Wayne State University Press
  • Grimm NightsReflections on the Connections Between the Grimms’ Household Tales and the 1001 Nights
Abstract

Discussing relevant passages in both the Grimms’ original appendix to their collection and Bernhard Heller’s essay contribution to Bolte and Polívka’s “Notes” to the Grimms’ tales, in the present essay I explore the connections between the Grimms’ Household Tales and the 1001 Nights. Because the number of direct connections is limited, I turn to the reasons for this apparent lack by discussing the Grimms’ assumptions as collectors, adaptors, and editors. This approach reminds us of the necessity to assess previous scholarship in light of its sociocultural, historical, and political contexts.

Modestly titled “notes” to the Grimms’ Household Tales, the Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm, compiled by German scholar Johannes Bolte (1858–1937) and Czech scholar Georg (Jiří) Polívka (1838–1933), is an impressive representative of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century erudition. Contrasting with the unassuming title, the three volumes of notes to the 225 numbered tales from the Grimms’ collection (taking into account all the tales published in the collection’s various editions as well as fragments and unpublished items) cover an impressive 1,700 pages. To this day, the Anmerkungen constitutes an invaluable mine of information. Bolte and Polívka not only discuss the Grimms’ tales in relation to their historical precursors and their changing versions in the various editions of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen but also present a wide array of data relating to European and international narrative tradition in general, documenting the impact of the tales on subsequent tradition. In the short preface to the first volume published in 1913 (1: iii), Bolte humbly presented the Anmerkungen as an enlarged version of the notes that the Grimms themselves had compiled. These notes were first published in the appendixes to the first and second volumes (1812, 1815) of the first edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, and a revised version was published as a separate volume in 1856 (Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, v. 3).

In addition to the three volumes of annotations proper to the Grimms’ tales, in a fourth and fifth volume Bolte (and his collaborators) elaborated on the Grimms’ originally concise remarks on the history of the fairy tale in fourteen extensive chapters. These chapters deal with a variety of topics, ranging from a discussion of historical documents to surveys of fairy tales in various [End Page 75] European regions and in regions whose narrative traditions are related to those of Europe. Of particular interest for the present discussion, which combines Donald Haase’s dedicated interest in the Grimms’ tales with my predilection for the narrative culture of the Muslim world, are a few pages in the chapter on tales in the Arabic tradition that Hungarian scholar Bernhard Heller (1871–1943), an expert in both Jewish and Arabic narrative traditions, contributed to the fourth volume of the Anmerkungen. On the one hand, Heller’s detailed discussion speaks to the problematics of what historically constitutes scholarly knowledge and how relative the value of this knowledge may or may not prove to be in the long run; on the other hand, Heller addresses the Grimms’ assumptions as collectors, adaptors, and editors that, although perfectly in line with contemporary attitudes, deprived later research of invaluable source material for the comparison of tales from literary tradition and their oral retellings.

Heller’s chapter focuses on the connections between the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen and the 1001 Nights, the world-renowned Arabic collection of tales better known in the English-speaking world as The Arabian Nights. (An English translation of Heller’s detailed treatment of these connections is published separately in the “Texts and Translations” section of the present issue.) Although the Grimms’ tales are available in various English translations (see, e.g., Grimm, Complete Fairy Tales; and Grimm, Grimm Reader), the Anmerkungen compiled and edited by Bolte and Polívka has never been translated in full. Considering the tremendous wealth of concise and highly specialized information that is crammed into its pages, the Anmerkungen is, as the translated sample suggests, fairly untranslatable and should best be used in the German original. Furthermore, from today’s perspective, the predominantly descriptive and enumerating character of Heller’s essay risks being experienced as somewhat tiring, particularly because folkloristic research has long left behind the stage of merely amassing data in vogue in the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth. Notably, Heller does not make the least effort to develop a hypothesis regarding the considerable overlap (which he labels either “connection” or “relationship”) between the 1001 Nights and the Grimms’ tales in terms of narrative motifs, elements, or plots. Instead, he cautiously emphasizes that one should not “believe that for every analogy, the respective tale or motif has simply been adopted from the 1001 Nights” (Heller, 405) or that “we should not think of a direct transfer” (409).

