Arabian Nights

Arabian Nights is a compendium featuring Mid-eastern tales, including stories from the Persian Empire and also tales from the time of the Caliphs. It's without any doubt a historic and literary document, in equal parts.

Talking about its literary value, we can say that its influence in the Western world has been vast, from the first translation to French by Antoine Galland during the first decade of the XVIII century, and other translations like Sir Richard Burton's, to English, during the XIX century. Its specific folklore which features genies, flying carpets, all kinds of spells and curses, and many other objects and creatures have dazzled the young and the old, through these tales based on popular tradition.

Some of them help us, too, understand the social structures and administration of justice of that time, especially those set during the reign of Harun Al Rashid in Baghdad.

During the XX century many adaptations to film have been made based on these tales, some of them using two or more, some of them focusing on one single tale, like Disney's animated film Aladdin, considered an animation classic today. Also to highlight, The Adventures of Prince Achmed by Lotte Reiniger. And the various adaptations of one of the compendium's prototypical tales, The Thief of Bagdad (Alexander Korda's 1940 adaptation and an earlier one starring Douglas Fairbanks from 1924 silent). In the XXI century, animation producer Pedro Alonso Pablos has included some of these tales on his Tales of the World animated mini-series.

Nowadays, prof. Michael James Lundell traces current manifestations of Arabian Nights in popular culture, along with a selection of scholar texts related to the work in his well-known blog "Journal of the Nights".

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