presented in straight narrative, occasionally set off by a framework of some kind; the subtler technique of oblique presentation is hardly ever employed here. Still, it does occur: rather unaccountably in “Alî Ibn Bakkâr and Shams En-Nahâr,” and with all the marks of a deliberate artistic choice in “The Hunchback.” Both cases are interesting enough to warrant a brief discussion.

The badly transmitted story of “Alî Ibn Bakkâr”²¹ presents, successively, two secondary characters in the familiar role of helper to the lovers: first the distinguished merchant Abu el-Hasan ibn Taher, and later his friend, the jeweller. In the first episodes of the story, Abu el-Hasan assists at the events, but except for a few brief passages he does not report them; the narrative proceeds in the third person as customary. Later, though, when he has taken flight and has been succeeded by the jeweller, the latter is given, at first incidentally and towards the end consistently, a reporting function: he tells, in the first person, what happened, and concludes the story in his own name.—The whole set-up raises several intriguing questions, which the present version does not permit to answer. Why should Abu el-Hasan, who is very emphatically introduced at the beginning (in terms that would seem to make him fit a witnessing part) be replaced half-way by the less eminent jeweller? Why does the jeweller, an important secondary character, remain nameless? And above all, why does the latter half of the story take to presenting the events through him? Probably all these puzzling features came about in the course of transmission; but it would be mere guesswork to try and reconstitute a previous, more coherent version, let alone the original. Still, it does not seem improbable that from the very beginning there was a secondary character with a reporting function: for “Alî Ibn Bakkâr” is a story about amorous martyrs, who must love in secret and are united only in death. Such a plot, which in its whole conception is strongly reminiscent of the early Arabic love-stories, traditionally called for a surviving friend to tell about the fate of the lovers. However that may be—to refrain from further speculation—we are confronted here with an unusual presentation of an in more than one respect exceptional full-length story.

A consistent, even pointed use of oblique presentation is one of the many remarkable traits of “The Hunchback.” One of the collection's finest specimens of the frame-story, it will presently be examined as such; at this point, attention must be drawn to the fact that all its stories but one report adventures of third persons, which gives a most peculiar cascade effect. Each of the four men who successively are compelled to tell a story reports how he met some other man who related an incident from his life: the broker tells about a merchant; the steward, about another merchant; the doctor, about a young man from Mosul; finally, the tailor, about a young man from Baghdad, who had an unlucky encounter with a barber. The said barber—as the tailor proceeds to report—first told a “story of himself” and then six stories about his six brothers, whom we thus get to know through the double intermediary of the barber and the tailor. In this way the framework is filled by two sets of, differently presented, biographical stories, separated by an autobiographical one; a very distinctive pattern, doubtless entirely intentional, and flawlessly executed. The result is that “The Hunchback” appears marvellously rich, crowded with people and their adventures, while yet it contains only four characters—the broker, the steward, the doctor and the tailor—who have a major speaking part. (As an additional stunt, the hunchback about whom all the fuss is and who rightly gives the story its title, does not utter a single word.) If ever, the literary possibilities of that very trivial phenomenon, people telling about people, have been fully realized here.

INSERTED STORIES

The structural difference between inserted stories and framed stories is one of relative proportions and weight. The inserted story is not only much shorter than the main story in which it is inserted, but also of lesser consequence; it never is the centre of gravity of the whole. The framed story on the contrary is longer and, particularly, more important than the framing story that surrounds it; in the whole called frame-story, the framework is always subordinate to the story or stories it serves to frame. Now it is a curious fact that, while frame-stories occur with great frequency all through the 1001 Nights, the insertion technique is employed only in the first part of the book. Inserted stories are found repeatedly until no. 21 inclusively, and thereafter not any more, except in one piece that is a curiosity in all respects, and in two that do not belong to ZER [Zotenberg's Egyptian Recension]. Already in the framing story of the collection, Shehrezâd's father tells her a moral tale (0a); “The Fisherman and the Demon” has a triple insertion (2a, 2aa, 2ab), and “The Three Ladies,” in one of its framed stories, has one (3ba). “Ghânim” contains the two eunuch stories (7a, 7b), “Omar Ibn En-Nu'mân” is enlivened with a double love-story (8a, 8aa), and two other, brief, pieces (8b, 8c). Next, the series of fables and moral tales presents no less than six insertions (13a, 16a, 16b, 16c, 17a, 18a). Lastly, a love-story (21a) is inserted in the third part of “Kamar Ez-Zamân.” As far as ZER is concerned, the technique then suddenly goes out of favour; it only crops up once more in “The Serpent Queen” (136aa). Moreover, two of the asterisk pieces of our title-list present inserted stories: there is one (79a) in “The Awakened Sleeper,” and one (173a) in the orphan story of “Khudadâd.”

This uneven distribution, in ZER, seems to a large extent accounted for by a historical factor. The Indian influences that, through Persian models, came to bear on material and structure of the 1001 Nights, have left the most perceptible traces on the old core of the book, which also in ZER stands mainly at the beginning. Although recent research tends somewhat to diminish the importance which older scholars accorded to Indian elements in the 1001 Nights, there is no doubt that Indian story-telling furnished one particular insertion device that haunts some of the older stories. This device, which we may well call the instructive insertion, consists in making one of the characters in the main story tell a tale or a little story to convey a moral lesson. As Littmann, among others, points out²², Indian literature abounds in examples of the typical manner in which such insertions are presented. A character says, for instance: “Don't do this or that, or else the same will happen to you as happened to …” The other asks: “What was that?” whereupon the warning story is told. In framed collections, the framed stories may be given the same instructive function, as we shall see later on.

The instructive insertion occurs in several stories for which Persian models containing Indian elements may be presumed. The most illustrative case is “The Fisherman and the Demon”²³. When the fisherman has tricked the bloodthirsty demon back into the bottle, he refuses to liberate him again, despite his supplications and promises: “You lie, wretch”, exclaimed the fisherman; “you and I are to each other as the vizir of king Yunân and the sage Dubân.” “How was that about the vizir of king Yunân and the sage Dubân? What is their story?” asked the demon; and the fisherman began … (I, 56). The story tells how the sage Dubân healed king Yunân from leprosy, so that he came to high favour; but the king's vizir, envious, slanders him. The king said: “O vizir, you are filled with envy for this sage, and you want him to be put to death; but I should repent of it afterwards, just as king Sindibâd repented of having killed his falcon.” And the vizir said: “By your leave, o greatest king of our time, how was that?” So the king began … (I, 62). In the secondary tale, king Sindibâd gets angry when his falcon keeps him from drinking, and kills it; too late, he perceives that the drink was poison, and that the falcon saved his life. The vizir of king Yunân, however, is not convinced, and maintains that he has spoken the truth about the sage: “You might perish, like the vizir perished who was disloyal towards his king.” So king Yunân asked: “How was that?” and the vizir began … (I, 65). Follows another secondary tale, somewhat inadequately told and not quite to the point: a vizir lets the son of his king go hunting alone, so that he barely escapes being eaten by a ghoul; the vizir is executed. This is a punishment for neglect of duty, and does not apply to the situation of king Yunân. Galland (or the ms. G) saves the parallel by making the vizir say: “S'il [mon avis] est faux, je mérite qu'on me punisse de la même manière qu'on punit autrefois un vizir.” (1, p. 50)²⁴. However, king Yunân lets himself be persuaded by the arguments of his vizir, and prepares ungratefully to kill the sage who healed him, just as the demon, once out of the bottle, prepared to kill the fisherman who set him free; the dominant parallel of the fisherman's story is effective throughout.

At this point, the device crops up in a singular variant, which leaves only the introductory dialogue and suppresses the insertion. The sage Dubân, standing with blindfolded eyes waiting to be beheaded, says to the king: “This reward you intend to pay me is the reward of the crocodile.” The king asked: “What is the story about the crocodile?” But the sage answered: “I cannot possibly tell it in this plight; I entreat you by Allah, spare me …” (I, 69-70). The king, though, refuses, and the crocodile story is not told²⁵. We may well ask if the omission is intentional and part of the story-pattern, or simply an accident of transmission. Surely the sage's excuse is understandable enough, and it can even be supposed that he tries to make a play for the king's curiosity and thereby at least to gain time. But the attempt has so little success that he might as well have told the story.—Later on, when the inserted story told by the fisherman has been brought to a conclusion, relating the sage's posthumous revenge on king Yunân, the variant occurs once more in the main story. The demon, still in his bottle, pleads: “Spare me and forgive me! if I did evil, so do you good, for in the proverbs of the people it is said: O renderer of good for evil, unto the criminal sufficeth his crime. And don't do to me as Umâma did to Atika.” The fisherman asked: “What did Umâma do to Atika?” But the demon answered: “This is not the time to tell it, while I am here imprisoned. Let me out, and I will tell you.” (I,73). Here the promise of a story is evidently used as bait, which the fisherman, however, refrains from taking. It is only later, and on other conditions, that he liberates the demon, who rewards him by doing him a good turn; but the story of Umâma and Atika which has been missed is never told.

