• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • FREE short summaries for all!

Book Summary

booksummary.net

  • Home
  • Summaries
  • Analyses
  • Characters
  • Biographies
  • Books


Read original fairy tales >>

One Thousand and One Nights

Summary  unknown author

"One Thousand and One Nights" is an Arab book of stories that contains legends, stories, anecdotes and others. There are many stories written in verse and characterized like art. There are many dialogues and monologs, Turkish loanwords and archaism.

All of the stories are bound by the Emperor Shahryar and Scheherezade.

Shahryar, the ruler of India and Persia, is the witness of his brother's and wife's infidelity. He was so hurt by their act that he concluded that all women are infidel, and he decided to sleep with a different woman every night and execute her in the morning. He did It for three years, and then he met Scheherezade.

She was beautiful and smart, and she started telling him a story he enjoyed so much that he decided to put off her execution just to hear the end of the story.

She talked about nights and nights. She would always end the story when it got interesting. After a 1001 night, the Emperor was convinced that Scheherezade was faithful, noble and kind. In the meantime, she gave birth to three of his sons, so he decided to spare her life.

Scheherezade told him stories about Sinbad the Sailor and many others and everything was possible in her stories. The main characters rise from poverty to richness and the other way around, depending on what they deserve. Nothing is ever finished and there is always the possibility for a story to go on.

The Emperor brought some of his best men to write her stories down and today they are known under the name "One Thousand and One Nights".

One Thousand and One Nights has an Indian-Persian core and Egyptian-Bagdad stories.

The book begins with a Persian book of fairytales "Thousand Stories" that was translated into Arabic in the 9th century under the title "Thousand Nights". Some new stories were added in the translation, and some of them were adapted to Islam.

During the crusade, the book got to Egypt where new stories were added. By the end of the 18th century, the book had 1001 stories.

The rest of the world found out about these stories in 1704 when J.A. Galanda translated them.

This one of a kind work tells many stories by unknown authors from the Arabic literature, and they uncover the medieval world in the Orient. The stories make the reader feel as if they were real and as if the reader is traveling with the main characters.

This work of art became valuable in every world literature.

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

Top Writers

Albert Camus Alexander Pushkin Alexandre Dumas Anton Chekhov Arthur Conan Doyle Art Spiegelman Barbara Kingsolver Bible Brothers Grimm Charles Dickens Charles Perrault Clive Staples Lewis Dante Alighieri Edgar Allan Poe Emile Zola Erich Kästner Ernest Hemingway Eugene Ionesco Euripides Gabriel Garcia Marquez Hans Christian Andersen Jane Austen Joseph Jacobs Mark Twain Michael Coleman Nikolai Gogol Oscar Wilde Ovid William Faulkner William Shakespeare

Recent

  • Hills Like White Elephants Analysis
  • Hills Like White Elephants Characters
  • Jerome David Salinger
  • James Joyce
  • Mark Twain
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Ernest Hemingway
  • Hills Like White Elephants Summary
  • Brothers Grimm
  • Alexander Pushkin
  • Nikolai Gogol
  • The Masque of the Red Death
  • The Masque of the Red Death Characters
  • The Masque of the Red Death Summary

Study guides

  • Analyses
  • Characters
  • Summaries
  • Biographies
  • Books

Footer

Information

  • About Us
  • Contact
  • Index of Writers
  • Digital Books

Study guides

  • Book Analyses
  • Book Summaries
  • Character Analyses
  • Biographies

BookSummary.net

The largest collection of book summaries, analyses, books, study guides and educational resources for students and teachers. Here, you'll find works from more than 250 greatest authors of all time. [more]

Copyright © 2016–2023 · KnowHow Network / Mastermind · All rights reserved