Across the Narrow Sea
The creation of One Thousand and One Nights, in spite of its importance, is shrouded in mystery. The original author of One Thousand and One Nights is unknown, though based on the text’s long history, this fact is unsurprising. The text, which is also called The Arabian Nights, is a compilation of various stories from the Middle East and South Asia, with the earliest tales coming from India and Persia. The Nights then evolved throughout the entirety of the Islamic Golden Age—roughly 750 C.E. to 1250 C.E. The Nights as we know it today was created in the early 8th century, when “these tales were translated into Arabic under the title, Alf Layla or ‘The Thousand Nights’” (Irwin 48). Robert Irwin, a respected expert on the Nights, notes that this small “core” collection of stories grew exponentially over the next five hundred, with an abundance stemming from modern-day Iraq in the 9th and 10th centuries, with Syria and Egypt adding more in the 13th century. Irwin notes that many of the stories from Syria and Egypt “[showed] a preoccupation with sex, magic or low life,” themes that are widely seen in the Nights and its European descendants (48).
In 1704, the Nights saw a surge of popularity in Europe, when Antoine Galland first translated the text into English. The Galland Manuscript became immediately popular, with Irwin noting that he has been called “the real author of the Nights” (14). Beyond the entertainment value, the text was incredibly important in creating a more accurate representation of the cultures pictured within it. When translating the collection in 1909, Edward Lane noted “he valued Alf Layla wa- Layla as a source of ‘admirable pictures of the manners and customs of Arabs’ and sought to explicate such matters for British readers” (Schacker-Mill 165). Many of the early translators saw the Nights as an important conduit for introducing the British and other Europeans to Arabian literature.
While the Galland Manuscript is often seen as the Nights’ first major instance of contact with Europe, sections of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccacio’s Decameron tell a different story. Both of these European texts were written prior to the Nights’ official arrival to Europe, with the publication of the Canterbury Tales and the Decameron in 1392 and 1353, respectively. Because both of these texts include aspects from the Nights, it must be inferred that the Nights made its way to Europe prior to the Galland Manuscript, both through oral and written word.
Trade served a vital function throughout the Middle Ages as a means of exchanging material goods as well as ideas. In The Arabian Nights: A Companion, Irwin theorizes that the Nights diffused into Europe through several of these routes (92). Arab traders were in constant contact with Byzantines, Sicilians, and Spaniards, making this theory entirely plausible. While many might assume the Byzantines played the greatest role in the Nights dispersion—given its proximity to the Silk Road—Irwin disagrees. “Although a certain amount of material was translated in Byzantium, Spain and Sicily were the main corridors for the translation and transmission of Arab learning—and the Arab literature of entertainment—into medieval Europe” (Irwin 92). Irwin believes that Arabic texts were often translated into Latin at universities in Toledo, as evidenced by the Latin translation of the Koran in 1143. Meanwhile, Arab and Sicilian merchants often shared stories orally, making it unsurprising that Chaucer (a diplomat in Italy), Boccaccio, and Ariosto all used elements of the Nights in their texts.
However, this theory is not without its detractors. Paulo Lemos Horto argues that the similarities between several European texts “suggests the unlikelihood of the hypothesis of direct influence from The Thousand and One Nights,” arguing instead that another tale collection—in this instance, One Hundred and One Nights—served as a more probable intermediary (194). While the stories within One Hundred and One Nights do show a great similarity to some stories in Orlando Furioso—another text that shows linkages to the Nights—Horto’s theory rests on the same principles as Irwin’s: that the text travelled “from North Africa and Muslim Spain to and through Italy” (195). However, given that Hundred Nights was less critically acclaimed, both then and now, it is reasonable to say both texts likely influenced the European texts, though the 1001 Nights had a greater influence.
