I’m bored so what’s 2+2

hi there!

one thousand and one nights, also called the arabian nights is a collection of middle eastern tales compiled in arabic during the islamic golden age, dated from the 8th to the 14th century. this collection was compiled of largely middle eastern and indian stories with an uncertain date and autorship whose tales such as aladdin, ali baba and sinbad the sailor -these ones were the most popular ones, the ones that have almost become part of western folklore.

as in much medieval european literature, the stories contained in this collection are set within a frame story. its scene is central asia, as known as "the islands or peninsulae of india and china", where king shahryar kills his wife after discovering her infidelities and as well as any other who betrayed him.   then, loathing all womankind, he marries and kills his new wife each day until no more candidates could have been found. his vizier had two daughters, scheherezade and dunyazad. the elder one -scheherezade- having devised a scheme to save herself and the others insisted that her father needed to give her in marriage to the king. each evening, she used to tell a story leaving it incomplete and promising to finish it the following night. the stories kept the king very interested, so eager to hear evey ending of each story, that he puts off her execution from day to day and finally he decided to give up with his plan. these stories are contained within the collection of 1001 nights, the bulk of the text is in prose, although verse is usually used for songs and riddles to express better the heightened emotion of them.

third person

explanation:

note the usage of names and pronouns, "james" & "the old man". this alone can confirm it as third person, as first person uses "i" and the like, while second person uses "you" and the like.

~

awnser:

the thousand and one nights – or, as i prefer to call them in the following forpurely practical reasons: the arabian nights – as we perceive them three hundredyears after antoine galland’s epochal french adaptation bear a distinct arabicimprint. meanwhile, the commonly accepted model for their textual historyacknowledges various stages in the conceptualization and effective formation ofboth the collection’s characteristic frame story and the embedded repertoire. thevast majority of tales in the preserved manuscripts of the nights has beenintegrated into the collection during two periods of arabic influence, the so-calledbaghdad and cairo periods (gerhardt 1963: 115–374). these “arabic” stages arepreceded by an iranian version, probably dating to pre-islamic times, which in itsturn profits from both structural devices and narrative contents originating fromindian tradition. considering the eminent position that iran and iranian culturehold in the early stages of the textual history of the arabian nights, surprisinglyfew details are known concerning the collection’s relation to and its actualposition within the iranian cultural context. in the following, i will discuss linksbetween the arabian nights and iranian culture on several levels. in surveyingthese links, i will treat five major areas: (1) the iranian prototype of the nights; (2) tales of alleged persian origin; (3) persian characters within the tales; (4)persian translations of the arabian nights; and (5) the position of the arabiannights in modern iran