Literary Wonderlands

by Laura Miller

  In the worlds of poem and poet, Beowulf in his doomed struggles may be the purest of heroes; in present debates whether one can be a hero and lose, in popular cultures awash in flawed (super)heroes—for us, too, Beowulf remains relevant.

  ANONYMOUS

  THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS (c.700–947)

  This vastly influential collection of folktales was compiled more than 1,000 years ago and is framed by the narrative of King Shahriyar and the many tales told by his wife Shahrazad.

  The Thousand and One Nights, or The Arabian Nights (the first English translation, 1706), is a compilation of tales from many sources—Persian, Indian, Chinese, and Egyptian—put together in Arabic more than a thousand years ago. It first became known in Europe when Antoine Galland published a twelve-volume French translation between 1704 and 1717. The best-known English version, by the explorer Sir Richard Burton, came out in sixteen volumes between 1885 and 1888. Two of the most famous tales in the collection, “Aladdin’s Lamp” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” were added by Galland, who claimed to have been told them by a Syrian storyteller named Hanna Diab. They appear to be genuine Middle Eastern folktales, so his claim is probably true, and they are now regularly added to translations.

  When the collection first became known in Europe, it struck its audience as completely novel on many levels. The framing concept sees King Shahriyar, horrified by the infidelity of his wife, deciding that the only way to be safe from female betrayal is to marry a virgin every evening, and have her executed the next morning. He continues this custom until Shahrazad, or Scheherazade, the wily daughter of the king’s vizier (a high official), hits on a plan. Every night she begins to tell a story, but leaves it unfinished, so that her life is spared until the next day to complete the tale, whereupon she begins another one. Often tales are inserted one inside the other, so that endings continually recede, although in the end, after a thousand and one nights (and three children) Shahrazad persuades Shahriyar to trust her and spare her life permanently.

  From the start we are in a world of despotic power and cruelty, but also enormous wealth and generosity. Kings and Caliphs award thousands of gold pieces and camel-loads of treasure to deserving young men, so much money sometimes that “no-one could count it but God.” A merchant may spend a million dinars in pursuit of a beautiful woman and bankrupt himself, to be saved by a turn of fortune that brings him a sack of jewels, and among the jewels a magic amulet, priceless because it holds the cure of the daughter of the king of India (tales 946–52).

  Wealth is abundant even on a less miraculous level, for the tales are set within the immense civilization of medieval Islam, with its connections to Africa, India, China, and Central Asia, and its great cities of Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo, Basra, and above all Baghdad, home of the Caliphs, where city markets are stuffed with goods of which Europeans in Galland’s time had barely heard: quinces, peaches, jasmine from Syria, raisins of Tihama, pomegranate blooms, and pistachios.

  Also totally novel to Westerners, and perhaps even more influential for imitators of the Nights, was the cast of supernatural creatures who figure continually. Shahrazad’s first tale begins with a fearsome ‘ifrit, who appears with a drawn sword to kill a merchant who has carelessly thrown away the pit of a date. Other menaces include the man-eating tomb-haunting ghuls, all too capable of disguising themselves as beautiful women, or even houris, the nymphs of the Muslim Paradise. But most prominent of all in the tales are the jinn, or genies, often trapped inside a lamp or bottle or ring, and when released bound to fulfill every wish of their new master. Sometimes the power that constrained them was that of the great magician Suleiman, in whom Christians could recognize the Old Testament’s King Solomon, son of David.

  “The Seven Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor” (tales 536–66) introduced the rukh, or roc, a bird so enormous it caught elephants to feed its chicks, as well as the elephants’ graveyard from which Sindbad takes a fortune in ivory. In his travels across the Indian Ocean, Sindbad also encounters a diamond mountain, the City of the Apes, giants and cannibals, and the Old Man of the Sea. Oddly enough the magic carpets—now a classic component of Middle Eastern tales—appear only fleetingly in the Nights.

