Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange is a new collection of 18 medieval Arabic tales compiled in the 10th century and expertly translated into English for the first time by Malcolm Lyons, a professor of Arabic at Cambridge University. It is a valuable addition to the sea of stories that has become known over many centuries of repetition, translation and djinn-like transformation as the Arabian Nights and contains stories, themes and devices that will already be familiar to readers and scholars.
Like the storyteller Scheherazade who provides the Nights with its framing device by telling fantastic tales to stay her own execution, the real-life story of the Tales begins with a suitably mysterious set-up: the discovery of an incomplete manuscript in an Istanbul library in the 1930s.
When the German Arabist Hellmut Ritter found the manuscript, Robert Irwin writes in his indispensable introduction, its title page was missing along with the second half of what should have been a collection of 42 tales (themselves taken from “a well-known book”). The manuscript may have been tentatively dated to the 16th century but its importance for those studying the Arabic storytelling tradition today is certain.
As Irwin writes: "Tales of the Marvellous is probably the oldest surviving story collection with material in common with the Nights. (Indeed Tales of the Marvellous seems to be the oldest of all Arab story collections that have been uncovered so far.)"
Irwin has much more to say about the style and subject matter of what lies within the Tales, making the final point that they are not folklore but "early and impressive examples of pulp fiction". The clue is not only in the title but also on the contents page, where each story is described with a typically peculiar blend of the fantastic and matter of fact.
By turn, the reader is promised astonishing, marvellous, wondrous, strange and comical stories rendered as news, poetry, reports and prose. Their plots contain djinn and lost princes, automata, sorceresses and slave-girls, monsters and mermaids conjured from the sea, not to mention a princess who’s been turned into a white-footed gazelle, sensuality, rape, murder, tragic twists of fate, coincidence and redemption.
To best enjoy the stories, it’s first necessary to suspend our modern-day expectations or, as Irwin puts it: “The stories are a window on to a world whose strangeness is heightened by the passage of the centuries … we should beware of what the social historian E P Thompson termed ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’.”
Indeed, the most interesting window opened, or one should say reopened, for readers of the Nights, is the idea of the marvellous as a sort of supernaturally tinged norm, the natural consequence of the wondrous creations of God. For those ready and willing to suspend their disbelief, the Tales' 440 pages are packed with entertaining deeds and all sorts of adventure – one reviewer has gone so far as to call it a medieval Fifty Shades of Grey but as much for a certain stylistic repetitiveness as any sort of titillation, although the fate of lovers often plays a starring role.
The Tales has a fizzing narrative energy and the plot points come thick and fast as the abandoned prince finds women to fall in love with him in The Story of the Forty Girls and What Happened to Them with the Prince. The promised entertainment is delivered with aplomb in all but two of the stories, where there are inconsistencies thanks to "gaps and indecipherable words in the manuscript" and the reader gains an insight into the conundrums facing their translator.
There can be little doubt, however, that what this collection offers up is an overwhelmingly rich and joyful representation of the world and a valuable insight into the medieval Arab imagination – mechanical vultures and all. Truly a fantastic read.
Clare Dight is the editor of The Review.
