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Arabian Nights week 16
Story
- King's three sons all love their cousin. The king sets them a challenge to see who will marry her, by finding the most extraordinary thing
- First prince (Hussein) travels to Bisnagar, city of merchants and rich. Finds and buys the "flying" carpet, but stays in the city and sees all manner of amazing things. He eventually returns, safe and well, with the carpet.
- Second prince (Ali) travels to Shiraz in Persia. Finds and buys the ivory pipe. Stays a while, then returns to India.
- Third prince (Ahmad) travels to Samarkand. Finds and buys the apple. Stays a while, then returns to India.
- The brothers reunite, show off their treasures.
- They use the pipe to see Nurunnihar dying, use the carpet to get there, and the apple to save her.
- The king judges that all three gifts are incomparable, so sets another challenge: who can shoot an arrow the furthest.
- Ali shoots further than Hussein, but Ahmed's arrow can't be found.
- Hussein leaves to become a dervish.
- Ahmed goes to search for his arrow. He finds it at an impossible distance.
- Ahmed finds an iron door; inside is a palace and inside the palace, a woman. She reveals she is a jinn and that she fixed the competiton between the brothers.
- Pari Banu seduces Ahmed.
Notes
- Again, the claim that much of European folklore comes from the Arabian Nights.
- Marriage between first cousins?
- How much of the story is an excuse for an exotic travelogue?
- Three wonderous treasures, just locked up in the kings palace. Did no-one think of doing good with them?
- How fickle is Ahmed's love? He forgets Nurunnihar as soon as he sees Pari Banu.
Comments
I liked this story! And am looking forward to reading the next part - yes, I managed to restrain myself from reading straight on... One of the striking features is how aspects of the story - for example our sudden introduction to the Pari - connect neatly through to The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi.
In passing, struck by the coincidence of Pari and Fairy I looked up the etymology of both and there doesn't seem to be any direct connection. Fairy comes via Middle English and Old French ultimately from Latin fatum = fate. Pari comes from an Old Persian root which has to do with wings and flying. So despite the superficial likeness, it seems they're unrelated.
Back to the story - a neat idea to require all three magical artefacts to be used in conjunction, especially as it does nothing to resolve the original problem! Makes you wonder what part the gifts will play in the later part of the story - as mentioned, it seems a bit pointless just locking them away.
Other connections - CS Lewis in The Magician's Nephew had both a winged horse and a magical apple that cured illness (though not, as I recall, a crystal ball). I'm sure Lewis was aware of the Arabian Nights link-up!
The annotator's preamble to the tale seems to be suggesting that the origins of the tale might be European, as well as hedging their bets and looking for origins in 11th century India. An odd omission (to my mind, at least) is The Judgement of Paris, where the three-and-one motif is inverted so that the one man Paris has to decide which of three goddesses (Aphrodite, Hera and Athena) is the most beautiful, with the promised prize being a golden apple. This contest was inspired by Eris, goddess of discord, and led naturally to the Trojan War and thence the foundation of Rome, so Paris's decision was arguably an ill-fated one...
"How fickle is Ahmed's love? He forgets Nurunnihar as soon as he sees Pari Banu" - I guess we have to decide what is meant by "love" - hardly romantic love, I suspect, more a weighing of advantage from one liaison or another. So the princess gets dumped for the magical being, which arguably is a sensible choice if what you're looking for is power and influence.
A slightly meta-question which occurred to me at this point - with the earlier stories (prior to Diyab's contribution through Galland) there seemed to be themes which upheld the basic frame conflict between Shahrazad and the Wicked King - for example men who renounce revenge in order to do the right thing, or clever women who use their wits to uncover wickedness and uphold the male figure - but I don't get the feeling that the recent crop of stories does anything to advance Shahrazad's agenda. Have we simply dropped by now into tales which are simply fun and so were appended by later redactors into the original frame?
As for the story of three brothers, the first part and the last part are like two separate stories mashed together, almost like a book and it’s sequel. So I’m not particularly surprised to find a new love interest. Love is always fickle in short fiction anyway. Just look how often people in film and TV go from just meeting to desperately tearing each other’s clothes off. As for treasures, they are meant to be collected and hoarded. Actually using treasures seldom works out for characters! See Tolkien or Moorcock for examples.
Galland added the travelogue stuff, so that might have been him injecting a bit of himself into his own work (which otherwise he mostly got from someone else).
Irwin spends a lot of time looking at sources for the Nights - all of chapter two, with other references later in the book. He doesn’t draw any firm conclusions, but finds roots in India (esp for the core tales), Persia, and Europe. It’s pretty easy to see how many modern authors have drawn from the Nights (I’m not sure they say ‘much of European folklore’ comes from them, do they?) but there was probably a 2-way fiction highway between Europe and the Middle East, just as there was in trade goods. They shared an inland sea, afterall.
Just 35 of the tales huh! That would be an interesting piece of work to understand, though I strongly suspect you'd need to be very familiar with the historical development of Arabic and other languages to follow it closely.It reminds me a bit of the long-standing practice of source analysis on the Hebrew Bible, where infinite are the arguments of mages!
Re the hoarding of treasures, yes indeed about using them at your peril. It's a kind of tangible parallel to the old theme of being granted wishes which then backfire because you haven't anticipated all the loopholes.
As for the problems of using the treasures, I don't think we've had any hint of downsides for using them so far in the story. And I'm not sure we'll get back to them either, as the focus is now on the pari.
I'm pretty much of the opinion that there's no such thing as a "definitive" collection of Arabian Nights tales, and attempting to define one is a fool's task. If nothing else, I don't think any of these tales is "Arabian": most of them are Persian or Mesopotamian (in terms of geography if not culture).