  The final and most alluring novelty for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western readers, was the presentation of sex and love. Every king, caliph, emir, and vizier has his harem of beautiful wives and concubines, graceful as gazelles, with their eunuch guards. The ladies, however, do not seem to be strictly cloistered and are as passionate for adventure as their admirers—which, of course, is what causes King Shahriyar’s murderous custom. Both men and women fall in love readily and, far more than in medieval European tales, consummate their love without feelings of guilt. Although respect for the Prophet and the Koran is everywhere in Nights, expressed even by the jinn and the creatures of the sea, the characters’ religious devotion contains nothing of the asceticism that often accompanies Christian piety. While women are in theory controlled and all but enslaved, their intelligence often gives them the upper hand.

  One final charm is the elaborate style in which the tales are told and in which the characters speak. The tales are studded with poetry and with set-piece descriptions using rhyme and rhythm, much appreciated in Arabic culture, all of which translators have struggled to reproduce.

  The Nights soon became as familiar to Western children, in censored and selected form, as “Jack and the Beanstalk” or “Cinderella.” Many classical authors mention them, from Stendhal to Tolstoy. Dickens makes several explicit references to them, and his London, where disguised figures walk the streets and uncover strange tales, seems a transmuted Baghdad, as is the London of Robert Louis Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights (1882). The Brontë family was especially fond of a moralized version of some of the tales, published as Tales of the Genii by James Ridley in 1764.

  The effect of the Nights on children’s literature has probably been even greater than on the classics. Aladdin is now a staple of children’s theater, and everyone knows “Open Sesame” and Sindbad the sailor. E. E. Nesbit’s trilogy, Five Children and It (1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), and The Story of the Amulet (1906), uses props derived from the Nights, although the Psammead is her own invention. C. S. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy (1954) starts like a tale from the Nights with a poor fisherman called Arsheesh, and the hot country of Calormen to the south of Narnia, with its despotic ruler, groveling vizier, and insincerely flowery language, is a parodic version of the Nights’s Arabia. The world of the Nights is now so familiar that references to it may be third-hand, or even more indirect. It has become as much a part of Western popular culture as Middle-earth or Sherwood Forest.

  As a result of its popularity Nights has inspired many film adaptations, including three versions of The Thief of Baghdad (1924, 1940, 1978), and the animated Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958). The most successful was Disney’s Aladdin of 1992, which won two Oscars. In recent years Salman Rushdie has turned to the treasure trove of Nights, causing Ursula K. Le Guin to remark of his Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015, here): “Rushdie is our Scheherazade.”

  An hour before daybreak Dinarzade awoke, and exclaimed, as she had promised, “My dear sister, if you are not asleep, tell me I pray you, before the sun rises, one of your charming stories. It is the last time that I shall have the pleasure of hearing you.” Shahrazad did not answer her sister, but turned to the Sultan. “Will your highness permit me to do as my sister asks?” said she. “Willingly,” he answered. So Shahrazad began…

  ANONYMOUS

  THE MABINOGION (12th–14th century)

  A blend of Celtic mythology and Arthurian legend in eleven atmospheric tales, playing out in the forests and valleys of Wales as well as the shadowy “otherworld,” where dragons and giants roam, and virtuous heroes quest for honor.

  The Mabinogion (mabbi-nogue-yon) is the name given to a collection of eleven medieval Welsh tales, which form our best guide to the world of early Welsh m
ythology. The manuscript dates from the fourteenth century, but the stories themselves were composed well before that. The meaning of Mabinogion is not known, and the word may be an old scribal error. It was probably intended to mean “tales of youth,” a Welsh equivalent of the French enfances. Some have suggested the word mabinogi may have meant “tales of Maponos,” the mythological Divine Son, who perhaps underlies the figure of the hero Pryderi in some of the stories.

  In the world of The Mabinogion, myth and legend co-exist with history and reality, and they are not easy to tell apart. The geographical world of the tales looks like medieval Wales, divided into separate kingdoms such as Gwynedd, Powys, and Dyfed, but this imagined Wales also contains giants, monsters, and strange beasts, and is in contact with supernatural dimensions.