Even though we might regard the value of the collected data as limited, we need to posit ourselves within the field of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century research so as to understand what Heller was actually writing about. What notion did Heller (and, for that matter, the Grimms more than a century before him) have of the 1001 Nights? What knowledge did [End Page 76] writers up to the second half of the twentieth century rely on for talking about the Nights, and where did their knowledge derive from? Which versions of the Nights were accessible to them, and which others did they know (or ignore)? To start a short journey through the historical perception of the 1001 Nights in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century German—or, more generally, Western—research, let me begin by discussing the initial passages of the chapter on “the Orient” from the Grimms’ essay on literary sources of folk and fairy tales in the second edition of the volume of annotations to their collection (Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, 3: 348–50).

The Grimms’ essay begins with a general statement that leaves no doubt about both the sources that the Grimms used to inform themselves about the Nights and the credulity they shared with their contemporaries. Introduced by a short justification of why a discussion of “Asian” (obviously implying Chinese and Japanese) literature has been excluded, the text continues: “At first we encounter the narratives of the Arabic Thousand and One Nights that have been compiled toward the middle of the sixteenth century (1548). They are known both through Galland’s translation and by way of the supplements of Chavis and Cazotte, whose genuine character [deren echten Grund] has only been brought to light by Caussin de Perceval in his continuation” (Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, 3: 348–49; all translations mine).1 A note following this statement refers to a note in the commentary on KHM 71, “How Six Men Got on in the World,” which in turn relates to a stylistically similar “Arabic narrative in the continuation of the 1001 Nights by Chavis and Cazotte published in the Cabinet des fées 39, 421–478” (Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, 3: 122). That note reads: “It [i.e., the tale under consideration] has been considered as spurious, but Caussin de Perceval has later identified the Arabic manuscript that has served as the basis for Chavis that Cazotte has adapted. … There is no doubt as for its being authentic [echt].” (122)

At this point, it is necessary to go into some detail. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, detailed knowledge about the complex history of the 1001 Nights was limited, and scholars (and even more so the lay public) tended to trust the evaluation of other acknowledged scholars regarding the “authenticity” of the various (French) translations of the Nights, including that of their “continuation,” all of which they supposed were based on “genuine” Arabic manuscripts. The Grimms were no exception to the rule. Because the renowned expert of Arabic language and literature Jean Jacques Antoine Caussin de Perceval (1759–1835), professor of Arabic at the prestigious Collège de France in Paris since 1782, had authenticated the continuation of the Nights published by Dom Denis Chavis and Jacques Cazotte, the Grimms were bound to follow his judgment. Little did they, or, for that matter, Caussin [End Page 77] de Perceval himself, suspect that the supposedly genuine Arabic manuscript was an audacious forgery produced in the second half of the eighteenth century, right under the eyes of the French Orientalists who would later support its authenticity (Mahdi, 51–61).

Specifically, the point in question refers to the disputed authenticity of the tale of “Aladdin,” a tale for which no Arabic manuscript from which Galland could have translated was known (Marzolph and Van Leeuwen, 1: 84–85). Essentially, the dispute of authenticity even goes back to Galland himself, because Galland mystified his source by not acknowledging that he owed the “orphan tales” (such as “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba,” among others; see Marzolph and Van Leeuwen, 2: 666–67), which he published in the final volumes of his translation, to the oral performance of Syrian Maronite storyteller Hanna Diyab. This fact was revealed only at the end of the nineteenth century by Hermann Zotenberg (1834–1909), who documented the relevant passages from Galland’s diaries that testified to the role Diyab played in the creation of “Aladdin” (194–99).2 Even so, the process of transmission and adaptation of Diyab’s tales came to be studied in detail only in the second half of the twentieth century (see, e.g., Abdel-Halim; May, 82–92; Larzul). When Dom Chavis, a teacher of Arabic in Paris who “seems to have come from nowhere and then have vanished into thin air” (Mahdi, 61), in 1787 consciously forged a manuscript containing a translation of Galland’s “Aladdin” into Arabic, the scholarly world was all too willing to accept the manuscript Chavis had produced as authentic, that is, independent of Galland’s adaptation and elaboration of an oral tale. After all, the manuscript appeared to prove the long suspected Arabic origin of a tale from the 1001 Nights that was dear to European audiences. When Caussin de Perceval subsequently acquired a second Arabic manuscript containing the very same tale (with minor deviations), the question appeared to be solved beyond any reasonable doubt (Mahdi, 64–66).

