680 Pages of Motifs

Nights 779-801

This long story starts with a Magian alchemist before going into very familiar tropes, e.g.,  a prince steals the clothes from a bird maiden that he has fallen in love with. It all felt very familiar, and to make it worse, when a new character entered the story, the existing characters kept recapping all the events that had already happened. I felt stuck in repetition. It reminded me of the Further Reading section in the first volume, which listed Hasan M. El-Shamy’s A Motif Index of The Thousand and One Nights. His text is 680 pages of extremely specific motifs from the Nights such as “series of living corpses to serve as phantom guards” and “woman thinking lover dead erects cenotaph and mourns before it.” (vol. 1, pp. 973-974). It is funny that such an index of motifs exists, but it does bring down the actual reading of the Nights to have such specific repetition.

Things eventually get more interesting when the bird maiden / jinn princess / mother of the hero’s children is approached by Harun al-Rashid’s Zubaida. Zubaida is concerned that the bird maiden is so beautiful that Harun al-Rashid will kill our hero so he can take her from him. (Night 795, p. 185) It’s a fun way to escalate the plot past an early “happily ever after” marriage.

This week ends with the hero being told that he needs to go to the seven islands of Waq to find his wife and children. When he gets there, he’ll need to fight off “a vast army, all composed of virgin girls.” (Night 801, p. 201) That’s a new trope.