The instructive insertion is, in “The Fisherman and the Demon,” employed with a fair amount of skill; this permits to assess its intrinsic literary qualities. It certainly is an excellent way to give the inserted story a function within the whole, and the grouping of parallel situations all around the knot of the main story permits a varied and at the same time coherent display of story-material. On the other hand, the predominance of the stories' moral purpose soon makes for a certain dreariness. The device is essentially ungratuitous, and thereby something of an exception in the 1001 Nights, where most of the story-telling indulged in by the characters is done for its own sake, simply for the listener's and the speaker's pleasure.

That the series of fables and moral tales, where an abundant if not very interesting use is made of instructive insertions, occurs also at the beginning of the book, is probably an effect of chance; it seems as good as certain that the series was added by the Egyptian compilers, and that they placed it at random²⁶. On the contrary, the “Ass and Bull” story in the Shehrezâd framework, and the “Envier and Envied” story of the Second Mendicant in “The Three Ladies,” both instructive insertions too, belong to the old core. They all contribute to the curiously intricate Chinese-boxes pattern that characterizes the whole first part of the 1001 Nights.

If the majority of the inserted stories in the book are thus presented by way of moral advice proffered by the characters in the main story, a small number are given for other reasons or even, apparently, for hardly any reason at all. The somewhat dogmatic pertinence of the Indian device contrasts sharply with the varied and mostly rather offhand proceedings we meet in stories which are less old. But just because of this greater liberty, the degree of craftsmanship and skill in using the insertion technique can be all the more clearly distinguished.

Thus for instance, a completely purposeless, non-functional and, moreover, clumsily presented insertion is found in the feeble third part of “Kamar Ez-Zamân”²⁷, with the story of “Ni'ma and Nu'm.” The cruel Magian Bahrâm, the villain of the plot, is on the point of being beheaded, but escapes execution by accepting Islam. To the two princes, who lament their sad experiences, he then says: “Noble lords, do not weep! In the end you will be reunited with your family, just as Ni'ma and Nu'm were reunited.” And as they asked: “what happened to Ni'ma and Nu'm?” Bahrâm related … (II, 530). The old opening move works, but that is about all. The inserted love-story does in no conceivable manner apply to the situation of the princes, who, for that matter, can hardly be imagined as yearning for reunion with their family, since their father ordered their death and their mothers misconducted themselves and slandered them. The Magian for his part, although now a Moslem, has not been made sufficiently likable for the position of entertainer to the whole company. And lastly, the Ommayad court intrigue of “Ni'ma and Nu'm,” thus placed within the remote “Kamar Ez-Zamân” story, which moves vaguely through far-away countries and olden times, constitutes an anachronism that is glaring even for the 1001 Nights. All this does not mean to say that the presence of the love-story is unfortunate. On the contrary, since it is as charming as the main story is tedious at this point, it provides a most welcome diversion. But this, unintentional, relieving effect does not in itself justify the thoughtless inserting, which only accentuates the incompetence of the creator or narrator who made up the third part of “Kamar Ez-Zamân.”

On the other hand, a convincing use of insertions meets us in Omar Ibn En-Nu'mân. This novel, much worked over by, apparently, Egyptian narrators, carries several inserted stories, which vary with the different manuscripts²⁸. One might suspect that later story-tellers found the main plot, on the whole, a little stern, and thought fit to brighten it up with contrasting material. Moreover, the unwieldy length of the novel may well have acted as an inducement to make it still longer. However that may be, the Calcutta II version displays some clever as well as pleasant insertions, showing that the old and in later times somewhat disused technique still had, on occasion, its artisans.

In the last part of Omar Ibn En-Nu'mân, two little stories are neatly made to serve a purpose. The jest of the “Hashish-Eater” is told by a murderess to her prospective victim, in order to put him at ease and make him forget caution. We see him fall into the trap: When Kânmâ-kân had heard this story from the slave-girl, he laughed till he fell over backwards. And he said to Bakûn: “Nurse, that's an excellent story; I never heard the like of it. Do you know another?” “Yes, to be sure”, she said. And now the slave-girl Bakûn continued to tell Kân-mâ-kân marvellous happenings and memorable merry events, till sleep came over him. (II, 195-196). When tension has thus been carefully built up, Kân-mâ-kân's life is saved just in the nick of time.—Further on, the story of the “Bedouin Hammâd” makes for a surprise effect. The Bedouin, a robber, has been captured and is about to pay his misdeeds with his life; but he begs to be spared, promising to tell extraordinary adventures. Kân-mâ-kân intercedes for him, and the kings ordered: “Well then, tell us a story!” “O greatest kings of our time”, he asked, “if I tell you a wonderfully fine story, will you let me off?” This was granted by the kings, and the Bedouin began to tell the most interesting of his experiences. (II, 210-211). This gambit—a good story for a life—is not unusual, as we shall see later on; but here the point is that the Bedouin candidly proceeds to tell about one of his own villainous crimes. He murdered a noble Arab warrior, who gave him hospitality in the desert, because he coveted the young man's sister; she killed herself out of grief. To the Bedouin, who lacks all moral sense, this is merely a curious occurrence²⁹; but the listeners are naturally moved to indignation and execute him on the spot. Instead of ransoming his life with his story, he has brought upon himself the punishment he fully deserved.

In the middle of the Omar novel, and considerably increasing its bulk, occurs the insertion of the full-length “Tâj El-Mulûk,” in which “Azîz and Azîza” is inserted in its turn as an autobiographical secondary story³⁰. It is placed, aptly, at a moment when the warlike action has come to a temporary standstill. The heroic king Sharkân has been murdered in his sleep by an enemy agent; his young half-brother Dau el-Makân and the faithful vizir have set up siege before Constantinople, intending to conquer it and to revenge Sharkân's death, but it can already be foreseen that they will not achieve their aim. They deliberate day and night about matters of strategy, but Dau el-Makân continued to be depressed by mournful sorrow, and finally he said: “I long to hear stories about people, adventures of kings and stories of the slaves of love; perhaps Allah then will take from my heart this sorrow deep, so that I may cease to lament and weep.” And the vizir said: “If your sorrow can be cast out only by hearing notable stories and adventures of kings and tales about the slaves of love from olden times and suchlike things, the matter is easy; for when your late father lived I had nothing to do but to tell stories and to recite verse to him. This very night I will tell you the story of a lover and his beloved, so that your breast will not be constricted any more.” (I, 765).

Dau el-Makân looks forward greatly to the entertainment; a few emirs are invited too, and they settle down comfortably by lamplight, with everything they needed in the way of food, drink and perfumes. (I, 765). Still, it is hardly to be supposed that the vizir finished his double love-story that same night, as it runs to a hundred and thirty pages. The point is not cleared up, perhaps intentionally, for the long insertion represents, as it were, the time spent on the unsuccessful siege: All this happened while they were besieging Constantinople. But after four years had passed, they began to long for their country; the troops murmured […]. And the vizir said to the king: “Know, o greatest king of our time, our staying here has been to no avail. Therefore I think we should depart now and return to our native land, and remain there for a few years on end. Then we will again march out valiantly, and wage war against idolatry.” “That is excellent advice”, said the king. (II, 134-135). Thus sped along by the insertion, which distracts attention from the failure and creates, indeed, the illusion that something “happened”, the main story nimbly moves away from where it had got bogged down.—The Egyptian compilers, when they put in the Omar novel, did not choose the most appropriate place for it; but, by design or by chance, it furnishes a fine contribution to the display of inserted stories in the first part of the book.

As we have seen, the story-tellers of the Baghdadian and of the Egyptian period forsook the instructive insertion along with the foreign models that imported it; this particular device, which does not quite agree with the spirit of Arabic story-telling, was never assimilated. As far as they still employ inserted stories, they present them without any moralizing or didactic intention, in a free and easy manner, variously adapted to the situations arising in the main story. In a few cases, the insertion serves a purely artistic purpose: thus in “The Awakened Sleeper,” where the little “The Tramp and the Cook” amusingly mirrors the theme of the main story³¹, and in “Ghânim,” where the two eunuch stories provide suspense and contrast³². The autobiographical insertion acquaints us with the past life and adventures of the characters in the main story: thus “The Princess of Daryabâr” in “Khudadâd,” and the proportionally too long story of “Janshâh,” which satisfies the curiosity of Bulûkiya in “The Serpent Queen.”

Practised in this way, insertion is an unpretentious but quite satisfactory technique. It brings about a sudden shifting of the interest that is refreshing, and it may achieve all sorts of pleasant effects, by providing a foil to the main story, a surprise, a transition, or just an ornament. All in all, it seems so well suited to the ways of the 1001 Nights that one wonders why it is so sparingly employed. My impression is that, from early times on, the prevailing tendency was to make the surrounding story subservient to the one that is placed inside it; in other words, that frame-story technique was preferred to the inserting of stories. Their essential difference is that, while the latter creates merely a narrative diversion, the former is determined by and centred upon the act of narrating. To put it strongly: the subject of the frame-story is story-telling. So it seems very appropriate that this pattern should be the prevailing one in the 1001 Nights.

