50 Fun Facts About One Thousand and One Nights

What is the Arabic title of the collection known in English as the Arabian Nights?

Alf Laylah wa-Laylah means 'a thousand nights and a night'; the oldest surviving scrap, a ninth-century fragment, calls the book only the tale of 'a thousand nights', so the extra night came later.

Which ruler is told a story every night by his wife in the frame tale?

Shahryar, betrayed by his first queen, resolved never to be deceived again: he married a new bride each day and had her executed the next morning, until Scheherazade's stories stayed his hand.

In the Nights' frame tale, Scheherazade is the daughter of which court official?

The vizier had the grim duty of finding the king's brides, and he tried to talk his daughter out of volunteering by telling her a cautionary fable about a bull and a donkey.

What is the name of Scheherazade's younger sister, who asks for a story on the wedding night?

Dunyazad's request is part of the plan: Scheherazade had told her sister beforehand to ask for a tale, so that the king, listening in, would let her live to finish it.

In the Nights' frame tale, Scheherazade is said to have collected a thousand what?

Books of histories of past peoples and kings: she had studied the sciences too and knew the poets' verses by heart, so her memory was stocked with stories long before she volunteered.

The Nights' frame story is thought to come from the Hezār Afsān, a lost work in which language?

Persian: a tenth-century Baghdad bibliographer who described the Hezār Afsān, 'A Thousand Tales', said its thousand nights held no more than 200 stories and dismissed it as coarse and coldly told.

Which Stephen King novel, about a writer forced to keep writing to stay alive, did King liken to playing Scheherazade?

Misery traps novelist Paul Sheldon with a murderous fan who makes him write a new book just for her; like Scheherazade, he survives only for as long as the story is unfinished.

Which real Abbasid caliph is a recurring character in the tales, often wandering Baghdad in disguise?

Harun al-Rashid ruled from 786 to 809, more than a century after the fall of the Sasanian empire in which the frame tale is set; the stories send him out at night in disguise with his minister Jafar.

Which two famous tales did the first French translator add, absent from the Arabic manuscripts?

Aladdin and Ali Baba are known as the 'orphan tales' because no authentic Arabic text of either has been found; the translator's diary shows he got them from a Syrian storyteller he met in 1709.

Hanna Diyab told his Nights tales to a French translator in which city?

Paris: Diyab, a Maronite from Aleppo, had come to France as a French traveller's assistant, and the memoir of the journey that he wrote in old age survives in the Vatican Library.

In the Nights' frame tale, King Shahzaman, whose visit to his brother starts the story, rules which Silk Road city?

Samarkand's king turns back for something he has forgotten and catches his wife with a lover; finding his brother's queen just as faithless is what sends both kings out to roam the world.

Which French scholar gave Europe its first translation of the Nights, published from 1704?

Antoine Galland's twelve volumes were such a success that Europe was reading the Nights in French a century before the book was first printed in Arabic; the manuscript he used is still its oldest substantial copy.

In the Nights, Sinbad escapes a desert island on his second voyage by tying himself to the leg of which giant bird?

The roc carries him, lashed on with his own turban, to a valley floored with diamonds and patrolled by giant snakes, where merchants gather the gems by throwing down meat for the birds to fetch.

Films give Aladdin's genie a three-wish limit, but in the original tale his mightiest genie must obey whom?

Whoever holds the lamp commands the genie without limit, which is why losing it is a catastrophe: the sorcerer simply orders the palace, princess and all, carried off to Africa.

Under whose imprint did Burton issue his unexpurgated Nights to private subscribers?

The Kama Shastra Society was Burton's own device: he and a friend created it so that works too risky to publish openly, the Nights and the Kama Sutra among them, could be printed for subscribers only.

In the Nights, Sinbad blinds a man-eating giant with red-hot spits on his third voyage, echoing which ancient epic?

The Odyssey has Odysseus blind the Cyclops Polyphemus with a heated stake; Sinbad's giant is likewise blinded as he sleeps, and the survivors flee on rafts while rocks are hurled after them.

