Lyons Ursula - Tales from 1,001 nights: Aladdin, Ali Baba and other favourite tales

In the caliphs palace, a girl is frying multi-coloured fish when a woman with a wand bursts through the wall and demands to know of the fish if they are true to their covenant A young man mounts a flying horse; the horse strikes out one of his eyes with a lash of its tail and lands him on a building where he will encounter ten more one-eyed men A travelling merchant is entombed alive with his deceased wife It was the strangeness of the plotting and imagery, as well as the freedom from classical constraints derived from such authors as Homer, Ovid and Virgil, that appealed to the earliest Western readers of The Thousand and One Nights (best known in English as The Arabian Nights). Read Sinbad and you will be sick of Aeneas, as the eighteenth-century gothic novelist Horace Walpole declared. Yet behind the apparent wildness of the stories, there are patterns and correspondences and the playing off of themes and images against one another by the tales anonymous authors.

One Thousand and One Nights is a marvel of Eastern literature, according to the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk in his essay Love, Death and Storytelling (New Statesman, 26 December 2006). It was a book that was familiar to Pamuk since childhood, but he has recently described how he decided to reread it in order to understand what fascinated Western authors like Stendhal, Coleridge, De Quincey and Poe in these stories and made the book a classic: I saw it now as a great sea of stories a sea with no end and what astounded me was its ambition, its secret internal geometry I was able finally to appreciate One Thousand and One Nights as a work of art, to enjoy its timeless games of logic, of disguises, of hide-and-seek, and its many tales of imposture.

It seems most probable that the core of the Arabic story collection, Alf Layla wa-Layla (The Thousand and One Nights), originated in a fairly brief and simple form in ancient India. Then, some time before the ninth century AD , these Sanskrit tales were translated into Persian under the title Hazar Afsaneh (The Thousand Tales) and doubtless some Persian stories were added to this collection. By the ninth century at the latest, an Arabic version known as Kitab Hadith Alf Layla (The Book of the Tale of One Thousand Nights) was in circulation. But The Thousand and One Nights in the form we have it today, with its elaborate frame story about King Shahriyar and the storyteller Shahrazad, was compiled much later. The oldest substantially surviving manuscript of the Nights seems to date from the late fifteenth century. In the opening frame story, which is included in this edition, Shahrazad tells Shahriyar stories night after night in order to postpone her execution. The nights function as story breaks; there are not actually a thousand and one stories. Some stories are very short, others very long, told over many nights. Some are about criminals, some about saints. Some feature magic and monsters, while others centre on commercial transactions or romantic assignations. It is the sheer variety of stories that gives the Nights its unique quality.

In bookshops and libraries it is common to find the Nights shelved with fairytales, even though fairies feature very rarely in the Arab stories. But a fairytale is not defined by the presence of fairies within it. Such Western stories as Puss in Boots or Bluebeard have no fairies in them, but they are still universally regarded as fairytales. A fairytale, rather, is a story that relies on the fantastic to induce wonder. In this sense, a very high proportion of the stories in the Nights can be regarded as fairytales. Even so, there are also plenty of stories in which the fantastic and the supernatural do not feature stories about cunning adulterers, learned slave girls, pious hermits, master criminals, benevolent or despotic rulers and so on. Jorge Luis Borges once remarked that all great literature becomes childrens literature. (Doubtless he was thinking of such works as