FRAME-STORIES

A frame-story³³ may be defined as a narrative whole composed of two distinct but connected parts: a story, or stories, told by a character or several characters in another story of lesser dimensions and subordinate interest, which thus encloses the former as a frame encloses a picture. The 1001 Nights presents three basic types of the pattern, determined by the function of the framed story in relation to the plot of the framework: we may call them the entertaining frame, the time-gaining frame and the ransom frame. They will be discussed here in this order, which corresponds to an increasing importance of the issue involved in the telling of the framed story.

ENTERTAINING FRAME

The simplest type is the entertaining frame; it merely presents a character (or several in turn) telling a story for the pleasure of one or more listeners. It mostly dispenses with elaborate stage-setting, except in those Harûn stories that begin by making the disguised caliph assist at some intriguing scene. The interest concentrates on the framed story, which is told for its own sake and serves merely to provide entertainment, or occasionally, to satisfy curiosity. Harûn er-Rashîd needs stories to allay his restlessness and prepare him for sleep; and other caliphs too, thought not endowed with the distinctive feature of insomnia, often ask one of their familiars to relate a memorable experience, by way of pastime. Even the mamluk sultan Baibars, the story says, had a liking for all that is told among the folk, and all that men choose to believe; and he always wanted to assist in person and to listen when there was talk about such things (IV, 776); so he had the captains of his watch assembled to hear about the strange events they met with in the course of their careers. (If this is authentic, it might be a case of “life imitating art”: Baibars modelling himself upon the caliphs as presented in fiction.) Normally, the entertainer is of a humbler condition than the listener who is being entertained; there are no examples, in the 1001 Nights, of a caliph telling a story himself. Only in “Sindbad the Sailor,” the customary roles are reversed, and the distinguished, wealthy man's entertaining—in every sense of the word—the poor man gives added point to the frame.

In this type, structural interference between the frame and the related story is comparatively rare. Most often, the listening caliph simply dismisses the teller with a few words of comment, and a reward. Occasionally, he orders that the persons about whom he has just heard be brought before him, to make their acquaintance and bestow benefits upon them: thus, el-Mamûn wants to see the six well-spoken slave-girls (46), and the generous merchant (103). However, already here there is sometimes a striving to connect frame and story more closely, making each of them dependent on the other for its point. The stories of the Ladies of Baghdad account for their strange behaviour, as described in the framework; in “Nocturnal Adventures,” too, the autobiographical stories of the three protagonists explain the puzzling things that were first related about them. A less spectacular, but extremely skilful connexion is made in “Abu El-Hasan from Khorasân,” where a veritable little mystery is set up in the frame, to be solved in the story. The caliph's amazement and displeasure at noticing valuable property marked with the name of his grandfather el-Mutawakkil in the house of an unknown businessman, are dispelled when he is told how this came about through his grandfather's magnanimity. Still, the only case where the entertaining frame is an integral part of the whole, not only completely motivated, but functional in bringing out the story's intention, is, again, “Sindbad the Sailor”³⁴.

To this first, simple type belongs also the very elaborate and historically interesting frame of “Saif El-Mulûk,” which even has a title of its own, “Story of King Mohammed Ibn Sabaïk and the Merchant Hasan.” It shows how high a value was set, at the time, upon a good story, and it certainly has some foundation in fact, for all the romantic embellishment of the circumstances. The figure of the dignified sheik, who gives permission to copy the “Saif El-Mulûk” story, but strictly specifies the kinds of public worthy or unworthy of hearing it, may in a certain measure correspond to the reality of a good story-telling period³⁵. It also seems authentic that the story is copied from a book, and carefully checked, whereas the king, every time he wants to hear it again, has it read out aloud to him.—Artistically, however, this unique frame is a misfit, because, as Lane already remarked³⁶, the story it serves to frame does not live up to it. After having been made to expect something incomparable, the reader is disappointed by an unoriginal and mediocre piece, remarkable chiefly for its length.

The entertaining frame, which prepares the telling of the story and surrounds it with a definite atmosphere, certainly adds to the appeal of the whole; from a technical point of view, though, it most often remains relatively ingenuous. The frame-story offers other, less obvious possibilities.

TIME-GAINING FRAME

The time-gaining frame, a more complicated type than the one just discussed, serves notably to string together large collections of stories, whose function within the frame is to help put off an execution or another calamitous event. This pattern, apparently of Indian origin³⁷, is not indigenous in the 1001 Nights; it is found only in a few stories that were adapted from the Persian. Nevertheless it occupies a place of unique importance, as it furnished the framework for the collection itself: Shehrezâd temporizes by making one story follow another, until at last she has gained her victory.

The Shehrezâd story, though made up from bits and pieces³⁸ and having an indefinable air of foreignness and oddity about it, is all that a framing story should be. The story-teller who patched it together is a little long in coming to the point, but he struggles valiantly along with a firm purpose in mind³⁹. First, the misconduct of the two queens shows that women can be very depraved, then the demon episode illustrates their appalling boldness and resourcefulness in depravity, and finally, in striking contrast to this black picture of womanhood, Shehrezâd appears on the scene, self-sacrificing, chaste, learned; she, too, is bold and resourceful, but she uses her gifts nobly, not viciously. She is going to play for time, to save herself and many other girls fated to die, just by telling stories. It is no wonder that this plot had a world-wide success: it works up a quite unexpectedly charming and simple suspense situation, to which the story-book itself will finally furnish the denouement.

Notwithstanding this excellent start, though, as a framed collection the 1001 Nights has no firm structure: the working-out falls short of the idea. As soon as the telling of the stories begins, the framework seems gradually to fade away. King Shehriyâr rarely comments on what he has heard⁴⁰; only in the little series of fables in the first part of the book, a compiler put in some grateful remarks and requests: “O Shehrezâd, you have given me still more wise warnings and lessons by what you have told. Do you also know any stories about the animals of the field?” (II, 248)⁴¹. The last of such remarks occurs, as an afterthought, at the end of 22; from then on, there is no more comment between the stories⁴², which follow each other without transition or with a simple “Furthermore it is told …”. The failure to keep the framework functioning throughout the collection is illustrated by the fact that its conclusion varies in the different texts, and sometimes is lacking altogether.—All this must partly be put down to the plot itself, which, involving only one reciter and one listener (two if we count Dinazâd in), is not solid enough, as it were, to carry the weight of so many stories. A very large framed collection is more convincingly presented when the roles are distributed among a little company, every member of it telling a story in his turn while the others listen. A larger cast also favours the exchange of comment, which lends variety and depth to the whole; and above all, it offers an opportunity for creating a relation between the personality and circumstances of each character, and the stories he tells⁴³.

Such a relation between the framed stories and the frame is lacking in the 1001 Nights. To be sure, it would have been difficult to keep up in so vast a collection, and necessarily would have limited its scope. Yet, especially in the beginning it is somewhat surprising when Shehrezâd's stories seem so ill-adapted to the dangerous situation she had put herself in. The first one, “The Merchant and the Demon,” already presents two wicked wives, and in the second one, “The Fisherman and the Demon,” the last part seems a particularly tactless choice under the circumstances: the queen's morbid infatuation with the negro slave can scarcely have been a pleasant topic to king Shehriyâr. In the fourth one, “The Three Apples,” the plot turns again upon a negro slave supposed to have won his mistress's favours, although the suspicion turns out to be unfounded. All in all, in the first few stories, if we try to connect them with the frame, Shehrezâd appears to be rubbing in the king's conjugal misfortune, rather than helping him to get over it; unless we interpret her choice as destined to show the king that he is not the only one to suffer, but nothing bears out this interpretation⁴⁴.

The obvious explanation is that the compilers did not consider the point; they did not strive to interrelate stories and frame, nor to keep alive the interest in the framing story itself. Consequently, just as they did, we gradually forget Shehrezâd and her plight, and concentrate all our attention upon the stories she tells. There remains only the rhythmical division into Nights, with its standing transition formulas, to remind us in passing of the clever woman who is still playing for time.

Apart from the Shehrezâd story, the time-gaining frame is something of a rarity in the 1001 Nights. A doubtful case is “The Serpent Queen,” where it does not become quite clear whether the long framed story with its oversized insertion⁴⁵ is told for its own sake, or to put off the young hero's return to the upper world, which will cause the Serpent Queen's death. At first she refuses to let him go, and keeps him occupied with the story of Bulûkiya; later, when he has obtained permission to return, he voluntarily stays on for a while to hear the story of Janshâh. I confess that I should need more data on the framework of “The Serpent Queen”⁴⁶—which looks like a batch of old material in a mediocre Egyptian version—to grasp its implications.