In The Fisherman and the Jinni, what gets the jinni back into its jar?

A dare: the fisherman says he cannot believe so huge a jinni ever fitted in the jar; eager to prove him wrong, it turns to smoke and pours itself back inside, and he claps the stopper on at once.

In The Three Apples, often called an early murder mystery, how does the caliph's minister finally find the culprit?

By sheer chance: given three days to find the culprit or die, Jafar does no detecting at all, and is saying farewell to his family when he finds the stolen apple on his own daughter.

In The Hunchback's Tale, a tailor, a doctor and two other men each confess in turn to what?

Killing the same man: the hunchback chokes at the tailor's table and each terrified finder dumps the body on a neighbour, until a barber pulls a bone from his throat and he sits up alive.

How many voyages does Sinbad the Sailor make?

Seven voyages, each begun because the rich merchant grows restless at home; the cycle circulated as a separate book of sea stories and was folded into the Nights only late in its history.

In the Nights, the island where Sinbad lands on his first voyage turns out to be what?

A gigantic sleeping whale: trees had taken root on its back over the years, and when the sailors light a cooking fire the heat wakes it and it dives, leaving Sinbad adrift in the open sea.

Which creature clings to Sinbad's shoulders and rides him day and night on a later voyage?

The Old Man of the Sea locks his legs round Sinbad's neck and will not let go; Sinbad frees himself at last by getting the creature drunk on wine he has fermented in a gourd.

In the Nights, Sinbad the Sailor tells the story of his voyages to a poor man who works as what?

A porter, who had set down his load outside the rich man's gate and complained aloud that some toil and stay poor; Sinbad overhears, invites him in and sends him home each evening with gold.

What is Ali Baba's trade?

Woodcutter Ali Baba is at work in the forest when forty horsemen ride up; he hides in a tree and overhears the words that open their cave, while his rich brother Cassim knows nothing of it.

Cassim's wife learns of Ali Baba's treasure when what comes back stuck to the measure she lent his wife?

A gold coin: wondering what such poor relations could need to measure, she had smeared grease inside before lending it, and the coin that stuck sent the greedy Cassim to the cave and his death.

Which clever slave-girl repeatedly foils the thieves' plots against Ali Baba?

Morgiana first saves the household when a thief chalks a mark on her master's door: she chalks the same mark on the neighbouring doors, so the gang cannot tell which house is his.

In the original tale, Aladdin lives in which land?

China here is a storybook land at the edge of the known world: its ruler is called a sultan, its people are Muslims, and the villain comes from the far end of the map, the Maghreb.

Besides the lamp, what second magical object lets Aladdin summon a lesser genie?

A ring lent to him by the sorcerer saves Aladdin first: sealed in the cave and wringing his hands in despair, he rubs it by accident, and the genie that appears carries him out.

How does the sorcerer trick Aladdin's wife into handing over the magic lamp?

Offering new lamps for old works because Aladdin never told his wife what the battered lamp was: thinking the pedlar a fool, she laughs and lets it go in exchange for a shiny one.

What is the name of the princess Aladdin marries in the original tale?

Badroulbadour, renamed Jasmine by Disney, first catches Aladdin's eye when he hides behind the bathhouse door to glimpse her unveiled, although looking at her was forbidden.

Which composer's 1888 symphonic suite Scheherazade is based on the Nights?

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov gave the storyteller a voice of her own, a winding solo violin over harp that returns through the suite, set against the grim bass theme of the Sultan that opens it.

Which swashbuckling star played the title role in the 1924 silent film The Thief of Bagdad?

Douglas Fairbanks had made his name in light comedies before The Mark of Zorro, Robin Hood and this film turned him into the silent screen's great swashbuckler.

The 1940 Thief of Bagdad, an Oscar winner for special effects, marked the first use of what?

The manual bluescreen technique let Larry Butler film a genie pouring out of his bottle and set him, towering, into a separately shot scene, work that won the Oscar for special effects.

Which Italian director's 1974 Il fiore delle Mille e una notte is called the most faithful Nights adaptation?

