Arabian Nights week 12
Stories
Fourth voyage
- Travels again (against better judgement), thrown overboard in a storm
- Find naked men, Sinbad's fellows are drugged by them
- Shown the way to escape by a man-herder
- Comes across other people, welcomed by them
- Makes a saddle for the king
- As reward, Sinbad is married to a noble woman
- He learns about tradition of people being buried if their spouse dies
- Sinbad's wife dies (quelle surprise!)
- After some time, another widow is lowered into the crypt. Sinbad murders her and eats her food. This repeats.
- Eventually, Sinbad escapes the crypt, taking jewels, but continues to kill widows until rescue arrives
Fifth voyage
- Companions find and break a rukh egg. The rukh attack and destroy the ship.
- Sinbad washes up on a paradisical island, is captured by a man who rides on his shoulders
- Eventually, Sinbad gets him drunk and frees himself. Sinbad kills the Old Man.
- Finds a ship, but is abandoned at the City of Apes
- Sinbad taken in, gains coconuts from the apes.
- Finds a ship, takes passages, luckily trades coocnuts for valuables.
Sixth voyage
- Another voyage, another shipwreck
- Island has great wealth but no food. Eventually all other shipwreck survivors starve
- Builds raft and travels on underground stream
- Finds civilsation, gifts the king and is taken in.
- Eventually finds a ship returning to Baghdad.
Seventh voyage
- Travels to China, but ship attacked by whales
- Finds an island, makes a raft, carries him to a hidden city, rescued and taken in
- Rescuer buys his raft of sandalwood, marries his daughter
- Sinbad notices the men grow wings and fly away once each month. Praising god causes fire
- Abandoned on a mountain, meets others, given a rod of gold, rescues another man from a serpent
- Returns to the city, decides to leave with his wife
Notes
Fourth voyage
- Anything to make of the constant references to food and hunger? Do these foreshadow the ending?
- Do you think Sinbad was justified in his murders? His theft? His concealment of it?
- No miscellany of strange sights. Do you miss it?
Fifth voyage
- Note, p. 242, contrasting Sinbad and Odysseus (former seeks adventure, latter just wants to go home)
- Return to piety. How religious are these stories?
- A good deed is punished. Contrast with all the good deeds that people have paid Sinbad.
- What is the role of luck in these stories?
Sixth voyage
- I take it we're not supposed to ask why no-one else tried to go down the stream
- Is this really a more fantastic tale than the ones before?
Seventh voyage
- Note, p 256: different version of the voyages of sinbad.
- Are cities always places of safety?
- Where does this fit in the ring cycle of the stories? Is that an accurate description of the voyages of Sinbad?
- Is this a good end of this story cycle?
Comments
I think the main thing that struck me here was (again, as last week) the sheer length of time the whole series is supposed to take. Most of the episodes aren't actually given numbers of years, but seeing as how Sinbad lives a long time, gets wealthy, (usually) marries etc before getting back home, one has to assume that it's years. And in the last one we are actually told 27 years! Assuming they're all intended to be roughly the same span of time, Sinbad must truly be the Ancient Mariner by the time he settles down!
Which of course all really highlights the point that these were tales that grew and accreted in the telling, and I don';t think we're ever supposed to think of them as realistic tales of the voyages of a single man. But one has to admire the sheer boldness of even suggesting that they might be actually linked together.
I was wondering about the fourth story premise that Sinbad niftily bumps off new arrivals of spouses in the cave, which the commentator takes to be a Bad Thing and contrary to Sinbad's beliefs. But... did he have any choice? (other than simply rolling over and dying, I mean). I suppose there's provision in Islam for needing to take life when the alternative is death?
It was noteworthy to me that the plots grew progressively more complicated as the cycle continued, with multiple blocks put in Sinbad's way before he was able to return home. And also how important it was to return home at all - some of the places seemed fine enough to simply settle down in. But I think the logic of each story in the cycle echoes the cycle as a whole - returning to the point of origin is an important thematic ploy, no matter how seemingly attractive the interim places are.
I splurged on Tim Severin's book on the Sinbad Voyage and am finding that fascinating. I can't understand why - given how much I enjoyed Thor Heyerdahl's writings in my youth - I never encountered him before. He writes well and very engagingly. I'm at the stage at the moment where he has gathered most of the raw materials for his boat, and assembled a team of boatbuilders who still have some knowledge of the old ways of boat building, and has just laid down the keel and the stern post of the ship.
Now, the ships of that era (and to a much more limited extent until comparatively recently) were held together not by nails but by stitching. Explanations vary - some say it was to enable the boats to flex in the waves, some attribute it to superstition, some say that it was simply that they didn't have metal in sufficient quantities until much later. It certainly wasn't a choice (like that of ancient-world Mediterranean vessels which never needed to go out into the Atlantic) of not needing structural strength - the Indian Ocean and the various seas around to China could be truly fearful, and a weak boat wouldn't last long. Over here in Europe, Neolithic and Bronze Age boats also used stitching, so it seems to be a solution found the world over.
But - relevant to the story - the rope used to bind the wooden sections together was made from coconut fibre (Severin gathered 50,000 coconut shells from which his team would extract fibre) and all of a sudden this made sense of the coconut trade that Sinbad joined in. I had assumed on first reading that he just found a market enthusiastic for coconut as a food - but how much more likely that he was selling into the boat-building trade?