  The society, meanwhile, is that of the medieval Welsh aristocracy—still independent and unconquered by English or Normans, proud of their native traditions as sung or told by bards—and their sense of history reaches back surprisingly far. In “The Dream of Macsen Wledig,” Macsen is thought to be the Roman general Maximus, who led his British legions into Gaul in CE 383 to fight unsuccessfully for the imperial throne. The Welsh tale makes him an Emperor of Rome, who originally came to Britain led by a vision of a beautiful Welsh princess.

  Two other tales are stories of Arthurian legend. “Culhwch and Olwen” tells how Arthur assisted his cousin Culhwch in winning the daughter of the chief giant Ysbaddaden, by acquiring an extensive list of magic objects, including the blood of the Black Witch of the Valley of Grief; the comb and shears between the ears of Twrch Trwyth, the giant boar; and a leash made from the beard of Dillus the Bearded, to hold the hounds that hunt the boar. Both “Culhwch” and “The Dream of Rhonabwy” list many members of Arthur’s court, including some who became widely known, such as Cei (Sir Kay), already as disobliging as he is in later stories.

  Pride of place, however, must go to the four tales designated as the four “branches” of the mabinogi, loosely connected by the hero Pryderi. Their humor and imagination set them apart from any other wonder-tales known anywhere in the world. Their characters are paradoxical: passionate but polite, wordy and taciturn, courteous but rough. Women are valued highly and treated respectfully, but when the lady Rhiannon is falsely accused of murdering her son (who will become the hero Pryderi, and has actually been carried off by a giant claw) her punishment is to sit by a mounting-block and carry visitors on her back to the court. She is later exonerated, but such vulgarities would likely have been forgotten in later courtly romance tales.

  With their cast of colorful characters, high drama, philosophy, and romance, it is no surprise these Celtic stories have proved an irresistible inspiration, first to French romancers and then through eight centuries of further storytellers. The stories are especially treasured in Wales as foundations of national culture. They have been retold in novelistic form several times in recent years, in Lloyd Alexander’s six-volume Chronicles of Prydain (1964–73) and in Evangeline Walton’s four-volume sequence begun with Prince of Annwn (1970) and re-issued as The Mabinogion Tetralogy in 2002. Alan Garner’s Owl Service (1967) retells the tragic love-story of Lleu, Gronw, and Blodeuwedd, with a happier ending.

  SNORRI STURLUSON

  THE PROSE EDDA (c.1220)

  A remarkable written preservation of Norse mythology, detailing the adventures of gods, heroes, warrior kings and queens, giants, dwarves, and elves. It is the most renowned and influential work of all Scandinavian literature.

  Iceland had been Christian for two centuries by the time of Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241), and the old pagan traditions were fading. Snorri’s main purpose in writing The Prose Edda was to provide a guide to poetic diction and allusion for future poets. He drew on and quoted older poems, both heroic and mythological, of which many survive as a group called The Poetic Edda.

  Snorri’s text describes a variety of interrelated worlds: The gods (or Æsir) live in Asgard; the giants in Jötunheim; Svartalfaheim is home to the dwarfs; Alfheim is where the “light-elves” live; and Niflheim is a dark world of primeval chaos. The world of humans is a flat disk encircled by ocean, with girdling walls erected by the gods to keep out the giants, called Mithgarthr in Old Norse, usually Anglicized as Midgard. At the center of the cosmos is the great ash-tree Yggdrasil. Its three roots extend to Asgard, to Niflheim, and to the land of the frost-giants. In the ocean around Midgard lives the dreaded Midgard Serpent, also known as Iörmungand.

  Perhaps the most striking thing about this Northern cosmology is its sense of grim threat. The dragon Nidhögg eternally gnaws the root of Yggdrasil. The squirrel Ratatosk runs up and down conveying messages of hate and defiance between Nidhögg at the bottom and an eagle at the top. The sun and moon move across the sky constantly pursued by two great wolves called Sköll and Hati: and one day it is expected that they will catch up. Gods and men are under constant threat from the monster-world, and this will end in Ragnarök, “the doom of the gods,” when gods and heroes will fight a final battle against the giants and the monsters—and it is known to all that they will lose, hoping only to lose gallantly and destructively.

