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Little excuse is needed, perhaps, for any fresh selection from thefamous "Tales of a Thousand and One Nights," provided it berepresentative enough, and worthy enough, to enlist a new army ofyouthful readers. Of the two hundred and sixty-four bewildering,unparalleled stories, the true lover can hardly spare one, yet theremust always be favourites, even among these. We have chosen some of themost delightful, in our opinion; some, too, that chanced to appealparticularly to the genius of the artist. If, enticed by our choice andthe beauty of the pictures, we manage to attract a few thousand moretrue lovers to the fountain-book, we shall have served our humble turn.The only real danger lies in neglecting it, in rearing a child who doesnot know it and has never fallen under its spell.

Nowhere in the whole realm of literature will you find such a Marvel,such a Wonder, such a Nonesuch of a book; nowhere will you findimpossibilities so real and so convincing; nowhere but in what Henleycalls:

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This action of the African magician's plainly shewed him to be neitherAladdin's uncle, nor Mustapha the tailor's brother; but a true African.Africa is a country whose inhabitants delight most in magic of any inthe whole world, and he had applied himself to it from his youth. Afterforty years' experience in enchantments and reading of magic books, hehad found out that there was in the world a wonderful lamp, thepossession of which would render him more powerful than any monarch; andby a late operation of geomancy, he had discovered that this lamp layconcealed in a subterranean place in the midst of China. Fully persuadedof the truth of this discovery, he set out from the farthest part ofAfrica; and after a long and fatiguing journey came to the town nearestto this treasure. But though he had a certain knowledge of the placewhere the lamp was, he was not permitted to take it himself, nor toenter the subterranean place, but must receive it from the hands ofanother person. For this reason he had addressed himself to Aladdin,whom he looked upon as a lad fit to serve his purpose, resolving, assoon as he should get the lamp into his hands, to sacrifice him to hisavarice and wickedness, by making the fumigation mentioned before, andrepeating two magical words, the effect of which would remove the stoneinto its place, so that no witness would remain of the transaction.

Then the Emeer Moosa ordered one of his young men to mount a camel, andride round the city, in the hope that he might discover a trace of agate. So one of his young men mounted, and proceeded around it for twodays with their nights, prosecuting his journey with diligence, and notresting; and when the third day arrived, he came in sight of hiscompanions, and he was astounded at that which he beheld of the extentof the city, and its height. Then he said: "O Emeer, the easiest placein it is this place at which ye have alighted." And thereupon the EmeerMoosa took Talib and the Sheikh Abd-Es-Samad, and they ascended amountain opposite the city, and overlooking it; and when they hadascended that mountain, they saw a city than which eyes had not beheldany greater. Its pavilions were lofty, and its domes were shining; itsrivers were running, its trees were fruitful, and its gardens bore ripeproduce. It was a city with impenetrable gates, empty, still, without avoice but the owl hooting in its quarters, and the raven croaking in itsthoroughfare-streets, and bewailing those who had been in it.

Eventually the Vizier (Wazir), whose duty it is to provide them, cannot find any more virgins. Scheherazade, the vizier's daughter, offers herself as the next bride and her father reluctantly agrees. On the night of their marriage, Scheherazade begins to tell the king a tale, but does not end it. The king, curious about how the story ends, is thus forced to postpone her execution in order to hear the conclusion. The next night, as soon as she finishes the tale, she begins another one, and the king, eager to hear the conclusion of that tale as well, postpones her execution once again. This goes on for one thousand and one nights, hence the name.

The earliest mentions of the Nights refer to it as an Arabic translation from a Persian book, Hezār Afsān (aka Afsaneh or Afsana), meaning 'The Thousand Stories'. In the tenth century, Ibn al-Nadim compiled a catalogue of books (the "Fihrist") in Baghdad. He noted that the Sassanid kings of Iran enjoyed "evening tales and fables".[22] Al-Nadim then writes about the Persian Hezār Afsān, explaining the frame story it employs: a bloodthirsty king kills off a succession of wives after their wedding night. Eventually one has the intelligence to save herself by telling him a story every evening, leaving each tale unfinished until the next night so that the king will delay her execution.[23]

However, according to al-Nadim, the book contains only 200 stories. He also writes disparagingly of the collection's literary quality, observing that "it is truly a coarse book, without warmth in the telling".[24] In the same century Al-Masudi also refers to the Hezār Afsān, saying the Arabic translation is called Alf Khurafa ('A Thousand Entertaining Tales'), but is generally known as Alf Layla ('A Thousand Nights'). He mentions the characters Shirāzd (Scheherazade) and Dināzād.[25]

