Arabian Nights: Sindbad (Andrew Lang) Week 6: Middle East - Assignments - Reading - Resources - Images

Background Reading

Alf-Layla-wa-Layla, "One Thousand Nights And (One) Night"

There are many versions of The Thousand and One Nights, which is best known in the West under the title Arabian Nights. The different editions share the same basic framework: the sly and beautiful woman, Scheherazade, manages to keep her husband the sultan from executing her because every night she tells him part of a story, but does not quite finish the story - so he has to keep her alive just one more night so that he can find out what happens. The inventory of stories that Scheherazade tells to the sultan is what varies from edition to edition. Some versions of the book are very short, while some are quite lengthy. As different editors transmitted the manuscript, they felt free to add more and more stories.

The first versions of the book probably were written in Persian (probably based on an even earlier Indian version), with the first Arabic translation dating to some time in the 9th century. Although this 9th-century manuscript has not survived, there is a manuscript fragment of the Nights which does seem to belong to the 9th century. The Arabic historian Masudi, writing in the 10th century, referred to a book that he called A Thousand Nights (Alf layla). He said that the book was a collection of stories translated from Persian, Indian, and Greek sources, set in Baghdad. Masudi identifies what is probably the most fascinating feature of the Nights: it is a collection of stories from all over the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean worlds.

The Arabian Nights in Europe

The first European translation of the Nights was a French translation by Antoine Galland which was published in 1704 under the title Les Mille et une nuits, contes arabes traduits en français. This book was enormously popular, and contributed greatly to the "Orientalism" that was such a strong force in European culture of both the 18th and 19th centuries. Galland based his translation on a manusript from Syria that probably dates to the 15th century (you can see a photograph of this manuscript online). Some of the most popular stories in Galland do not come from this manuscript, but were instead collected by him when he traveled in Syria. Some of the stories which Galland collected and transcribed include the story of Aladdin and the story of Ali Baba and the forty thieves.

Like the stories of Aladdin and Ali Baba, the stories connected with voyages of Sindbad were not part of the original Nights collection. Instead, the stories of Sindbad circulated in Persian manuscripts, and were then added to the Arabian Nights; it is not clear in what century the stories of Sindbad were added to the Nights.

In terms of their historical setting, the voyages of Sindbad claim to take place during the reign of Harun al-Rashid, the Caliph of Baghdad. Harun was born in 764 and died in 809. The time of his rule in Baghdad (768-809) marked the height of what is called the "Abbasid" period of Arabic history (named for "Abbas," the uncle of Mohammad). Harun’s territory included southwest Asia and north Africa, and he conducted diplomacy with the emperor Charlemagne in the west and the Chinese emperor in the east. Harun's rule as the "Golden Age" of the Abbasid dynasty. Abbasid rule came to an end in 1258 when Baghdad was invaded and overthrown the Mongols led by Hulagu Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan.

Yet even though the stories of Sindbad are set in the 8th century, this is more historical fiction than historical fact. As Daniel Beaumont writes in the introduction to his book Slave of Desire: Sex, Love, and Death in the 1001 Nights:

Despite the antiquity of many of the plots in The Thousand and One Nights, the stories as we have them now seem to wear the garb of the late medieval period in the Arab-Islamic world, that is, the eras of the Mamluks and the Ottomans. Thus, stories about the Abbasid caliph Harun ar-Rashid, who ruled about six centuries before the Ottoman Turks established their power, may reflect popular notions about how a Turkish sultan lived in the fifteenth century rather more than they reflect such images of the way Harun lived six hundred years earlier.

The situation of the Nights is thus very similar to that of the medieval European story collection called the Gesta Romanorum ("Deeds of the Romans") in which the Roman emperors talk and look and act like European kings rather than ancient Roman rulers.

Andrew Lang's adaptation of Arabian Nights

The version of the "Voyages of Sindbad" that you will be reading comes from Andrew Lang's adaptation of the Arabian Nights. This book is in the public domain and you can read the entire book online.

Exactly because Andrew Lang's works are in the public domain and commonly available on the Internet, he is an important resource for this class; the units on The Arabian Nights, Japanese Tales, African Tales, Estonian Tales, and Danish tales all come from Lang's books. Andrew Lang was born in 1844, in the early years of Queen Victoria's reign (Victoria had become queen in 1837). When Andrew Lang died in 1912, he had outlived Queen Victoria by only a decade (Victoria died in 1901). Andrew Lang's life is thus almost perfectly "Victorian." He was a professor of anthropology at Oxford, one of the notorious "armchair anthropologists" of the late 19th century (the most famous example being Sir James Frazer, best known for his book The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion). As the British Empire expanded its reach around the world, these British armchair anthropologists worked hard to popularize the folk literature and traditions of "primitive" peoples around the world. They did not do field work themselves, but they read the reports of far-flung anthropologists and they compiled, compared, and published voluminously. You can see the range of Lang's interests in a bibliography of his publications. In addition to books on myth, religion and folklore, he published popular adaptations of many classics, such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Morte d'Arthur, in addition to the Arabian Nights.