The framed collection of “The Seven Vizirs”⁴⁷ on the contrary, an adaptation from the Persian that was incorporated in the 1001 Nights by later compilers, is carefully arranged in an elegant time-gaining frame. The telling of the stories is doubly functional here, as it serves a double purpose: to persuade, as well as to gain time. A king's favourite has treacherously accused the prince, his son, of trying to seduce her, and the king proposes to put his son to death. His vizirs are trying to save the prince, not only by the delaying action of the stories, but also by making them furnish arguments against the deed: they try to exemplify the dangers of rashness and the malice of women, while the spiteful favourite retaliates by telling about unreliable vizirs and the wickedness of men. The advantages of the pattern are evident: a captivating interrelation of framework and stories, and, in the series of stories itself, a debate effect that makes for variety and surprise. The result might have been a structural masterpiece, if only the stories were to the purpose; but, oddly enough, most of them are not⁴⁸. The first vizir, already, opens the series with a tale in which a woman, tactfully defending her virtue, has the beau rôle. The first tale of the second vizir is, at best, a warning against stinginess, and in that of the fourth vizir, the husband is really more immoral than the wife (139a, e, k). The favourite, in her turn, misses the mark with her fourth story (139m), about a man who invents an unusual stratagem to conquer his beloved, but without meaning or doing any harm at all⁴⁹. And so on: even the gem of the series as it stands in the 1001 Nights, the memorable “Woman with Five Suitors,” is too ambiguous to make the point required by the framing story. Told by the sixth vizir, it certainly sets forth an uncommonly fine example of the malice of women, but it is the men who are dissolute and abuse their power; the woman merely takes advantage of their illicit pursuits to further her own, relatively legitimate aim—freeing her lover from prison—and shames them quite deservedly. All these inconsistencies detract from the effect of the pattern; they may, however, be due not to carelessness on the part of the original creator, but to the transformations which the story underwent in the course of transmission.

Thus, the 1001 Nights offers no examples of a particularly skilful use of the time-gaining frame. And yet, the two are inseparable in every reader's memory. Beyond all technical cavilling, the compelling plot of the Shehrezâd story remains one of the most remarkable artistic achievements of the book.

RANSOM FRAME

Lastly, there is the ransom frame, which must be examined here with particular care, as it is represented in the 1001 Nights by some very interesting pieces, more or less connected with and dependent upon each other, as I hope to show. In this type, the telling of stories has a paramount function: it serves to redeem a human life. The frame is set up to show how somebody came to be threatened with imminent execution; the story or stories told, either by the condemned man himself or by people intervening in his favour, may, if found good enough, redeem him. A very important issue depends, therefore, on their quality, and on the taste of the listener who holds the decision in his hands.

The very first story of the 1001 Nights in all known recensions, “The Merchant and the Demon”⁵⁰, shows the pattern in its simplest form. A merchant travelling in the desert is menaced by a demon; three sheiks save his life by telling a story each. Now it has often been remarked upon, and every reader can see for himself, that Shehrezâd is given a surprisingly insignificant piece for a beginning. Indeed, its shortcomings are only too apparent. The arrival of the three sheiks with their animals at the right time and place is in no way motivated; the demon, after each story, willingly renounces a third of the merchant's blood, so that there is no uncertainty as to the final success; and worst of all, the three narrations rather monotonously develop the same motif, the transformation of human beings into animals. Almost any story in the collection might have made a better opening than this one.

Macdonald⁵¹ has attempted to offer, for this anomaly, a historical explanation, which seems very plausible; it is connected with an anecdote apropos of the Arabic word khurâfa, meaning “a (pleasant) fictitious story”. A 13th-century author states, giving the chain of witnesses, that Mohammed once told Aïsha a story about a man named Khurâfa, who was captured by three demons, and redeemed by three passers-by who each told an amazing incident (one of these involving a transformation). Our “The Merchant and the Demon” is so like the Khurâfa story as to appear just another, somewhat more elaborate version of it. Macdonald therefore surmises that it is a left-over, taken along with the Shehrezâd frame, of an older form of the 1001 Nights, composed throughout of simple, relatively short, and purely Arabic stories such as this one.

If the Khurâfa story really goes back to Mohammed's time, the ransom frame would be quite an old pattern indeed. If, on the other hand, it was made up later, as an attempt to provide the word khurâfa with an etymology⁵², it may have been modelled upon “The Merchant and the Demon,” though on internal criteria this latter seems the younger one. Yet even in that case, the place of honour assigned to “The Merchant and the Demon” is still well explained by its being assuredly one of the oldest stories in the book, “of a pronounced desert and Arabic type”⁵³, as Macdonald says.

From a literary point of view, the question is how we are to understand the peculiar ransom frame here displayed, and what assured the lasting success of this pattern. Its two essential features seem to be: the value of good stories, rated so high that they balance the scales against a human life; and the fact that the bargain is made—in this oldest form, represented also by the Khurâfa story—not with another human being, but with a demon, of the species called Jinni (plural Jinn).

The lively appreciation of a good story may perhaps be explained, to a certain extent, by the conditions of life in pre-Islamic and early Islamic times. In a society where entertainments were few and reading not within everybody's reach, the resources of human intercourse were of great importance: they not only provided diversion, but ranked among man's principal means of asserting himself as a civilized being. Stories, as much as poetry, could be perpetuated by oral tradition, and there is ample proof that they were. Later, when a more refined urban culture prevailed over desert life, the particular form of pastime offered by story-telling found its professionals; this development affirms its lasting popularity, of which the 1001 Nights in all its aspects offers such interesting proof.

Stranger, at first sight, seems the role of the demons. In the Khurâfa story, they take the man prisoner for no reason at all, and then deliberate among themselves what they shall do: kill him, enslave him, or let him off. “The Merchant and the Demon” gives a motivation: the merchant has accidently killed the Jinni's son, and the father has a right to revenge. But in both cases, the stories told by the human intercessors apparently afford such gratification to the Jinn that they willingly consent to let their captive go free. As the 1001 Nights-story has it: when the third sheik had told his story, even more wonderful than the first two, the demon was all amazement; he wriggled with pleasure, and exclaimed: “Lo, I acquit you of the rest of the merchant's debt, and I grant his freedom unto you all.” (I, 48).

There is an odd naïveté, at the same time endearing and puzzling, in this gratitude of an other-world being for stories from this world. But no doubt it seems stranger to us than it did to the Arabs, who lived on a footing of relative familiarity with Jinn and regarded them as different, certainly, from humans, but not basically or incommensurably so⁵⁴. (They are not immortal, and may be killed by men; most of them accepted Islam.) The implication of the stories under discussion seems to be, if we put it in modern terms, that Jinn are subject to boredom and want entertainment, just as humans do⁵⁵. Their wanton capturing of Khurâfa and then not quite knowing what to do with him is well in keeping with this interpretation. And we might even remember, in this context, the Koran's telling how the Jinn try to ascend to the lowest spheres of heaven because they want to overhear the angels, who chase them away by hurling meteors at them⁵⁶. Fundamentally, the ransom frame as presented here affirms human superiority: Jinn may be stronger than men and often redoubtable, but men's words charm them, men's lives are more interesting than theirs.

Let us now turn to a general survey of the beginning of the 1001 Nights. In the chief mss. of the Oriental family as well as in ZER, the first five pieces are the following:

• (1) “The Merchant and the Demon.”
• (2) “The Fisherman and the Demon,” + “The Petrified Prince.”
• (3) “The Three Ladies.”
• (4) “The Three Apples” + “Nûr Ed-Dîn and Shems Ed-Dîn.”
• (5) “The Hunchback.”

Of these five stories, four display the ransom frame in one form or another; and, curiously enough, thereafter it is not found any more in the whole of the 1001 Nights⁵⁷. Oestrup did remark that the first stories of the collection are characterized by an “Einschachtelungsmethode”⁵⁸, which, however, he did not analyse in detail, nor try to explain. To find out the possible reasons for this recurrence of the same pattern in just one place of the book, we must closely examine the first five stories, and compare them from a structural point of view.

After (1) “The Merchant and the Demon,” already discussed, follows (2) “The Fisherman and the Demon,” which treats the same theme: when the fisherman has unintentionally liberated the menacing demon (a Mârid this time) who is resolved to kill him, he says to himself: “This is a demon, and I am a human being, Allah has given me intelligence; so by my astuteness and intelligence I will undo him, even as he meant to undo me in his treacherous wickedness.” (I, 54). And he defeats the demon by his superior human wit. This piece is the only one of the five that is not a frame-story; its first part employs the kindred insertion technique⁵⁹, its sequel, “The Petrified Prince,” is half-appended, half-inserted in a somewhat puzzling manner⁶⁰, probably due either to an unskilful narrator or to damage in transmission. In the next story, the Baghdadian (3) “The Three Ladies,” the ransom device crops up in an unsatisfactory form, as we shall presently see. To (4) “The Three Apples,” a short and well-constructed Harûn story of the Baghdad period, was joined later the much longer, Egyptian, “Nûr Ed-Dîn and Shems Ed-Dîn,” in such a way that the latter functions as a ransom for the culprit of the former. And lastly, there is “The Hunchback,” a ransom-frame story throughout, and a highly complicated one, displaying no less than eleven stories within its frame.—In the last three pieces, the old frame-pattern is, as it were, secularized: instead of a Jinni, it is a caliph or a king, or a wealthy lady, who threatens people's lives and listens to the ransom stories⁶¹. It will be necessary now to discuss these last three pieces one by one, with special reference to the way in which the ransom frame is employed in each of them, in order to establish their relation to the opening story and to each other.

First of all, an analysis of the problematical “The Three Ladies”⁶², which will require an exact outline of the plot.