Caussin de Perceval’s manuscript presented itself as copied from a manuscript dating from 1703, that is, a year before the publication of the first volume of Galland’s translation. This manuscript appeared to prove that the tales it contained had been current in Arabic tradition before Galland, leading to the conclusion that they could not possibly have been invented or influenced in any way by Galland. Caussin de Perceval did not know that his manuscript was another fraud, this one prepared by Michel Sabbagh (1775–1816), a scholar of Arabic literature who served as keeper of Arabic manuscripts at the Royal Library. Given the contemporary scholarly judgment, it does not come as a surprise that the Grimms would indiscriminately accept the authenticity of the tales included in the Continuation translated by Chavis and Cazotte that was based on Chavis’s forged manuscript. They had no [End Page 78] reason to suspect that Chavis and Cazotte “did no more than what Galland had done earlier …: translate an Arabic story they could lay their hands on and develop others out of mere outlines, then claim that these are part of the Nights” (Mahdi, 58). As a matter of fact, the historical details surrounding the manuscripts by both Chavis and Sabbagh became widely known (and generally accepted) only after Muhsin Mahdi’s unambiguously clear documentation, published as recently as 1994 in the companion volume to his edition of the Galland manuscript (51–72), in which he convincingly argues that both manuscripts are conscious forgeries.

Beyond its importance for aspects of philological relevance, the discussion of the origin of the 1001 Nights illuminates the pivotal question regarding which translation of the Nights the Grimms used and which notion of the Nights that translation would convey to them. As documented by the references in the Grimms’ commentaries to specific tales, the only translation of the Nights they used was the one published by Caussin de Perceval in 1806. From today’s perspective the notion this translation conveyed was at best that of the “larger” Nights. This notion of the larger Nights would neither regard the Nights as a specific, clearly defined work of Arabic literature (a concept that has been developed only fairly recently; see, e.g., Chraïbi, 89–116) nor ask for the content of the Nights in its original Arabic context. Instead, it would uncritically accept the attribution no matter what tales were presented as part of the Nights in different contexts, particularly in European “translations,” while not even suspecting the fraudulent creation of a new phenomenon in favor of a credulous belief in historical authenticity. This evaluation holds valid for each and every one of the versions of the Nights that might have been available to the Grimms, beginning with Galland’s text.

If we now look at the eight tales in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen for which the Grimms themselves noted similarities to tales in the Nights (i.e., in Caussin de Perceval’s edition; Marzolph and Van Leeuwen, 2: 576–77), the overlap boils down to a limited number of clearly defined single motifs: the jinni in the bottle in “The Trader and the Jinni” in the Nights and in the brothers’ “The Fisherman and His Wife” (KHM 19) and “The Spirit in the Bottle” (KHM 99); the competition in magic transformation found in both “The Second Qalandar’s Tale” in the Nights and “The Thief and His Master” (KHM 68); and the umpire who steals magic objects that appears in “The King of the Golden Mountain” (KHM 92) and “Hasan of Basra” in the Nights. The Grimms’ references to the similarities between, on the one hand, “The Three Little Birds” (KHM 96), “The Water of Life” (KHM 97), and the Nights tale of “The Two Sisters Who Envied Their Cadette” and the similarities between “Simeliberg” (KHM 142) and the tale of “Ali Baba” on the other, all relate to items that are not included in the [End Page 79] pre-Galland Arabic manuscripts. In these instances the elements identified by the Grimms as common to the Kinder- und Hausmärchen and the Nights indeed were added to the collection by Galland in elaboration of Hanna’s oral performance, a fact that the Grimms and other scholars of the day did not know.