Michael James Lundell praised its emphasis on sexuality; Pasolini himself remarked on the tales' theme of fate.

Which Romantic poet recalled that an Arabian Nights tale, read at six, left him haunted by spectres in the dark?

Coleridge told a friend he would watch the window where the volumes lay and, whenever the sun fell on them, seize one and read it basking by the wall, frightened and fascinated at once.

The tale of Bulukiya, whose hero seeks immortality and visits other worlds, is cited as early what?

Science fiction, because his hunt for the herb of immortality carries Bulukiya across the cosmos to worlds far larger than his own, past mermaids, talking serpents and whole societies of jinn.

In The Ruined Man who Became Rich Again through a Dream, a Baghdad man seeks treasure in which city?

Cairo brings him only a beating and a cell, but the officer who mocks his dream describes one of his own, of gold under a fountain in Baghdad, and the man recognises the house: it is his.

Trapped in the thieves' cave, Ali Baba's brother Cassim forgets 'Open sesame' and tries the names of other what?

Grains: 'Open, barley!' he cries, and runs through every seed he can think of except the right one, until the thieves ride back and find him there among their gold.

Which American author wrote 'The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade', in which the king finally has her executed?

Edgar Allan Poe has her describe one more voyage of Sinbad, full of real marvels of Poe's own day; the king finds these true wonders too outlandish to believe and orders her death.

Which biblical king's seal stoppers the jar that holds the jinni in The Fisherman and the Jinni?

Solomon, in Islamic lore the master of the jinn, had shut the rebel spirit in the jar and thrown it into the sea; told that the king is centuries dead, the jinni is overjoyed.

In Ali Baba, the thieves hidden in jars in the courtyard die when what is poured over them?

Boiling oil: a slave girl sent to borrow lamp oil from the visiting 'merchant' hears a voice in the first jar whisper 'Is it time?', and quietly heats a kettle from the one jar that really holds oil.

Which Nobel laureate wrote Arabian Nights and Days, a novel that picks up where Scheherazade's tales leave off?

Naguib Mahfouz opens with the sultan deciding to keep Scheherazade as his wife, then follows his subjects through linked tales; in one, a genie orders a merchant to kill the district's corrupt governor.

How does Scheherazade sometimes break off a night's story, to the surprise of modern readers?

In mid-lecture on philosophy, and once partway through an account of human anatomy: each time the king still wants to hear the rest, so even a lesson buys her another day.

The jinn who fill the Nights are, in Islamic tradition, beings created from what?

Smokeless fire is the Quran's phrase, setting the jinn apart from humans, made of clay, and angels, made of light; like people, the jinn of the tales can be believers or rebels.

Which Sanskrit classic is seen as a particular influence on the animal stories in the Nights?

The Panchatantra frames its animal fables as lessons in statecraft for three princes; some scholars trace the Nights' habit of tucking one story inside another to Sanskrit works like it.

Where were the Nights first printed in Arabic, by the British East India Company in 1814-1818?

Calcutta printed the Arabic text more than a century after Europe first read the tales in translation, and some twenty years before any press in the Arab world took them up.

The 1835 Bulaq edition, the first printed in an Arab country, was published by which government?

Egypt's ruler Muhammad Ali had founded the Bulaq press in the 1820s to print manuals for his new army; within a few years it had moved on to literature, the Nights included.

Craters named Aladdin and Shahrazad lie on Enceladus, an icy moon of which planet?

Saturn's moon was given the Nights as its name bank in 1982 because, astronomers said, its surface was so strange and mysterious that a fantasy landscape deserved names from a literary fantasy.

In which Canterbury story does the hero ride a flying brass horse, echoing a Nights motif?

The Squire's Tale has the horse arrive as a gift from the king of Arabia and India, able to carry its rider anywhere, and then stops short: the Franklin interrupts and the story is never finished.

Which author set his Sandman story 'Ramadan' in the Baghdad of the Nights?

Neil Gaiman has the caliph, troubled that his perfect city cannot last, hand it to the lord of dreams, who keeps the Baghdad of legend safe for ever inside a bottle.