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Arabian Nights week 18
Story
- A man brings a magical horse to the king of Persia, offers it to the king in exchange for marrying the princess
- The prince objects, tries the horse, but disappears before receiving full instruction. The horse's owner is held hostage for the prince's return.
- The prince lands on the roof of a palace. He falls in love with the sleeping princess and asks for her protection.
- She falls in love with him, and offers him hospitality.
- Lot of padding...
- The prince wants to return home to reassure his father. The princess wants him to stay, fearful that he'll forget her once he leaves. She persuades him to stay a while
- He asks her to come with him, she agrees.
- The king of Persia agrees to the marriage.
- The owner of the wooden horse kidnaps the princess in full view of the king and prince, going to Kashmir.
- The prince resolves to track them down, disguised as a dervish.
- The princess makes a fuss about her capture (but after eating), and is rescued by the sultan of Kashmir. The sultan has the horse-owner beheaded.
- The sultan takes the princess to his palace and resolves to marry her the next day. She pretends to be mad.
- Doctors from ever-wider regions try and fail to cure her madness
- The prince hears of it and travels to Kashmir. He is reunited with the princess
- He persuades the sultan to bring the enchanted horse to the prince and princess
- Inside a smokescreen, the prince uses the horse to escape with the princess and the sultan's jewels.
Notes
- The princess gets no say in being offered as payment for a mechanical horse.
- Why does the Princess of Bengal have wardrobes full of men's clothes?
- Again, the connection between beauty and virtue. The prince and princess fall in love immediately and recognise each other as royalty; the sultan of Kashmir immediately takes her side over the ugly(?) Indian horse-owner
- Lots of padding of the initial meetings of the prince and princess
- Any comments on all the notes describing how Galland embellished the story with details of the "exotic Orient"? I think it's distracting filler. On the other hand, Galland knows his audience and wants to make some money. It'll be interesting to compare this with the original notes on pp. 539-42
- A lot of talk in this story about food. Hungry prince when he first arrives in Bengal, the princess has breakfast at the pleasure house, she doesn't escape in Kashmir because she's hungry
- Prince of Persia is a trickster, outwitting the sultan of Kashmir. Do you agree?
- What do you think of the imposed moral?
Comments
Hmmm I found this the weakest (from memory) of all the tales we've had so far. Quite apart from the padding (and leaving aside who it was that introduced this padding) it's kind of repetitious - person rides horse and ends up in random place, princess gets abducted/imprisoned [then finally] prince and princess marry.
I found myself wondering about the sultan of Bengal's perspective on all this. His daughter (who, naturally, he dotes on) is abducted by a prince who sneaks past her eunuch guards and all her women chaperones in order to find her, while she's asleep. In passing, did the eunuch guard have to go through a performance appraisal after all this? But that aside, then she's abducted by a random Indian toymaker, who does at least wait for her to be awake. And then by the sultan of Kashmir. And then - for the second time - by the prince of Persia (no reference intended to the video game
). Sure he gets told a bit later - presumably by regular messenger rather than superfast horse-mail - that after the last abduction she's now married and (presumably) no longer virginal and princessly.
Is he bothered about any of this? Or is Persia so powerful that he simply can't raise an opinion about the matter, and (probably) makes the best of a bad job by musing that at least she's married to a prince of Persia rather than the dodgy guy from Kashmir or the previously unheard-of toymaker? Alas, he gets no narrative voice...
But then also, what is Shahrazad's goal in telling the story like this? (presuming that the narrator intended to insert this tale somewhere in amongst the other 1000). Is she putting over the message that it's OK for women to be parcelled around? Or that whether it's OK or not, that's life and princesses had better get used to it, maybe taking advantage of the first prince that comes along in case he's followed by a random toymaker. Or is Shahrazad's focus the astute means by which our noble princess feigns illness and madness to avoid marriage to our man in Kashmir? A lot of the tales include quick-witted women, though until now the plans have been a bit more, well, cunning.
All a bit of a mystery, and a slightly unconvincing one. But!!! we do get a flying horse, who is presumably the ancestor of Fledge in The Magician's Nephew, who is himself the father of all winged horses. So some good came out of the tale in the end!
I think we've rather lost track of the frame story at this point. These aren't tales supposedly to educate a psychopathic sultan, but ripping yarns to amuse in a coffee house.
But I agree that there are a lot of tropes in this story that are very familiar, and the poor princess has very little to do except be rescued.
One question I forgot to ask, related to the discussion of Amina al-Sirafi: what do we think of how the Orient is portrayed in this story, vs how it is in earlier stories in this collection, vs how is was in the Amina al-Sirafi book? There's a lot more pointed exposition of the exoticness in this tale, with loving descriptions of wealth and food (so much food!). To me, it comes across as heavy-handed. What do others think?
Fair point. But one feels that even such ripping yarns should have a loose connection to the frame. After all, if we came across a previously unknown 12th century Robin Hood episode, we'd be surprised if it didn't have the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham in the background, or if the Merry Men were replaced by a coterie of clever civil servants who siphoned off the Sheriff's wealth by means of accountancy tricks.
(Though that might well make for a cool satire on the genre)
I'm not sure that is specific to the Orient - the Redwall series of children's books contain hugely long descriptions of feasts held by the animal protagonists. And the books in The Worm Ouroboros series that @BarnerCobblewood and I have rabbited on about from time to time have lengthy descriptions of the grandeur or palaces and clothing. Neither of those is focused on the Orient. Come to that, the biblical book of Revelation has a lot to say about gemstones and all, though I guess it's a moot point whether you think of Revelation as a Greek book or a Middle Eastern one.
So I guess my view would be that some storytellers like to focus on splendid trappings and some don't, and that's not necessarily linked to whether the book is depicting the Orient.
As for the story itself, this reminded me very much of the kind of tales Italo Calvino recounted in his book of Italian folktales - in fact I think there was even a comment about this inspiring an Italian tale. Not so much the horse, which is really just a vehicle. But the whole dynamic around Royal marriages and relations, and passing the woman around. Initially I was thinking a magic horse wasn’t even needed for the tale - a boat would do just as well. But there’s a certain spontaneous element to the horse that works well.
The final parting shot from the prince is ‘next time, ask for the woman’s permission first’. I had assumed she was a willing participant to the prince up until that point. It didn’t come across to me she was abducted by the prince.