Muhsin Mahdi's 1984 Leiden edition, based on the Galland Manuscript, was rendered into English by Husain Haddawy (1990).[49] This translation has been praised as "very readable" and "strongly recommended for anyone who wishes to taste the authentic flavour of those tales."[50] An additional second volume of Arabian nights translated by Haddawy, composed of popular tales not present in the Leiden edition, was published in 1995.[51] Both volumes were the basis for a single-volume reprint of selected tales of Haddawy's translations.[52]

The One Thousand and One Nights employs an early example of the frame story, or framing device: the character Scheherazade narrates a set of tales (most often fairy tales) to the Sultan Shahriyar over many nights. Many of Scheherazade's tales are themselves frame stories, such as the Tale of Sinbad the Seaman and Sinbad the Landsman, which is a collection of adventures related by Sinbad the Seaman to Sinbad the Landsman.

"The Tale of Attaf" depicts another variation of the self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby Harun al-Rashid consults his library (the House of Wisdom), reads a random book, "falls to laughing and weeping and dismisses the faithful vizier Ja'far ibn Yahya from sight. Ja'afar, disturbed and upset flees Baghdad and plunges into a series of adventures in Damascus, involving Attaf and the woman whom Attaf eventually marries." After returning to Baghdad, Ja'afar reads the same book that caused Harun to laugh and weep, and discovers that it describes his own adventures with Attaf. In other words, it was Harun's reading of the book that provoked the adventures described in the book to take place. This is an early example of reverse causation.[71]

Near the end of the tale, Attaf is given a death sentence for a crime he did not commit but Harun, knowing the truth from what he has read in the book, prevents this and has Attaf released from prison. In the 12th century, this tale was translated into Latin by Petrus Alphonsi and included in his Disciplina Clericalis,[72] alongside the "Sindibad" story cycle.[73] In the 14th century, a version of "The Tale of Attaf" also appears in the Gesta Romanorum and Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron.[72]

The horrific nature of Scheherazade's situation is magnified in Stephen King's Misery, in which the protagonist is forced to write a novel to keep his captor from torturing and killing him. The influence of the Nights on modern horror fiction is certainly discernible in the work of H. P. Lovecraft. As a child, he was fascinated by the adventures recounted in the book, and he attributes some of his creations to his love of the 1001 Nights.[86]

The immediate success of Galland's version with the French public may have been because it coincided with the vogue for contes de fées ('fairy stories'). This fashion began with the publication of Madame d'Aulnoy's Histoire d'Hypolite in 1690. D'Aulnoy's book has a remarkably similar structure to the Nights, with the tales told by a female narrator. The success of the Nights spread across Europe and by the end of the century there were translations of Galland into English, German, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Russian, Flemish and Yiddish.[110]

The work was included on a price-list of books on theology, history, and cartography, which was sent by the Scottish bookseller Andrew Millar (then an apprentice) to a Presbyterian minister. This is illustrative of the title's widespread popularity and availability in the 1720s.[114]

The Nights continued to be a favourite book of many British authors of the Romantic and Victorian eras. According to A. S. Byatt, "In British Romantic poetry the Arabian Nights stood for the wonderful against the mundane, the imaginative against the prosaically and reductively rational."[115] In their autobiographical writings, both Coleridge and de Quincey refer to nightmares the book had caused them when young. Wordsworth and Tennyson also wrote about their childhood reading of the tales in their poetry.[116] Charles Dickens was another enthusiast and the atmosphere of the Nights pervades the opening of his last novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870).[117]

Another important literary figure, the Irish poet W. B. Yeats was also fascinated by the Arabian Nights, when he wrote in his prose book, A Vision an autobiographical poem, titled The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid,[119] in relation to his joint experiments with his wife Georgie Hyde-Lees, with Automatic writing. The automatic writing, is a technique used by many occultists in order to discern messages from the subconscious mind or from other spiritual beings, when the hand moves a pencil or a pen, writing only on a simple sheet of paper and when the person's eyes are shut. Also, the gifted and talented wife, is playing in Yeats's poem as "a gift" herself, given only allegedly by the caliph to the Christian and Byzantine philosopher Qusta Ibn Luqa, who acts in the poem as a personification of W. B. Yeats. In July 1934 he was asked by Louis Lambert, while in a tour in the United States, which six books satisfied him most. The list that he gave placed the Arabian Nights, secondary only to William Shakespeare's works.[120] 2ff7e9595c