A century later, the findings summarized by Bernhard Heller from the references in Bolte and Polívka’s three volumes of annotations still betray an approach to the 1001 Nights that is similar to that of the Brothers Grimm. Heller is quite right in stating that in his day the “perception of the connections between the 1001 Nights and fairy-tale literature has widened and deepened” (405). And he is certainly cautious enough not to claim a direct influence of the Nights on the Grimms’ tales, which he admitted only for “Simeli Mountain” (KHM 142) (409). But even though research had made a certain progress since the days of the Brothers Grimm and even though Victor Chauvin’s monumental Bibliographie presented detailed information relating to the history and subsequent impact of specific tales of the Nights, the complex nature of Galland’s translation and that of the subsequent French editions had still not been recognized. From today’s perspective it appears that folkloristic research was mainly occupied with questions of origin (of the Nights as a whole and of specific stories) rather than with the creative impact exercised in and by Galland’s translation and the subsequent French editions and adaptations. Above all, Zotenberg’s findings about the origin of Galland’s orphan tales from oral storytelling appear to have gone largely unnoticed until the second half of the twentieth century, and nobody seriously doubted the “authenticity” of the Chavis and Sabbagh manuscripts that had authoritatively been authenticated by Caussin de Perceval. As a specific case in point, Heller still laments the fact that for several of Galland’s tales, Arabic versions (which he regards as originals) had not yet been discovered (404). All the tales he mentions in this respect are ones that Hanna Diyab narrated to Galland. And although Heller knew about the Arabic versions of “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba” that had meanwhile been discovered, he did not doubt the fact that these were “originals,” that is, Arabic versions that predate Galland’s work or that are, at least, independent of his publication.

As for the elaborated list of connections between the Grimms’ tales and the 1001 Nights that Heller presents, it is not exactly clear which translations of the Nights he is referring to. The bibliography at the end of the third volume of Bolte and Polívka’s Anmerkungen lists three translations (those by Habicht et al., Henning, and Greve), all of them German and all of them predating 1908. The various passages in Bolte and Polívka summarized by Heller almost exclusively refer to either Henning or Chauvin, rarely to Habicht, Burton, or Mardrus. Even though Enno Littmann’s then recently published [End Page 80] German translation (1921–1928), the most faithful one to the Arabic original, is mentioned in an extensive footnote relating to recent publications on the Nights (Bolte and Polívka, 4: 397–98n3), time had obviously not allowed for the perusal of this translation, because Bolte’s preface to the fourth volume of the Anmerkungen dates from December 1929.

Heller’s survey of the contemporary knowledge about connections between the Nights and the Grimms’ tales starts by mentioning the obvious strong impact of both “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba” on European oral tradition. Although the Grimms were conscious of this fact, they excluded a version of “Aladdin” that they had collected from an unidentified contributor from their publication; as Wilhelm Grimm unambiguously remarked, “This is Aladdin of the 1001 Nights and probably derives from there” (Bolte and Polívka, 1: 544; 4: 436). “Simeli Mountain” (KHM 142) was contributed by Ludowine von Haxthausen in May 1814. Wilhelm mentioned in his letter of thanks that he noticed “a strange similarity with an Oriental tale from the 1001 Nights” (3: 137n1); the Grimms’ notes to KHM 142 even say that the tale “corresponds exactly to the oriental one of the forty robbers” (Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, 3: 225). The reason that the Grimms did not exclude this tale as an oral retelling of a literary narrative (which was their usual agenda) most probably derives from the fact that they regarded the name Semsi or Semeli as an ancient (uralt) German name for a mountain. Meanwhile, both a Swiss folk song mentioning a “Simeliberg” and a Latin document dating to the ninth century that the Grimms cited as arguments are dismissed by Bolte as irrelevant (Bolte and Polívka, 3: 138). What follows next is a tour de force in two parts.

First, Heller lists fifteen pieces, the “nucleus of each … [of which] corresponds to a specific tale from the 1001 Nights” (406). His statement is supported by a detailed listing of single motifs that in the end leads Heller to declare even a “close relationship” (408) between the 1001 Nights and the listed fifteen tales from the collection of the Brothers Grimm. Meanwhile, this “relationship” at times appears to be fairly limited or even far-fetched. As a case in point one might mention the listed similarity between “Puss in Boots” (a tale that was deleted by the Brothers Grimm from the collection’s second edition onward because of its obvious origin from Charles Perrault’s Contes de ma mère l’Oye) and the Nights tale of “Abu Muhammad Lazybones” (whom Heller calls Lazy Kaslãn).3 This similarity relies on nothing else but the fact that a helpful animal (the cat in “Puss in Boots” and a monkey that is actually a demon in “Abu Muhammad Lazybones”) makes a seemingly undeserving hero rich.

