



Produced by Christy Phillips and John Hamm.  HTML version by Al Haines.









The Arabian Nights Entertainments,


Selected and Edited

by

Andrew Lang



after the edition of

Longmans, Green and Co, 1918 (1898)



Contents

  Preface
  The Arabian Nights
  The Story of the Merchant and the Genius
  The Story of the First Old Man and of the Hind
  The Story of the Second Old Man, and of the Two Black Dogs
  The Story of the Fisherman
  The Story of the Greek King and the Physician Douban
  The Story of the Husband and the Parrot
  The Story of the Vizir Who Was Punished
  The Story of the Young King of the Black Isles
  The Story of the Three Calenders, Sons of Kings,
    and of Five Ladies of Bagdad
  The Story of the First Calender, Son of a King
  The Story of the Envious Man and of Him Who Was Envied
  The Story of the Second Calendar, Son of a King
  The Story of the Third Calendar, Son of a King
  The Seven Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor
    First Voyage
    Second Voyage
    Third Voyage
    Fourth Voyage
    Fifth Voyage
    Sixth Voyage
    Seventh and Last Voyage
  The Little Hunchback
  The Story of the Barber's Fifth Brother
  The Story of the Barber's Sixth Brother
  The Adventures of Prince Camaralzaman and the Princess Badoura
  Noureddin and the Fair Persian
  Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp
  The Adventures of Haroun-al-Raschid, Caliph of Bagdad
  The Story of the Blind Baba-Abdalla
  The Story of Sidi-Nouman
  The Story of Ali Colia, Merchant of Bagdad
  The Enchanted Horse
  The Story of Two Sisters Who Were Jealous of Their Younger Sister




Preface


The stories in the Fairy Books have generally been such as old women in
country places tell to their grandchildren.  Nobody knows how old they
are, or who told them first.  The children of Ham, Shem and Japhet may
have listened to them in the Ark, on wet days.  Hector's little boy may
have heard them in Troy Town, for it is certain that Homer knew them,
and that some of them were written down in Egypt about the time of
Moses.

People in different countries tell them differently, but they are
always the same stories, really, whether among little Zulus, at the
Cape, or little Eskimo, near the North Pole.  The changes are only in
matters of manners and customs; such as wearing clothes or not, meeting
lions who talk in the warm countries, or talking bears in the cold
countries.  There are plenty of kings and queens in the fairy tales,
just because long ago there were plenty of kings in the country.  A
gentleman who would be a squire now was a kind of king in Scotland in
very old times, and the same in other places.  These old stories, never
forgotten, were taken down in writing in different ages, but mostly in
this century, in all sorts of languages.  These ancient stories are the
contents of the Fairy books.

Now "The Arabian Nights," some of which, but not nearly all, are given
in this volume, are only fairy tales of the East.  The people of Asia,
Arabia, and Persia told them in their own way, not for children, but
for grown-up people.  There were no novels then, nor any printed books,
of course; but there were people whose profession it was to amuse men
and women by telling tales.  They dressed the fairy stories up, and
made the characters good Mahommedans, living in Bagdad or India.  The
events were often supposed to happen in the reign of the great Caliph,
or ruler of the Faithful, Haroun al Raschid, who lived in Bagdad in
786-808 A.D. The vizir who accompanies the Caliph was also a real
person of the great family of the Barmecides.  He was put to death by
the Caliph in a very cruel way, nobody ever knew why.  The stories must
have been told in their present shape a good long while after the
Caliph died, when nobody knew very exactly what had really happened.
At last some storyteller thought of writing down the tales, and fixing
them into a kind of framework, as if they had all been narrated to a
cruel Sultan by his wife.  Probably the tales were written down about
the time when Edward I. was fighting Robert Bruce.  But changes were
made in them at different times, and a great deal that is very dull and
stupid was put in, and plenty of verses.  Neither the verses nor the
dull pieces are given in this book.

People in France and England knew almost nothing about "The Arabian
Nights" till the reigns of Queen Anne and George I., when they were
translated into French by Monsieur Galland.  Grown-up people were then
very fond of fairy tales, and they thought these Arab stories the best
that they had ever read.  They were delighted with Ghouls (who lived
among the tombs) and Geni, who seemed to be a kind of ogres, and with
Princesses who work magic spells, and with Peris, who are Arab fairies.
Sindbad had adventures which perhaps came out of the Odyssey of Homer;
in fact, all the East had contributed its wonders, and sent them to
Europe in one parcel.  Young men once made a noise at Monsieur
Galland's windows in the dead of night, and asked him to tell them one
of his marvellous tales.  Nobody talked of anything but dervishes and
vizirs, rocs and peris.  The stories were translated from French into
all languages, and only Bishop Atterbury complained that the tales were
not likely to be true, and had no moral.  The bishop was presently
banished for being on the side of Prince Charlie's father, and had
leisure to repent of being so solemn.

In this book "The Arabian Nights" are translated from the French
version of Monsieur Galland, who dropped out the poetry and a great
deal of what the Arabian authors thought funny, though it seems
wearisome to us.  In this book the stories are shortened here and
there, and omissions are made of pieces only suitable for Arabs and old
gentlemen.  The translations are by the writers of the tales in the
Fairy Books, and the pictures are by Mr. Ford.

I can remember reading "The Arabian Nights" when I was six years old,
in dirty yellow old volumes of small type with no pictures, and I hope
children who read them with Mr. Ford's pictures will be as happy as I
was then in the company of Aladdin and Sindbad the Sailor.



The Arabian Nights


In the chronicles of the ancient dynasty of the Sassanidae, who reigned
for about four hundred years, from Persia to the borders of China,
beyond the great river Ganges itself, we read the praises of one of the
kings of this race, who was said to be the best monarch of his time.
His subjects loved him, and his neighbors feared him, and when he died
he left his kingdom in a more prosperous and powerful condition than
any king had done before him.

The two sons who survived him loved each other tenderly, and it was a
real grief to the elder, Schahriar, that the laws of the empire forbade
him to share his dominions with his brother Schahzeman.  Indeed, after
ten years, during which this state of things had not ceased to trouble
him, Schahriar cut off the country of Great Tartary from the Persian
Empire and made his brother king.

Now the Sultan Schahriar had a wife whom he loved more than all the
world, and his greatest happiness was to surround her with splendour,
and to give her the finest dresses and the most beautiful jewels.  It
was therefore with the deepest shame and sorrow that he accidentally
discovered, after several years, that she had deceived him completely,
and her whole conduct turned out to have been so bad, that he felt
himself obliged to carry out the law of the land, and order the
grand-vizir to put her to death.  The blow was so heavy that his mind
almost gave way, and he declared that he was quite sure that at bottom
all women were as wicked as the sultana, if you could only find them
out, and that the fewer the world contained the better.  So every
evening he married a fresh wife and had her strangled the following
morning before the grand-vizir, whose duty it was to provide these
unhappy brides for