The Thousand-And-Second Tale of Scheherazade

Name: The Thousand-And-Second Tale of Scheherazade
Author: Edgar Allan Poe

Poe's narrator claims to have consulted a rare work called the Tellmenow Isitsöornot and discovered that the familiar ending of the Arabian Nights misrepresents the fate of the vizier's daughter, Scheherazade. He recaps the setup: a king, embittered against his queen, vows to marry a new maiden each night and have her beheaded the next morning; Scheherazade offers herself despite her father the grand vizier's objections, and on her wedding night arranges for her sister to lie nearby so she can begin telling a story just before dawn, leaving it unfinished so the king postpones her execution to hear the end. This continues for a thousand and one nights until the king repeals the tax on beauty. The narrator asserts this familiar conclusion is pleasant but untrue, and that the Isitsöornot reveals what really happened on the thousand-and-second night. On that night, Scheherazade tells her sister she regrets having cut short the tale of Sinbad the sailor's later adventures, and resolves to tell the true, fuller account, pinching the snoring king awake to listen. She then narrates, in Sinbad's own words, his final voyage: in old age, restless again, he goes to the seashore with a porter and merchandise, awaiting a ship. Instead a monstrous sea-creature approaches — vast, black, girdled with a blood-red streak, covered in metallic scales, flat-backed with tall spines, mouthless but many-eyed, puffing breath through nose-holes, moving without visible means of propulsion. On its back swarm man-like animals in tight ill-fitting coverings, heavy square boxes on their heads, and stiff collars binding their necks. The porter, believing the beast a sulphurous demon and the creatures vermin that goad it to wrath, flees; Sinbad is captured by the "man-vermin," bound, and carried aboard. He wins the favor of one who carries a trumpet and learns the rudiments of their language — called that of the "Cock-neighs" — and is granted passage as the creature circumnavigates a world Sinbad describes as round like a pomegranate. The voyage passes a series of wonders, each capped by the king's skeptical interjections ("Hum!", "Pooh!", "Ridiculous!", etc.): an island built by caterpillar-like creatures; a forest of solid stone; a cave of underground palaces hung with gem-like formations, beside black rivers of eyeless fish; a mountain streaming molten metal and belching darkening ash; a lake with a submerged forest; a region where dense air sustains iron; a magnificent river-garden called the Kingdom of Horror, fatal to enter; a land of horned beasts that trap prey in funnel-pits and drain their blood; airborne and self-moving vegetables, including sentient flowers that enslave other creatures; a country where bees and birds solve mathematical problems beyond the local sages; an immense mile-wide flock of birds taking four hours to pass; a headless-seeming, belly-shaped giant fowl that carries off a house full of terrified people and drops a sandbag on the voyagers; and a continent supported on the back of a four-hundred-horned, sky-blue cow, beneath whose legs the beast swims. Beyond the cow, they reach the man-animals' own homeland, a nation of powerful magicians said to harbor brain-worms that spur their imaginative feats. Sinbad describes their marvels: an iron horse fueled by black stones with boiling blood, swifter than any bird; a giant featherless "hen" of iron and brick that lays a hundred "chickens" a day, which reside briefly in her stomach; an artificial chess-playing man of brass, wood, and leather; a calculating creature performing decades of human labor in a second; a lead-and-pitch mechanism capable of copying the Koran with perfect precision; a fire-immune smoker; a turner of base metal to gold; makers of invisible wire, counters of impossibly rapid vibrations, animators of corpses, a voice audible worldwide, a man who writes letters across vast distances instantly, a commander of lightning, makers of silence from sound and darkness from light, ice made in a furnace, a portrait painted by sunlight itself, and precise measurers of the sun, moon, and planets — a people whose very infants and pets perceive things that do not exist or vanished eons before their nation's birth. Scheherazade adds that the wives and daughters of these magicians, otherwise accomplished, are afflicted by a shared delusion: that beauty consists in the protuberance of the body just below the small of the back, so that with cheap bolsters available, women there had become indistinguishable from dromedaries. At this the king, declaring he cannot bear more of her "lies" and has a headache, orders that she might as well rise and be strangled after all. Scheherazade, grieved but resigned given her husband's rigid integrity, submits to her fate, consoled only that much of the story remains untold and that the king's impatience has cost him many more extraordinary adventures.

By Edgar Allan Poe · First published 1845 · Genre: Fantasy, Satire, Adventure · 6,640 words

First lines

Truth is stranger than fiction. Old saying

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The Thousand-And-Second Tale of Scheherazade is listed on Textopian as a novel by Edgar Allan Poe, dated 1845 CE.

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Work type: Novel
Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Date: 1845 CE
Language: English
Genres: Fantasy, Satire, Adventure, Fiction, Literary Fiction
Length: 6,640 words
Structure: 1 section, 75 paragraphs
Reading fit: Difficult (College Level)

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Genres

Fantasy — The narrative features fantastical elements, including magical creatures and surreal adventures, characteristic of the fantasy genre.
Satire — The work employs humor and exaggeration to critique societal norms and human behavior, particularly through the absurdity of the king's actions and the portrayal of characters.
Adventure — The protagonist embarks on a series of adventurous journeys filled with peril and discovery, aligning with the adventure genre.
Fiction — The story is a work of fiction, presenting a narrative that is not based on real events but rather imaginative storytelling.