Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand and One Nights — Volume 3 (of 6) Part 2
General
Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand and One Nights — Volume 3 (of 6) Part 2
Fairy tales; Tales -- Arab countries
She steals the ring and elopes with her sable paramour to an
island in the sea, where she has a castle erected by the power of the
ring. The black man sleeps with the ring under his tongue, but the
hero’s dog takes the cat on his back and swims to the island; and the
cat contrives to get the ring and deliver it to her master, who
straightway causes the castle to be removed from the island, then kills
the black man, and afterwards lives happily with the princess.—In a
Danish version (Prof. Grundtvig’s “Danske Folkeäventyr”) a peasant gets
from an aged man a wishing-box, and henceforward lives in grand style.
After his death the steward and servants cheat his son and heir, so that
in ten years he is ruined and turned out of house and home. All the
property he takes with him is an old sheepskin jacket, in which he finds
the wishing-box, which had been, unknown to him, the cause of his
father’s prosperity. When the “slave” of the box appears, the hero
merely asks for a fiddle that when played upon makes everybody who hears
it to dance.[137] He hires himself to the King, whose daughter gives
him, in jest, a written promise to marry him, in exchange for the
fiddle. The King, when the hero claims the princess, insists on her
keeping her promise, and they are married. Then follows the loss of the
wishing-box, as in the Greek version, only in place of a black man it is
a handsome cavalier who is the lady’s paramour. The recovery of the box
is accomplished by very different means, and may be passed over, as
belonging to another cycle of tales.[138]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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