Three ladies admit into their house a porter who has carried the provisions bought by the lady housekeeper. They are passing a merry evening with him, when three one-eyed mendicants knock at the door, and are admitted. A little later Harûn er-Rashîd arrives with Ja'far and Masrûr, disguised as foreign merchants, saying they have lost their way in the city. To all these seven men, the ladies give warning that they must not ask questions about what does not concern them. After some more drinking and amusement follows the intriguing episode where the eldest lady whips two bitches, and the lady doorkeeper faints three times upon hearing a sad song, thereby revealing scars of a beating. Harûn forces Ja'far to ask questions; the eldest lady, indignant, summons seven negro slaves, who make ready to behead the guests. The caliph, frightened, wants to give up his incognito, but the lady is already questioning the mendicants, who state that they are all sons of kings. Thereupon the eldest lady invites them, and by implication the other guests also, to tell their stories, after which she will let them go free; but it is not expressly stipulated that the stories are to serve as a ransom. First the porter, by way of a joke, describes the shopping tour he made with the lady housekeeper, saying: “This is my story”; the eldest lady laughs, and lets him off. But he prefers to stay and hear the others: it has already become clear that the lady's anger has spent itself, and that the guests are no longer in great danger. Then the three mendicants successively tell the stories of their lives and adventures, which for each of them involve notably the explanation of how they came to be blinded in the left eye. There is a marked climax in the series: each story is longer and more complicated than the preceding one. In the “First Mendicant”’s there is no relation between his cousin's crime and subsequent death, and his own misfortunes; the whole thing is rather indifferently put together. The “Second Mendicant” reports his adventure with a dangerous demon (an Ifrît) who nearly killed him, and to whom he tells the tale of “The Envier and the Envied” by way of a moral lesson⁶³. The Ifrît relents in so far that he merely changes the prince into a monkey; it takes a frightful transformation combat to restore him to human shape. The “Third Mendicant”'s story is extremely long: it stresses the ineluctability of fate, makes an abundant use of the number 40, and in its last part exploits the well-known marvellous motif of the forbidden door⁶⁴.—The caliph and his company, finally, are not required to tell anything; they simply repeat that they are foreign merchants. The eldest lady forgives all the guests, saying: “I grant you each other's lives” (I, 185), which we apparently must take to mean that the mendicants, by telling their stories, have redeemed the rest.

The next day, the caliph has them all brought before him, and now it is the ladies' turn to tell their stories. The “Eldest Lady”'s is an elaborate version of the story of the Second Sheik in “The Merchant and the Demon”: the two bitches are her wicked sisters, transformed by a demoness whose life she saved⁶⁵. The “Lady Doorkeeper”'s is a purely Baghdadian short story of married life, involving as a husband Harûn's own son el-Amîn. The Lady Housekeeper does not tell a story. Harûn puts things right: the demoness is summoned and takes the spell off the two sisters, while el-Amîn is reconciled with his repudiated wife. The eldest lady and the two sisters who just returned to human shape are given in marriage to the mendicants, who are granted posts and incomes, and the lady housekeeper takes a place among Harûn's wives. All the stories are put down in the annals of the realm.

As this outline shows, the structure of the whole seems more than a little out of joint in several places. The mendicants' stories are too long, particularly the last one. What is unusual, though, in the 1001 Nights, is not their length, but their being misplaced: they hold the story up with a minor issue when a major one has just been raised. Coming immediately after the ladies' strange behaviour, which arouses a much stronger curiosity than do the persons of the mendicants, they cause an unwelcome delay in the explanation of the mysteries of the household. Then, when we finally come back to the ladies and their stories, it is strange and somewhat disappointing that the lady housekeeper, who was introduced first and seems the most attractive person of the three, has nothing to tell. Even symmetry would demand that she, too, should have had a misfortune which caused her to live with her sisters, instead of being a married woman.

But above all, the telling of the mendicants' stories is not sufficiently motivated. There can be distinguished an attempt to employ the ransom device: the eldest lady's anger at the indiscretion of Ja'far, and the menacing display of seven negro slaves—one for each guest—with drawn swords, are clearly meant to prepare for it. The attempt, however, does not come off: the conditions are not clearly stated and the anger is soon forgotten. Now the reason why the device fails to work lies in the plot itself: the characters are miscast. The role belonging to a demon (or a king) falls to a mere Baghdadian lady, which causes an improbability not easily glossed over; and what is worse, the caliph, who would have fitted the part much better, is among the threatened guests. This fact alone would thwart the setting-up of a ransom frame: it is impossible to believe that Harûn could ever be in serious danger of being beheaded in a private house. One hint at his identity would be enough to change the whole course of events. As a matter of fact, the story wavers at the point where Harûn wants to protect himself by telling who he is, but does not get a chance, because the lady has already turned to the mendicants.

This particular passage most clearly demonstrates the clash between the two different patterns that can be distinguished throughout in the story. On the one hand, there is the well-known plot that turns on the presence of Harûn incognito; on the other hand, the ransom device that is intended to motivate the telling of the mendicants' stories. The two are incompatible, and the result is that neither of them really takes shape. Evidently, a simpler but much more satisfactory plot would emerge if the story were not encumbered by the mendicants. Its obvious, and traditional, outline would be the following:

• (1) The porter introduced into the house of the three ladies; drinking and singing.
• (2) Arrival of Harûn and his company, attracted by the noise; whipping of the bitches, fainting of the lady doorkeeper.

• Either the guests leave without asking questions, or Harûn asks questions, but justifies himself by revealing his identity.

• (3) The next day, the three sisters are brought before him, and tell:
  • a. the story of the Eldest Lady and the two bitches;
  • b the story of the Lady Doorkeeper and el-Amîn;
  • [c. the story of the Lady Housekeeper].
• (4) Harûn arranges things for all three of them.

The stories of the ladies would be quite sufficient to justify the framework—evidently of the entertaining frame-type—presenting Harûn as an unknown visitor. With the mendicants' stories the abortive ransom frame disappears, together with the improbability it entails. In this hypothetical form, “The Three Ladies” would be strikingly similar to another Harûn story, “Nocturnal Adventures.” Here, too, we have a common entertaining frame for three stories of personal experience (one of them, again, an elaborate version of one of the sheiks' stories from “The Merchant and the Demon”). But seeing that “Nocturnal Adventures,” one of the orphan stories, probably owes its present structure to Galland⁶⁶, it does not afford conclusive proof of the existence of this very pattern in the 1001 Nights.

The foregoing literary analysis raises a historical question: whether the mendicants' stories are a later addition. The fact that they are of no great artistic merit and dislocate the whole is not in itself a sufficient reason to consider them as such. It would be different if they were manifestly younger than the rest of the story; but that is not the case. They present many elements that point to old, presumably Persian, sources⁶⁷, and may well belong to the Persian layer of the collection. Thus there are no chronological grounds to consider the mendicants episode as alien to the original of the story.

We are left, therefore, with two equally valid suppositions as to the origin of “The Three Ladies.” Either, the story was first created in the simple form tentatively outlined above; thereafter a narrator, wishing to extend and to enrich it, worked it over to fit in the mendicants' stories, failing, however, to bring off their ransom frame, because it clashed with the already existing pattern. Or, alternatively, it was the original creator of the story who made an ambitious effort to set up a sort of double frame, but, having attempted too much, did not quite succeed.—As to the Lady Housekeeper's story, perhaps it was never there; perhaps it was lost in transmission; or just possibly it may have been struck out, if and when the mendicants' stories were worked in by a second hand, for reasons we can only guess at: did it by any chance contain the incest motif now figuring, somewhat disconnectedly, in the “First Mendicant”'s story? Unless an Arabic text is found that can throw new light on these historical problems and alternatives, we must needs leave them as they are.

As we saw, “The Merchant and the Demon” undoubtedly influenced “The Three Ladies”: it furnished the tentative ransom frame of the mendicants' episode as well as the plot of the “Eldest Lady”'s story. Returning to our examination of the first five pieces of the collection we may now conclude that the first three, in any case, are connected in more than one respect. It seems a reasonable surmise that the early compilers realized this connexion, and that it determined the placing together of these stories in the order still extant. The old relic, “The Merchant and the Demon,” traditionally came first; then follows “The Fisherman and the Demon” as another demonstration of man's superiority, and then “The Three Ladies” as an elaborate offspring of the opening story.

This surmise gains in plausibility because it can be demonstrated that in the Egyptian period, the impact of the pattern set by the opening story was still felt, and continued to shape the beginning of the book. It determined the Egyptian narrator who prolonged “The Three Apples” by “Nûr Ed-Dîn and Shems Ed-Dîn,” to link up the two by means of the ransom device: Ja'far tells the story to Harûn in order that his guilty negro slave shall be spared, and Harûn consents, on condition that the story be more amazing than the case of the three apples. It must be said, however, that the device is out of place here just as it is in “The Three Ladies,” although to a lesser degree: it does not harm the whole, but it lacks motivation. The plot of “The Three Apples” does not ask for the slave's life to be spared: on the contrary, it would be more satisfactory to see him punished for the wanton harm he has done⁶⁸. And why should Ja'far take such pains to save just one slave, among the many he had? The Egyptian narrator, wanting to place the delightful “Nûr Ed-Dîn” story, must have given it a ransom frame, deliberately, although not very judiciously, in order to follow the prevailing pattern of the preceding stories.

