RolandoJOlivo

A Thousand and One Nights is a collection of various Arabic and Oriental tales, written mostly between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, although some stories come from earlier times, and these were collected and translated in Western languages, since the eighteenth century, in France.

It should be noted that this is a great story. It begins with the short tale of two powerful brothers, the king Shahryar and the king Schahzaman, both deceived by their wives, which humiliated them. However, the firstborn and wisest,  king Shahryar, decides to marry every night and murder his wife at the dawn of the next day, satisfying a strange thirst for revenge. These unprecedented actions, that resemble sacrifices of human beings, created terror in the kingdom,  many fathers fled with their daughters, and there came a time where the vizier, faithful servant of the king, couldn´t find more wives and was convinced by his intelligent eldest daughter, Scheherazade, to be handed over to the monarch.

In this regard, she is a heroine, who understands the need to liberate her people and restore the rights of women, and conceives an unusual plan to prevent her death and persuade the king to eliminate his bloody practices: every night the bold Scheherazade tells a story, but she doesn´t ends it, forcing the curious king to let her live for the next night. Later, if she finishes that tale, then Scheherazade continues with another unfinished narration and so on, staying for a thousand and one nights...

It is not known who designed this extraordinary leading story, which wonderfully fulfills two great objectives: first, joining a large collection of different and non-related narrations into a single literary work, and second, developing an incredible story, in which a weak but intelligent heroine defeats an evil and powerful king.

Table of A Thousand and One Nights

Table of contents

Volume 1