  Furthermore, the universe of The Prose Edda is one of moral neutrality, or even moral indifference. Humans are on the gods’ side against the monsters, but no one can trust Odin, the All-Father, who betrays heroes on the battlefield in order to bring them to Valhalla and swell his armies. Thor, the thunder-god, and Frey, a god of fertility, may seem friendlier, but another lurking presence among the Æsir is the god Loki, who continually brings trouble.

  The other side of Norse myth, surprisingly, is its sense of (sometimes cruel) humor. Thor, with his powerful hammer, Mjöllnir, which always returns to his hand, is at once the hero and the butt of several tales. Snorri gives an extended account of the visit made by Thor and Loki to the giant Utgarda-Loki. The giant challenges Thor to an easy test of strength. He is asked to drain a drinking-horn, but fails even after three drafts; to pick a cat off the floor, but can only raise one of its paws; and to wrestle with an old woman called Elli, who forces him to one knee. Thor is humiliated, but the tests were not as they seem. The drinking horn was connected to the ocean, and Thor has just created the tides. The cat was really the Midgard Serpent, and the old woman’s name, Elli, means “Old Age,” which as the Eddic poem Hávamál says, “gives no-one mercy.”

  Snorri tells some twenty stories of this nature in The Prose Edda. The most influential of them in the modern world is the long tale of the Völsungs and the Nibelungs. The tale centers on a ring belonging to the Nibelungs, which Loki extorts from the dwarf Andvari in order to pay restitution to the giant Hreidmar (Loki having mistakenly killed and flayed Hreidmar’s son, Otr, when he was in the form of an otter). The ensuing story of the ring brings in the dragon Fafnir, the hero Sigurd, and eventually the historical kings of the Burgundians, wiped out by the Huns in the year 437. Richard Wagner famously re-created the story in his four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876, see here), and J. R. R. Tolkien attempted to re-create the lost original poetic version—on which he thought all others must have been based—in his posthumously published Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (2009).

  The fact that the legend caught the imagination of the greatest re-workers of medieval themes in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries testifies to its abiding power. Indeed, the whole mythology of The Prose Edda has since become a favorite source for authors of fantasy. Tolkien’s Middle-earth represents his highly eclectic re-imagining of Midgard, with elves, dwarves, and other creatures, but without the pagan gods. A somewhat similar, but independent work by the prominent science-fiction author Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword (1954), tells the story of a human changeling brought up by the elves and a half-troll reared by humans, both embroiled in human and also elf-troll warfare unscrupulously fomented by Odin. Northern (and other) deities are brought into the contemporary American world in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (2003) and Joanne Harris retells the tale of the ultimate tri
ckster in The Gospel of Loki (2014).

  The most popular mode of modern retelling has, however, been the comic book industry. Marvel Comics have published more than 600 issues of The Mighty Thor since 1962, in which a modern American discovers that he is an avatar of Thor, able to move between our world and the world of Asgard. In 2011 the comic book adventures of Thor and Loki were brought to the big screen by director Kenneth Branagh, and today Northern mythology, once almost forgotten, is probably better known in the Western world than many classical or Biblical myths.

  DANTE ALIGHIERI

  THE DIVINE COMEDY (c.1308–21)

  Dante’s epic poem is celebrated as one of the greatest and most influential works of medieval Europe. This spiritual journey takes us from the darkness of the Inferno to the mountain of Purgatory to Paradise, during which reason and faith bring moral and social chaos into order.

  La Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy) was written between 1308 and the poet’s death in 1321. It consists of 100 cantos, each around 140 lines, in which Dante travels successively through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Heaven (Paradiso). The whole work presents the medieval Catholic image of life after death, as codified in the generations before Dante by the great theologians Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure. Yet Dante’s (c.1265–1321) particular vision is enriched by his classical learning: His guide through Hell and most of Purgatory is the Roman poet Virgil, who had presented a “descent into Hell” in Book VI of his epic Aeneid. And throughout The Divine Comedy figures appear from the confused and bloody world of contemporary Italian politics, in which Dante was deeply and dangerously immersed.