Lastly, there can be no doubt that this same awareness of the pattern provoked the crowning of the first batch with “The Hunchback,” which is a kind of virtuoso's performance among ransom frame-stories. The device is given here exactly the same turn as in the framing of “Nûr Ed-Dîn and Shems Ed-Dîn”: the king promises grace on condition that the stories told to him be more amazing than what he has just heard. The similarity is probably due to influence of the one on the other, but it is impossible to establish priority on chronological grounds⁶⁹. Now in “The Hunchback,” at last, everything functions to perfection; if the story had been expressly contrived for the purpose of rounding off the “ransom frame series”, it could not have been more satisfactory. To complete the present survey, therefore, particular attention must be paid to this last and best example of the pattern in question.

“The Hunchback”⁷⁰ derives its amazing pleasantness mainly from the expert framing, as the eleven stories fitted into it, though mostly good, are none of them outstanding. It almost seems as if the creator—or possibly, the narrator who achieved the present version—realized that he was working with somewhat commonplace and heterogeneous material, and, in order to make something new and surprising out of it, concentrated upon the framework. He certainly was familiar with the ransom device from the older stories to which his is a follow-up, and he well understood its possibilities and its requirements. He realized, as the man who added the sequel to “The Three Apples” did not, that the life or lives to be redeemed with stories must be those of innocent people; and also, as the creator or narrator of “The Three Ladies” did not, that the Jinni of the original form can be adequately replaced only by someone who wields absolute power: a king, and the more wilful and arbitrary a king, the better. And his is, too, the only story of the four where it remains captivatingly doubtful till the very end as to whether the ransom will be accepted or not.

The first episode, which sets up the frame for all that is to follow, exploits the well-known comic effects of repetition. A tailor and his wife invite an amusing little hunchback to supper; but unfortunately he chokes on a bite of fish, and dies. They quickly invent a pretext to carry him into the house of a Jewish doctor, who falls over the corpse on the stairs and thinks he killed it. So he puts the corpse in the yard of his neighbour, a steward, who in the dark mistakes it for a thief and deals it a heavy blow. Believing himself to be the killer, he hastily drags the corpse away and leaves it in a dark street, where a Christian broker, who is blind drunk, falls to fighting with it; caught beating the dead man, he is taken for a murderer, brought before the prefect of police, and sentenced to the gallows. The various misfortunes of the four men become more amusing every time they are repeated, unaccountably, as if the dead hunchback was accident-prone. The same applies to their reactions, each of them in his turn deciding to get rid of the corpse no matter how. When the last one in the chain, the Christian broker, is about to be hanged, the repetition is reversed: one after the other, the self-supposed hunchback-killers come forward, conscience-stricken, and confess, so that the hangman gets fed up with taking them off the rope in turn. This ludicrously repetitive pattern gives (as do similar devices on the stage) an odd impression of something mechanical and quite unlike real life, which fits in very well with the preposterousness of the whole affair.

At the end of the first episode, the frame is ready for the stories to begin. Brought before the king, who very much resents the death of the hunchback, his favourite jester, the four men are going to tell, each in his turn, the most memorable story they ever heard. It soon becomes clear, although it is not expressly stated at once, that by doing so they are going to fight for their lives; for the required ransom is not just any story, but a story still more amazing than the hunchback's posthumous adventures. And the king, unlike the Jinni of old, is not easily satisfied. After each of the first three stories—the Christian broker's, the Moslem steward's, and the Jewish doctor's—he declares: “This story is not more amazing than the story of the hunchback. And so you shall have to hang, all of you.” (I, 318, 330, 343). The judgment is fair enough: the three stories are indeed less surprising than what has just been told about the hunchback. But the inference is, again, preposterous; and here the effect of the repetition is sinister as well as comic, a kind of “humour noir”.

The first series of four stories is knit together by several analogies, among with the repetition of the mutilation motif is prominent. Each of the four men reports, not a personal experience, but an extraordinary adventure told by someone else⁷¹, some man he met in the course of his day's work or at a social function; and every time the account of this adventure serves to explain a bodily defect. Two of the stories' heroes had their right hands cut off, having been taken for thieves; one is deprived of his thumbs and great toes, to remind him of having offended a woman; and the last one is lame from an unfortunate accident. The motif might be due to a reminiscence of the three one-eyed mendicants from “The Three Ladies”; but in this homely form it appears less far-fetched and artificial than it does there. Another improvement is the fact that the mutilation is attributed to a third person, which puts the man who reports about it in the same position as the reader: intrigued at first, and subsequently pleased when his curiosity is satisfied by the mutilated man's account.

But, as we saw, after three of these stories the victims are still under the menace of death. So everything comes to depend on the fourth one, the Moslem tailor's; which is only right and proper, for the tailor was the initial cause of the whole chain of accidents. The king, with grim joviality, puts the responsibility plainly before him: “Why, there still is the tailor, who made this sad mess.” And he added: “Tailor, my little fellow, if you can tell something that is more amazing than the story of the hunchback, I'll forgive every man of you.” (I, 343). So the tailor comes forward and embarks upon what to all appearances is going to be the fourth mutilation story. But he knows well enough that merely another specimen like the foregoing will not save their necks: a special effort is called for. Therefore he presently makes it clear that the real hero of his story is not the lame young man from Baghdad, but a character that at first seemed only episodical: the barber. And as soon as the barber is in the limelight, the whole situation changes. For wherever stories are traded, the barber would spoil the market: he gives more than anyone ever bargained for.

The tailor has not set himself an easy task. First he gives the story told by the lame young man, who repeated for the benefit of his fellow-guests (among whom he found, to his dismay, the barber) the unbearable chatter by which the barber made him late for a rendezvous. Then he proceeds to tell how the barber tried to justify himself before the guests by relating an occasion where, brought before the caliph el-Mustansir-billâh⁷², he discreetly held his tongue—though just then it would have been simpler to speak up. But that is not all: in order to illustrate his superior wisdom and discretion, the barber forced upon the caliph the life-stories of his six brothers, which he now tells once more to the guests. (These brothers are all of them deformed or mutilated too: the motif of physical disgrace continues to run through the framed stories, incessantly reminding us of the hunchback whose death they are to atone for.) The tailor draws upon the astonishing verbal memory that reporting characters in the 1001 Nights occasionally display, and repeats all this before the king.

The effect of this wildly complicated, but at the same time perfectly clear pattern is, as it were, stratified: the reader enjoys the impact of the barber's torrent of talk on several planes of the story at once. First we have the caliph el-Mustansir-billâh, who for all his authority does not succeed in dismissing the barber, and must submit helplessly to hearing the stories of the man's six disgusting brothers till the very end. (Then he merely exiles him, a leniency that may be attributed as well to sheer fatigue as to a sense of humour.) Secondly, there are the guests at the banquet, who get all of it too, with the caliph's reactions added; and among them is the luckless young man from Baghdad, submitted once more to the word-flow of his former torturer, whom he wished never to see any more in his life. Thirdly there is the tailor, feverishly concentrating upon reproducing it all without skipping a word; for he hopes, thanks to the barber, to win the day by exhaustion tactics. Finally, the whole build-up ends with the “king of China”, who has, in a way, asked for it, and who now is nearly as helpless as el-Mustansir-billâh was. The difference is that he gets it all at second hand, from the tailor; but just because of that, the barber becomes almost a mythical figure, a sort of god of loquacity who speaks through the tailor's mouth and cannot be silenced. It gradually becomes hard to believe that he exists at all. But the cumulative epic that involves him and his six brothers and the caliph and the young man from Baghdad and the tailor, has the success it was calculated to have. When the tailor has rounded off his performance by reporting briefly how the guests put the barber under lock and key (indeed the only efficacious way of dealing with him) and how he himself, coming home from the banquet, ran into his misadventure with the hunchback, the king confesses defeat. When the king of China had heard the tailor's story, he shook his head in a pleased manner, manifested amazement, and said: “This story about the young man and the garrulous barber is indeed better and funnier than the story of the hunchbacked fool.” (I, 403). And then, striving to get back his hold upon reality after such a debauch of words, he orders the barber to be brought before him, which is a wise and sober decision.

Thereupon begins the brief final episode of the story, which is as fine as what went before. At last, then, the barber is there in the flesh, and the Egyptian feeling for detail asserts itself in a description: he was a very old man of over ninety, with a dark complexion, white beard and eyebrows, small ears, a long nose, and a silly and conceited expression on his face. (I, 404). And now, as it is hardly possible to cumulate still more, the whole construction is swiftly and expertly broken up. When the king jokingly invites him to tell a story, the barber asks instead for the stories of those he sees present; for, he huffily says, he is a discreet man and not for nothing is he dubbed “the Silent”. So, it is briefly stated, they give him the story of the hunchback and all that has just been told by the broker, the steward, the doctor and the tailor, thus paying him back in his own coin⁷³. Thereupon the barber, unruffled, and still extremely taciturn, examines the hunchback's corpse, pulls a fishbone out of his throat, and restores him to life.

It is extremely satisfying and right, not only that the tabor-playing little hunchback should still be alive, but that so much ado, such preposterous happenings and such heroic exploits with words should turn out to be, after all, about nothing. Because the hunchback was killed, there has been all this telling of stories, and stories within stories; but now that all the bags of words have been deflated and no one is talking any more, not even the barber, there is time at last to find out that nobody killed the hunchback at all. The pattern has been undone even to the basic knot; the story is finished indeed.

