Reading Notes: Arabian Nights, Part A
Arabian Nights:
from The Arabian Nights' Entertainments by Andrew Lang
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| "Stories from the Arabian Nights". Source: Flickr. |
For this week's reading, I decided to read the Arabian Nights unit. I have to be honest, it was mostly because I love Aladdin and I knew Aladdin came from the Arabian Nights stories.
One story that I really liked from Part A was The Story of the Young King of the Black Isles. This story is about a king who finds out that his wife doesn't love him anymore and the events that occur after that.
The King, who isn't named in the story, finds out one day while he is being fanned by two of her maids that she doesn't love him anymore. They say that she wants to kill him if she could because she is an enchantress.
The king watches her and finds out its true when he badly wounds one of her favorite slaves. His wife begs him to build a palace in the garden. There she cried for him for two years.
The wife one day, in a fit of rage, curses him and turns him into a half-man, half-marble. From then on she took over the kingdom and changed it.
- Turned the populous city into the lake and desert plain
- The fish of four colors are actually the four different races that lived in the town
- The four hills are the four islands
The wife even starts to beat him up regularly. Growing tired of this, he goes to the Sultan to ask him to do something. The Sultan feeling sorry for the king comes up with a plan to help the king and stop his wife once and for all.
As I was reading this story, I did get some good ideas on how I could write a story on this.
- A "dear diary" type of story. When he is telling his story to the Sultan, it's all in first person so I can make that into journal/diary entries.
- A courtroom drama. I could present it as a case in court and the king could be in the witness box presenting his story, and the Sultan could be the judge.
- Gossip Girl. I've been wanting to try a Gossip Girl type of story so maybe that.
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