Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand and One Nights — Volume 6 (of 6)
General
Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand and One Nights — Volume 6 (of 6)
Fairy tales; Tales -- Arab countries
"'I see a man with a besom grey
That sweeps the flying dust away.'
'Ay, that comes first in the mystic sphere;
But now that the way is swept and clear
Heed well what next you look on there.'"
P. 104, note 1.--Apropos of the importance of "three days," I may refer to the
"three days and three nights" which Christ is commonly said to have passed in
the tomb, and I believe that some mystics assert that three days is the usual
period required by a man to recover consciousness after death.
Pp. 106, 107.--These worked lions recall the exhibition of power made by Abu
Mohammed hight Lazybones (No. 37; Nights, iv., p. 165). Their Oriental
prototypes are probably the lions and eagles with which the Jinn ornamented
the throne of Solomon. In the West, we meet with Southey's amusing legend of
the Pious Painter:
"'Help, help, Blessed Mary,' he cried in alarm,
As the scaffold sunk under his feet;
From the canvass the Virgin extended her arm;
She caught the good Painter; she saved him from harm;
There were hundreds who saw in the street."
The enchanted palaces of the Firm Island, with their prodigies of the Hart and
the Dogs, &c., may also be mentioned (Amadis of Gaul, book II., chap. 21,
&c.).
Pp. 107, 108.--Stories of changed sex are not uncommon in Eastern and
classical mythology and folk-lore; usually, as in this instance, the change of
a man into a woman, although it is the converse (apparent, of course) which we
meet with occasionally in modern medical books.
In the Nights, &c., we have the story of the Enchanted Spring (No. 135j) in
the great Sindibad cyclus (Nights, vi., pp. 145-150), and Lane (Modern
Egyptians, chap. xxv.) relates a story which he heard in Cairo more resembling
that of the transformed Wazir. In classical legend we have the stories of
Tiresias, Cæneus, and Iphis. Turning to India, we meet with the prototype of
Cæneus in Amba, who was reincarnated as Sikhandin, in order to avenge herself
on Bhishma, and subsequently exchanged her sex with a Yaksha, and became a
great warrior (Mahabharata Udyoga-Parva, 5942-7057). Some of the versions of
the Enchanted Spring represent the Prince as recovering his sex by an exchange
with a demon, thus showing a transition from the story of Sikhandin to later
replicas. There is also a story of changed sex in the Hindi Baital Pachisí;
and no doubt many others might be quoted.
History of What Befel the Fowl-let with the Fowler (Pp.
119-128).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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