In the foregoing pages only one structural aspect of the 1001 Nights has been investigated: the presenting of the stories, either independent or placed within other stories. As we have seen, the book displays many samples of remarkable craftsmanship in this matter. There is a careful appropriateness in the oblique presentation of witness pieces and short stories, a deft touch in many of the insertions, while frame-story technique is carried to perfection: Sindbad's Voyages and the narrations of “The Hunchback” are like precious (or, in the latter case, semi-precious) stones of which the value is enhanced by a superb setting. Evidently the story-tellers—I use the word here in the widest sense—were not content with just telling something; they show a particular regard for the narrative performance in its own right, and so does the listening public evoked in many of the stories.

The contents of the 1001 Nights represent, by and large, a highly developed art of story-telling; the manner in which these contents are presented testifies to an intelligent feeling and liking for story-telling as a pastime. Yet, prose-fiction in Arabic never attained an acknowledged literary standing; while on the other hand its nobler competitors, epic poetry and drama, are conspicuously lacking. This state of affairs, within a literature so obviously endowed with narrative and descriptive gifts, puzzles the historian of literature and culture⁷⁴. The “popular”⁷⁵ art of story-telling, though, doubtless profited greatly by its modest condition; it remained untrammelled by formalizing conventions, such as for centuries continued to govern the Kasîda. Its direct and easy way of being, combining effective artistry with freedom from period-bound literary rules, largely accounts for its lasting appeal to readers of any time and civilisation.

Notes

1. Some of these aspects are treated incidentally in other chapters [of this book], apropos of the stories examined: story patterns, Chap. IV, Part I, pp. 154-8, Part III, pp. 253-7, Chap. VI, pp. 437-8: a curious denouement device, Chap. VI, pp. 447-9; tripartition, Chap. IV, Part II, pp. 184-90, Part IV, pp. 285-95; types of Harûn stories, Chap. VI. [Chapter and page references throughout this essay are to The Art of Story-Telling.]

2. For the matters touched upon in this paragraph, an extremely clear summary is that of Mac Guckin de Slane in the Introduction to his translation of Ibn Khallikân's invaluable Biographical Dictionary, I, pp. XVII-XXXV.

3. For a recent aperçu, see Weisweiler, Arabesken, introduction, pp. 1-2.

4. In exploring, as far as I could, the literature of the Arabic Middle Ages, this has struck me as one of its most remarkable characteristics. It has not escaped me that G. von Grunebaum 1956, pp. 275-287, records and illustrates an almost opposite impression. The reason of the divergence seems to lie in the different points of comparison: Von Grunebaum's, Greek literature, and mine, medieval European.

5. Thus for Jaudar (140), Wardân (60), also Abu Kîr (169).

6. See for instance Paret, Liebesgeschichten.

7. Not in Ibn Khallikân; not in E.I..

8. See Chap. VI, p. 463.

9. See Chap. VI, pp. 454-6.

10. See Chap. VI, pp. 456-60.

11. Mas'udi [Abul Hasan Ali Ibn Husain Ibn Ali Al-Masu'di, 10th century chronicler and author of Muruj adh-Dhahab (Meadows of Gold)], Golden Meadows, transl. cit., VI, p. 333; Ibn Khallikân, transl. cit., I, p. 310.

12. The only notable exception is the seven Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor, which he naturally relates himself, within the surrounding framework that presents him and his listener in the third person.

13. See Chap. IV, Part I, p. 125.

14. Above [in this book], p. 381.

15. For the subtle use of oblique presentation in the tale of “The Nile-Ferryman and the Saint,” see Chap. IV, Part V, pp. 371-2.

16. Which is a story-teller's anachronism, since this famous Udhrite poet (see Ibn Khallikân, transl. cit., I, pp. 331-337) died in 701.

17. See Chap. IV, Part I, p. 126.

18. See Chap. IV, Part I, pp. 132-3.

19. See Chap. IV, Part V, pp. 345-6.

20. It is well known that medieval Moslem scholars possessed prodigious memories; they thought nothing of learning whole books by heart. But the extraordinary thing here is the memorizing and reproducing of something only once heard: cf. the story about the stingy king, in Lane 1, p. 107.

21. See Chap. IV, Part I, pp. 147, 158-65.

22. Littmann VI, pp. 680, 684. Cf., notably, the Pantshatantra and the Parrot Book.

23. I follow the Calcutta II version in Littmann's translation. Galland, as also Calcutta I and Breslau, has a, better, parrot tale (duplicated in 139b) instead of the king's falcon tale, and in Bulak the sage is called Ruyân, not Dubân; for the rest, they are similar to each other and to Calcutta II.

24. The same turn in Lane's Bulak translation. It would seem that Calcutta II slipped up here.

25. Lane gives it from another source, 1, pp. 114-115 note; it is, as might be expected, a fable of the type Ungrateful serpent (S. Thompson, Types, no. 155).

26. See Chap. I, p. 30; also Chap. IV, Part V, pp. 352-3.

27. See Chap. IV, Part IV, pp. 293-4.

28. Paret 1927.

29. On Bedouin robbers in “Omar Ibn En-Nu'mân,” see also Chap. IV, Part II, p. 176.

30. The link-up of “Azîz and Azîza” with “Tâj El-Mulûk” has been discussed Chap. IV, Part I, pp. 134-5.

31. See Chap. VI, pp. 444-5.

32. See Chap. II, p. 49, and Chap. IV, Part I, pp. 154-5.

33. The following pages were published, in French translation and somewhat less developed, in Arabica 8 = 1961, pp. 137-157.

34. See Chap. IV, Part III, pp. 253-63.

35. Horovitz 1903.

36. Lane 3, p. 343; he therefore put the framing story in a note.

37. There seems little doubt that the time-gaining frame, like other framing and inserting devices, is an Indian invention. It is displayed to advantage in the Parrot Book, which we possess i.a. in a 14th-century Persian adaptation; the original Sanskrit text, “Seventy tales of a Parrot”, of which a mention occurs in the 12th century, but which may have been considerably older, is lost. See, however, also for the Shehrezâd story, Perry 1960 on the “Seven Vizirs.”

38. On this point, see notably Cosquin 1922. There is much to be said for the view, held by several scholars, that the version found in the 101 Nights is rather firmer and more coherent.

39. As Dyroff 1908, p. 280, so well puts it: “… kein bedeutender Künstler; er benützt unbedenklich fremde Lappen und stückt ohne besonderen eigenen Aufwand ein neues Gebilde daraus zusammen; aber wir müssen doch anerkennen, dass er mit Energie auf sein Ziel lossteuert.”

40. Except in the “translation” of Mardrus, who made up little comic dialogues between the king and Shehrezâd.

41. After no. 12; also before 9 and after 11, 14, 16, 17 and 19.

42. In one single instance, Shehrezâd is made to point out the moral of a tale she has just told, “The Just King Anusharwân”; see Chap. IV, Part V, pp. 360-1.

43. Boccaccio and Chaucer, and in some measure also Marguerite de Navarre, made expert use of the possibilities of this pattern. The Persian poet Nizami (12th century), in The Seven Princesses, connects the seven narrations with each other and with the framework by a subtle use of symbols and moral implications; the result is enchanting, but from a story-telling point of view almost over-refined.

44. An attempt to trace the developing of a long moral lesson throughout the whole of the ‘1001 Nights’ has been made by A. Gelber 1917, but his constructions are the opposite of convincing. The same applies to M. Lahy-Hollebecque 1927, who bases his demonstration on Mardrus.

45. The “Janshâh” story, forcibly inserted in “Bulûkiya,” is doubtless a random addition; the narrator did not even trouble to put it in the first person.

46. There is some information on the framed stories, especially “Bulûkiya”: see Chap. IV, Part IV, p. 282 and note 2; on the framework, I have found none at all.

47. Studies about the Book of Sindbad in its numerous versions—Persian, Arabic, Syriac, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Romance languages—are countless; I include only a few specimens in my Bibliography. The version that came to be incorporated, apparently at a late date, in the ‘1001 Nights’, derives from an Arabic prose version which was adapted from the Persian, probably in the 8th century, and gave rise to many imitations, among which seems to count Jali'âd and Wird Khân. It has long been unanimously supposed that the Persian version, in its turn, was adapted from an Indian original, of which, however, no trace has ever been found. Perry 1960, clearly dissatisfied with the old “India theory” as a whole, defends fresh views: Persian origin, possibly a 2nd-century Greek prototype, Jali'âd and Wird Khân the model (also Persian) rather than an imitation.

48. [Th.] Nöldeke 1879, pp. 522-523, aptly established that originally, the vizirs' stories formed two parallel series, the first one devoted to the theme of rashness and the second one to that of women's malice. This arrangement, which can never have been very efficacious, to judge by what is still left of it, has got broken up and obfuscated in the ‘1001 Nights’-version, especially towards the end.

49. See Chap. IV, Part I, pp. 122-3.

50. On the framed stories of “The Merchant and the Demon,” see Chap. IV, Part IV, pp. 307-10. I follow the Calcutta II version in Littmann's translation, for reasons explained there.