Second, Heller lists a number of “single traits and motifs in the 1001 Nights that are also known from other tales” (408) that in the end lead him to [End Page 81] establish “a relationship between the 1001 Nights and the Grimms’ tales in a total of twenty instances” (409). A detailed commentary to Heller’s listing is beyond the scope of the present essay. Suffice it to say that the second listing also includes highly specific or rather dubious items, such as “How Six Men Got On in the World,” mentioned earlier; Bolte’s uncritical repetition of the Grimms’ statement that the tale’s character as a genuine tale from the Nights “may hardly be doubted” (Bolte and Polívka, 2: 95) documents a sad lack of knowledge about the complex nature of the various versions of the Nights more than a century after the Grimms’ original annotations.

To sum up, one feels inclined to regard the existing surveys of possible connections between the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen and the 1001 Nights as much ado about nothing or, at least, about very little. After all, it would be surprising if there were no overlap at all between two of the internationally most influential collections of folktales and fairy tales. Folklorists have repeatedly noted the impact of the Nights on tales collected from the European oral tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Bolte and Polívka, 2: 418–19n2; Horálek; Stewart; Cox; Marzolph, “Märchen”), and it is here that more promising results are to be found. Besides betraying the impact of literature on oral tradition, these retellings document the creativity of talented storytellers, who often appropriated the tales in peculiar ways. In the context of the present discussion, my favorite example (see Marzolph, “Tale,” 405, 410) is a passage published in the introduction to Ulrich Jahn’s collection of popular tales from northeastern Germany in which the collector shows great sympathy for the ways the narrator appropriated his literary source:

A maid had been presented by her masters with a selection of the narratives of the Thousand and One Nights for reading. She liked the well-known tale of “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp” best. She read it again and again until she could reproduce it by heart. Then she would retell the tale when occasionally visiting the neighboring village. A story-teller picked up the tale from her and narrated it a generation after he had heard it himself. Out of the tales he remembered, it was his favorite tale, since it was taken from a printed book and therefore was surely more beautiful than all the other stories he knew.

Step by step the tale’s performance retold the original, except for the fact that the good man has transformed dirty Aladdin, without knowing why and how, into a red-haired and faithless dumb Jack who could neither read nor write and did not even know how to say the Lord’s Prayer. The garden that had been filled by Oriental fantasy with fruit-trees bearing pearls and jewels instead of ordinary fruit had been transformed into a popular garden of Fehnus. He had kept, [End Page 82] however, the egg of the bird Rokh (“Rochei”) that plays such an important role in the original tale and that Aladdin should request from the djinni of the lamp to be inserted into the cupola of his castle. He deemed this trait to be too important to be changed. Consequently he narrated that in the end red-haired dumb Jack asked the djinni to bring king Reckei (“Egg of the Rokh”) and hang him at the top of the vault. When I [says the collector] told him that such a name as “Reckei” did not exist, he calmly replied: “How do you want me to call him? You are cleverer than I am, so do give him a name that sounds better. His name is King Reckei, and I shall call him by that name as long as I live.”

Had the Grimms not been mislead regarding the presumed old German documents mentioning the name Semsi/Simeli, they would certainly also have excluded “Simeli Mountain” (KHM 142) from their collection. Seen from this angle, the question of connections between the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen and the 1001 Nights turns into a study of the Grimms’ agenda, that is, their goal to eliminate all tales or elements that appeared “suspect” in terms of a possible origin from a literary source (Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, 1: 21). While the literary origin of folktales and fairy tales is a wide field that many scholars have dealt with in great detail (see, e.g., Wesselski; Rölleke, 1281; Bottigheimer; De Blécourt), the question once more highlights both the assumptions of the early collectors and publishers and the assumptions of subsequent researchers. As Donald Haase has aptly summarized, this agenda relied on the assumption that folktales are

simple narratives serving as essentially direct expressions of “traditional” societies. And in each case the assumption that traditional narratives are simple, direct expressions relies on the assumption that all the published texts have oral origins, that orality is pure and natural, and that this natural origin essentially survives intact and defines each text’s unequivocal and primary level of significance, whatever the language of that text and despite whatever mediation, alteration, or appropriation might occur at the hands of collectors, editors, and translators.”

