“They say — and God knows better and is more glorious and nobler — that amongst the stories of ancient times and past peoples is one that is suited to the intelligence of men of understanding who both ask and give.” Thus opens the first tale of this fascinating collection of ancient Arabic stories, first published in 2015 as Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange in a beautifully block-bound Penguin Classics edition. This medieval Arab fantasy collection of 18 stories, six of which also appear in The Arabian Nights, originate from the 10th century and survived in a solitary, ragged manuscript in a library in Istanbul. Though a German volume was published in 1933, this edition, translated by Malcolm C. Lyons, is the first to be offered in English. Arabist Robert Irwin furthermore introduces the volume, providing a roadmap for insight into the cultural and literary context of the stories.
The reverberations of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights in western culture and literature are widespread; the tales had great influence in the 18th and 19th centuries, with themes and motifs reflected as early as in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Due to the impact and popularity of Arabian Nights, this newly published volume of a similar nature is an exciting addition to western literature. Guardian journalist Elizabeth Lowry writes, “Composed to fascinate and titillate, they are neither folk tales nor morality tales but early and enjoyable examples of pulp fiction, and should, Irwin contends, properly be classed as literature. And make no mistake, they are both marvellous (sic) and very, very strange. Featuring monsters, jinn, feckless princes, capricious princesses, wily viziers, concealed treasure and dramatic reversals of fortune, they offer a glimpse of a world whose oddness has simply been accentuated by the passing of the centuries.”
Unlike the stories of The Arabian Nights, where Scheherazade spins tales night after night to preserve her life, these stories have no cohering frame and are not didactic in their purpose. Because they are based on the only surviving manuscript, many of the stories are subject to lacunae (so marked in the text by [lac.]), robbing us of critical information. Irwin explains in the introduction that because the manuscripts were transcribed at times by people who didn’t know what they were writing, inconsistencies often arise through the passing down of the stories … third-person narration slips into first person, pronouns are confused halfway through the tale-within-a-tale, and a character may be described first as the king’s sister, then as his daughter. For this reason, Irwin’s well-crafted introduction is paramount to fully enjoying the stories. Subdivided into headings, such as “Treasure Hunting,” “Sea People,” “Deceitful Women,” “Flaws and Narrative Incompetence” and “How Tales of the Marvellous Relates to the Thousand and One Nights,” Irwin’s writing is lengthy for an introduction (about 35 pages) but can be scanned as desired or read in studious detail.
“It’s good to have a map,” writes NPR journalist Genevieve Valentine of the introduction to Tales of the Marvellous. “But that same sense of practicality infuses the tales themselves, so that wonderment about being swindled by unscrupulous businessmen and wonderment that your horse is your disguised sister-in-law stand side by side. It makes more sense by the time you get there; it’s just a long and winding road … And though there are magicked (sic) animals and jinni here, these stories are most often propelled by their characters’ own fates and follies. There’s dialogue aplenty, buckets of tears, no shortage of maidens like the full moon, and so many plot twists that stories like ‘The Story of Talha, the Son of the Qadi of Fustat, and What Happened to Him with His Slave Girl Tuhfa and How She Was Taken Away from Him and What Hardships Befell Until There Was Relief After Grief’ feel like a delightful venture into Medieval Sweeps Week.”
Indeed, the plots of these unusual stories are most certainly winding, but every turn along the way is a delightful part of the tale’s journey.
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