51. Macdonald 1924, pp. 372-379.

52. This is quite possible, and all the more probable as there is still another, similar anecdote extant to explain the word: Dyroff 1908, pp. 253-254.

53. Macdonald 1924, p. 376.

54. On Jinn, see especially the fine article of Macdonald 1919.

55. On this point, see also Chap. IV, Part IV, p. 288.

56. Koran, Sura 72; transl. Arberry, II, pp. 305-307.

57. The ransom device is merely hinted at in introducing one of the little inserted stories in “Omar Ibn En-Nu'mân”: see above, p. 393.

58. Oestrup 1925, p. 48. The same remark already in Dyroff 1908, pp. 263-264, with some, mostly excellent, comment.

59. See above, pp. 389-91.

60. Notably, the intriguing motif of the fishes who recite verse in the frying-pan when an apparition comes out of the wall, remains, in what follows, completely blind.

61. In the Indian Vetālā stories (written down by Somadeva in the 11th century) the pattern appears reversed: the demon tells casus-stories, and the king has to furnish answers to save his life, although by speaking he frustrates his enterprise.

62. I keep to Calcutta II in Littmann's translation. Galland has the same version, minus the bath scene (see Chap. III, p. 72) and plus proper names for the three ladies—Zobéide, Safie and Amine—which are perhaps of his own invention; the mendicants are blind in the right eye, not in the left.—Lane emended the Bulak text by some judicious corrections and additions; notably he completed the “Third Mendicant”'s story, of which Bulak gives only the beginning, with the aid of Calcutta I. As a result, his translation runs parallel to Littmann's.

63. See above, p. 391.

64. See W. H. Roscher 1909, and W. F. Kirby 1887.

65. See Chap. IV, Part IV, pp. 310-12.

66. See Chap. VI, pp. 431-2.

67. Littmann VI, p. 703, points out ancient Egyptian, Persian, and Indian traits; the latter part of the “Third Mendicant's” story is a duplicate of “The Man Who Never Laughed Any More,” from the “Seven Vizirs,” and used also by Nizami.

68. See Chap. IV, Part II, p. 170. Burton 1, p. 19, remarks: “it is supposed that slaves cannot help telling these fatal lies. Moreover it is held unworthy of a freeborn man to take over-notice of these servile villanies; hence the scoundrel in the story escapes unpunished.”

69. Since both stories originated approximately in the same period. On the date of “Nûr Ed-Dîn and Shems Ed-Dîn,” see Chap. IV, Part IV, p. 295, note 1; on that of “The Hunchback,” below, note 70.

70. Calcutta II, Bulak and Galland have the same version; I keep to Littmann's translation.—On the story's date, see particularly Macdonald 1924, pp. 383-390: he puts the composition of the present version in the 14th century.—On the hunchback episode, Suchier 1922; cf. also S. Thompson, Types, no. 1537.—On the framed stories, I have collected the following data. De Goeje 1886 shows that the story of the “Steward” occurs in a chronicle of Ibn el-Jauzi (d. 1200), and that the ‘1001 Nights’-version is rather garbled and overelaborate, in comparison with the anecdote as given there; cf. also Amedroz 1904. Burton 1, p. 317, notes, after Lane 2, p. 452, that the “Barber's Story of Himself” goes back to a historical anecdote related by Ibn Abd Rabbihi of Córdoba (d. 940); and also, for that matter, by Mas'udi, Golden Meadows, transl. cit., VII, pp. 12-16. The trick played in the “Barber's Second Brother” also occurs in Ibn Abd Rabbihi: see Weisweiler, Arabesken, no. 74. “The Barber's Fifth Brother” uses, in its first part, the old “Air-castles” motif (S. Thompson, Motif-Index, nos. J 2060 and 2061), occurring also in 168b, while the second part recalls a “Baibars” story (157h).

71. On this point, see above, pp. 387-8.

72. Who reigned 1226-1242; Bulak gives el-Muntasir-billâh, who reigned 861. Both names create chronological difficulties, which have been commented upon by Lane and others. It need hardly be pointed out that the matter is not really relevant: the story cheerfully mixes a history, and a geography, of its own.

73. Thus in Calcutta II and Bulak; in Galland, they tell him merely what befell the hunchback.

74. See for instance G. von Grunebaum 1956, pp. 287 ff.

75. In the sense as defined earlier, Chap. II, pp. 42-3.

Works Cited

Section I: On the 1001 Nights

A. Translations

[A.] Galland, Les Mille et Une Nuit, contes arabes; trad. en françois; nouv. éd. corrigée. Paris, 1726, 12 livres en 6 vols.

[A.] Galland, Les Mille et Une Nuits, contes arabes; nouv. éd. revue et préfacée par G. Picard. Paris, 1955, 3 vols. (Classiques Garnier.) Quotations are from this edition.

E. W. Lane, The Thousand and One Nights, commonly called, in England, The Arabian Nights' Entertainments; a new transl. from the Arabic, with copious notes; new ed. […] by E. Stanley Poole. London, 1877, 3 vols. Quotations are from this edition, which reproduces the standard ed. of 1859.

R. F. Burton, A plain and literal translation of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, now entituled The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night; with intr., explanatory notes […] and a Terminal Essay […]. Benares [= Stoke Newington], 1885, 10 vols. Quotations are from this edition.

E. Littmann, Die Erzählungen aus den Tausendundein Nächten; zum ersten Mal nach dem arabischen Urtext der Calcuttaer Ausgabe aus dem Jahre 1839 übertragen; [2. Neudruck]. Wiesbaden, Insel-Verlag, 1954, 6 vols. Quotations are from this edition.

B. Studies

a. On the collection as a whole

M. J. de Goeje, De Arabische Nachtvertellingen. In: De Gids, 50 = 1886, pp. 385-413.

W. F. Kirby, The forbidden doors of the 1001 Nights. In: Folklore Journal, 5 = 1887, pp. 112-124.

K. Dyroff, Zur Entstehung und Geschichte des arabischen Buches 1001 Nacht. In: F. P. Greve, Die Erzählungen aus den 1001 Nächten; vollst. Deutsche Ausg. auf Grund der Burton'schen Engl. Ausg.; Bd. 12, pp. 229-307. Leipzig, 1908.

D. B. Macdonald, From the Arabian Nights to Spirit. In: The Moslem World, 9 = 1919, pp. 336-348.

D. B. Macdonald, The earlier history of the Arabian Nights. In: J.R.A.S. [Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society], 1924, pp. 353-397.

J. Oestrup, Studien über 1001 Nacht; aus dem Dänischen (nebst einigen Zusätzen) übers. von O. Rescher. Stuttgart, 1925.

W. H. Roscher, Die Zahl 40 im Glauben, Brauch und Schrifttum der Semiten; ein Beitrag zur vergleichenden Religionswissenschaft, Volkskunde und Zahlenmystik. B.G. Teubner. Leipzig,, 1909

b. On individual stories

Hunchback

W. Suchier, Der Schwank von der viermal getöteten Leiche in der Literatur des Abend- und Morgenlandes. Halle (Saale), 1922.

Saif el-Mulûk

J. Horovitz, Saif al-Mulûk. In: Mittheilungen des Seminars für Or. Sprachen zu Berlin, 6 = 1903, 2. Abt., pp. 52-56.

Seven Vizirs

Th. Nöldeke, Sindban oder die sieben weisen Meister. […]. In: Z.D.M.G. [Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft], 33 = 1879, pp. 515-536.

B. E. Perry, The origin of the Book of Sindbad. In: Fabula, 3 = 1960, pp. 1-94.

Shehrezâd story

E. Cosquin, Le prologue-cadre des 1001 Nuits. In his Etudes folkloriques; pp. 265-347. Paris, 1922.

G. E. von Grunebaum, Medieval Islam; a study in cultural orientation; 3^d impr.. Chicago, 1956.

Section II: General documentation

B. Literary study; on story-telling.

S. Thompson, The types of the folk-tale; a classification and bibliography. Helsinki, 1928. (Folklore Fellows Comm., 74.) Quoted as: S. Thompson, Types.

S. Thompson, Motif-index of folk-literature; rev. and enl. ed.. Copenhagen, 1955-'58, 6 vols. Quoted as: S. Thompson, Motif-index.

C. “Märchendeutung”

A. Gelber, 1001 Nacht; der Sinn der Erzählungen der Scheherezade. Wien/Leipzig, 1917.

M. Lahy-Hollebecque, Le féminisme de Schéhérazade; la révélation des 1001 Nuits. Paris, 1927.

Section III: Background reading

A. Collections of stories, story-books, etc.

a. Oriental

M. Weisweiler, Arabesken der Liebe; früharabische Geschichten von Liebe und Frauen, ges. und übers. Leiden, 1954.

R. Paret, Früharabische Liebesgeschichten. Bern, 1927.

B. History, geography and miscellanea

a. Arabic

The Koran; interpreted [= transl.] by A. J. Arberry. London, 1955, 2 vols.

Ibn Khallikân, Biographical Dictionary; transl. from the Arabic by BⁿMac Guckin de Slane. Paris, 1842-'71, 4 vols.