One Thousand and One Arabian Nights; Volume 9 of 16

The Arabian Nights #9 of 16

by Anonymous, Richard Francis Burton (Translator)

One Thousand and One Nights is a collection of stories collected over thousands of years by various authors, translators and scholars in various countries. These collections of tales trace their roots back to ancient Arabia and Yemen, ancient India, ancient Asia Minor, ancient Persia, ancient Egypt, ancient Mesopotamian Mythology, ancient Syria, and medieval Arabic folk stories from the Caliphate era. Though an original manuscript has never been found, several versions date the collection's genesis to somewhere between AD 800-900.

What is common throughout all the editions of The Nights is the initial frame story of the ruler Shahryar and the framing device incorporated throughout the tales themselves. The stories proceed from this original tale; some are framed within other tales, while others begin and end of their own accord. Some editions contain only a few hundred nights, while others include 1001 or more "nights."

The collection, or at least certain stories drawn from it (or purporting to be drawn from it) became widely known in the West during the nineteenth century, after it was translated - first into French and then English and other European languages. At this time it acquired the English name The Arabian Nights Entertainment or simply Arabian Nights. The best known stories from The Nights include "Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp," "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," and "The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor." Ironically these particular stories, while they are genuine Middle Eastern folk tales, were not part of the "Nights" in its Arabic versions, but were interpolated into the collection by its early European translators. (Quote from wikipedia.org)

About the Author

Richard Francis Burton (1821 - 1890)
Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton KCMG

Genres: Fiction, Fantasy, Classics, Fairy Tales

348 pages, Paperback

First published July 23, 2015

About the author

Books can be attributed to "Anonymous" for several reasons:

* They are officially published under that name
* They are traditional stories not attributed to a specific author
* They are religious texts not generally attributed to a specific author

Books whose authorship is merely uncertain should be attributed to Unknown.

See also: Anonymous

Reviews

[James F · Rating 2 out of 5]

Almost to the end of the Nights, these stories were written later than the others and show a falling off of interest; many are near duplicates, especially the last one which is almost identical to the First Lady of Baghdad's tale, but with a male rather than female protagonist. There is also an increase in the overall misogyny of the tales.

The proofreading in this book is alright except for the replacement of characters with accents by Cyrillic letters, "a" with acute accent by Cyrillic "b", "i" with accent by Cyrillic "n" and so forth, probably because they seemed to have that shape to the OCR program they used.. After a while I could guess the original spellings, and it mainly affects proper names and Arabic words in the notes, but it was very annoying in a Project Gutenberg book. (Review of the Project Gutenberg e-book, not necessarily the same edition listed on Goodreads.)

[Hazel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the best volume since volume 1. There are many tales in this book that are just as good as the famous ones from collections of the nights, and is the first volume I would recommend for a read outside of those stories (most of them contained in volume 1 along with some other good tales not found in collections)

It suffers from poor book making practices like many of the others. By which I mean that it starts in the middle of a story that began in the last volume. It also ends with a mere 12 nights left. They could readily have been fitted into this volume, as it is not the thickest of the volumes.