As a rule, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century collectors of folktales and fairy tales from oral tradition were primarily interested in collecting the supposedly pure and unaltered expressions of traditional folklore. Irish folklorist Seán Ó Súilleabháin (1903–1996) instructed collectors in Ireland: “Be very cautious in dealing with a storyteller who can read. Make sure before you write down a tale that he has not learned it directly from a book, newspaper, or manuscript. [End Page 83] All tales recorded should be genuine popular tradition so far as the recorder can determine” (555). And Hungarian American folklorist Linda Dégh summarized this attitude: “When the informant of a folklorist referred to a book as his source, he was not listened to; and when it appeared afterward that the original of his text could be found in a calendar, it was removed from the collection” (147). In this manner the collectors’ romantic approach deprived folk narrative research of a unique set of comparative data, a resource that would have allowed the study of a given storyteller’s creativity in close relation to a clearly defined literary source. Even so, the published collections still retain numerous retellings of literary tales, of which the Grimms’ “Simeliberg” is just one example. Incidentally, “Simeliberg” is also a revealing example of just how intricate the relationship between oral and literary tradition can be. Relying on an unknown source, the tale of “Ali Baba” is first documented from the oral performance of Syrian Maronite storyteller Hanna Diyab in 1709; the shorthand notation of the performance was then transformed into an elaborate literary tale in Antoine Galland’s Mille et une nuit [sic], published shortly after; the collection’s fame gave rise to oral retellings, such as the one by Ludowine von Haxthausen in 1814; and finally, the tale’s publication in the Grimms’ collection undoubtedly again gave rise to further oral retellings.

Rudolf Schenda stressed the tremendous creative potential of semiliteral (or semi-oral) processes of transmission (217–38), and it is here that historical and comparative folk narrative research finds one of its most fascinating fields of research. If we shift the conversation from the primacy of oral versus literary to a nuanced study of oral performances that may or may not be based on literary texts, we have the chance to gain a deeper understanding of the motivations for and mechanisms of creative adaptation practiced by those individuals without whose involvement folk narrative studies would be meaningless: the storytellers.

Whether we study narratives in literary texts or in oral performances, there is always an individual behind the narrative who shaped it according to his or her personal experience and capacities and there are always sociocultural, historical, and political contexts. Discussions about the primacy of a certain medium of transmission, whether written/literary or oral, can at best sharpen our sensibilities toward the mechanisms of translation, migration, and adaptation. “Folktale scholarship,” as Donald Haase pointed out some time ago, “was born on the shift from orality to print, and the poles of this transition have in large measure defined how we think about folktales and fairy tales” (“Hypertextual Gutenberg,” 222). By widening the scope of this statement to the ways scholars think about previous scholarship, the present reflections on the connections between the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen and the [End Page 84] 1001 Nights add further fuel to the argument that scholars are bound to the sociocultural, historical, and political contexts they live in as much as storytellers are. Reconsidering the contextual limitations of scholarly approaches is a constant challenge to our discipline, even when, or just when, authorities speak.

Ulrich Marzolph

Ulrich Marzolph is a professor of Islamic studies at the Georg-August-University in Göttingen, Germany, and a senior member of the editorial committee of the Enzyklopädie des Märchens. He specializes in the narrative culture of the Near East, with particular emphasis on Arab and Persian folk narrative and popular literature.

Notes

1. In dating the compilation of the 1001 Nights to 1548, the Grimms followed Caussin de Perceval (8: viii–ix), who pointed to a reader’s note bearing that date (955 in the Muslim calendar) in the third volume of Galland’s manuscript. Caussin concluded that the compilation of the Nights would probably not date from long before the middle of the sixteenth century. Contemporary scholarship did not yet know about the tenth-century quotations of the Nights in Arabic literature or about most of the other evidence relating to the earlier history of the Nights. According to currently accepted scholarly knowledge, the oldest preserved Arabic manuscript of the 1001 Nights, the one used by Galland, most likely dates to the middle of the fifteenth century. Just about a dozen manuscripts, all of them fragmentary, are known from the period before Galland’s translation appeared, that is, before the beginning of the eighteenth century. Most of the currently known Arabic manuscripts of the Nights date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The manuscript forged by Chavis is not dated but presents itself as “authentic.”

2. In his diary Galland took down condensed summaries of Hanna Diyab’s oral performances, which he later elaborated into full-fledged tales. Only for “Aladdin” did he receive a written version, the manuscript of which is, however, not preserved. Concerning Zotenberg, despite his important contribution to the history of the Nights, he had successfully managed to make himself (almost) forgotten (see Gad Freudenthal’s recent essay).

3. The Arabic word kaslān, which Heller obviously mistakes as a given name, means “lazy.”

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