The parallel read also made sense of the sheer number of dangers faced by Sinbad - apparently the shipping losses on these trade runs were colossal, and shipwreck was a daily risk. But... the rewards were also great...
I was somewhat struck by the casualness with which the murders of the 4th story are described. There isn’t a lot of hand-wringing about them. Also, when he hears about the custom of dooming spouses (spice?) he’s mostly coming concerned for his own welfare, and not that of his wife. ‘Hey, this is a story about MY misfortunes, dammit!’
In the 5th story (I think) he makes a fortune for himself making saddles for rich people, but in the following story he claims to have no useful skills.
Boy, the last 2 stories were not too interesting, esp 6. Im assuming these were all collected at some point from different areas and them compiled to make this cycle.
Love "spice" as a plural for "spouse" - who does one lobby to get a new word into the dictionary?
At the risk of being boring about Severin, there were some great bits that I read last night. At this point in the story he has been making his way across the sea between Oman and the southern tip of India, and describes in detail his encounter with the long chain of islands running north from the Maldives past the south-western coast of India. One of them (Minicoy, an isolated island roughly level with the tip of India) supplied several of his boat-builders and crew. His comments on navigation in the ancient world are fascinating, and are based around knowing the latitude of where you want to go to (determined by the elevation of Polaris and other key stars above the horizon), then sailing north or south from where you are to get to that latitude, and then following the latitude line to destination. It's a strategy that can be used on land or sea, and a master-captain would be familiar with multiple stars and multiple destinations to get to in this way.
The other was to do with the whole business of Sinbad marrying everywhere he went - I'd assumed this was just a bit of storytelling fun, but Severin ran into the same problem... six of his seven Omani sailors married during a stayover of a couple of weeks in a town in Kerala, India (borrowing 1000 rupees each from Severin to pay for the privilege). Moslem men can marry up to four women (so long as they can support them all and show no favouritism) and this level of marriage was, and probably is, still normative. There are social provisions for the man continuing to send financial support when he sailed off, and if that dried up for some reason the woman could remarry after a period of time with no shame or difficulty in the process (not only for reasons of practicality, but also because many sailors even on a regular trading route would just disappear with their ship). For the women, gaining a proper Arabic husband was seen as social cachet - even if he subsequently disappeared - and there was always the offchance she might get taken back to somewhere closer to Arabia at some point.
There's a fair bit of callousness in all the stories, what with Sinbad being abandoned ashore more than once, as well as the multiple shipwrecks. Although most people Sinbad meets are friendly, some of them care uncaring.
The "sail along latitude" was used by European sailors too: the Viking's sun-stone was one example, and there was the whole thing about Harrison and the Longitude Act for the c.18 British navy.
I'm with @Apocryphal that the last two stories were the poorest of the bunch.
For those who know ring structures of stories, do you think the Sinbad voyages fit that model?
That's a slightly tricky question given that we're reading the tales in translation. There are kind of two questions folded into this a) does each story in isolation follow a ring structure, and b) does the cycle of seven stories as a whole follow it.
The simplest statement of a ring structure is that the end loops back to mirror the beginning - but that's not really enough as loads of stories built in a Western conventional way to this - the woodcutter's son goes back to his home in the forest, or the Star Trek crew end up back on the bridge looking at the viewscreen. To be a ring structure it has also to have the central feature or "message" of the story at the centre, whereas the examples just given typically have the climax near the end, with a little coda to tidy things up but not radically change how the story is told. More elaborate forms of ring structure typically go by the name chiasmus, in which not only the ends match each other but successive circles do like rings of an onion as you progress to the heart of the story and then regress again out of it.
Now, the commentator here argued for a ring structure to the whole cycle, mainly because the central story #4 was so much more dramatically and morally challenging, and as you went 5-6-7 they "relaxed" and got more casual again (as @Apocryphal commented "Boy, the last 2 stories were not too interesting"). Properly speaking it would be more convincing if one found common themes in stories 1 and 7, 2 and 6, 3 and 5, or maybe heavy use of particular word roots, or something like that. In examples from the Hebrew bible, ring structures are often signalled by use of unusual verbs which open and close the passage, or repeated turns of dialogue phrasing. It's often hard to tell in translation as it rellies on the translator a) deciding that that it what the original storyteller was doing and b) deciding to do something similar themselves to pass the message on to the reader. Very often, translators don't do that, either because it looks clumsy and stilted, or because they just don;t think it's an important enough feature of the text to be preserved in translation.
Looking at individual stories, for sure they each start and end in Baghdad, and there are problems in the middle like shipwreck or whatever which have to be overcome, but they feel to me more like a progressive resolution of a series of problems, and the stuff that's right in the middle doesn't feel like it's necessarily the bit you want your audience to remember most. So for my money I don't see the individual tales as built on rings... but given that the outermost layer of the whole Thousand and One Nights is exactly a moral challenge to a king who wants to keep killing women every night, I can go along with the idea that the cycle of seven as a whole is a ring. Right in the middle we have someone who (perhaps) the king would see as some kind of mirror of himself, and (perhaps) start thinking "was it OK for Sinbad to kill people... is it OK for me to?"