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Group 3: “The Story of the Fisherman and the Demon,” “The Tale of King Yunan and the Sage Duban,” “The Tale of the Husband and the Parrot,” “The Tale of the King’s Son and the She-Ghoul,” & “The Tale of the Enchanted King”

Summary: “The Story of the Fisherman and the Demon”

An old fisherman casts his net four times. He pulls up a dead donkey, a jar of mud, trash, and a brass jar with a stopper. When he pulls the stopper from the jar, a smoky demon emerges who threatens to kill the fisherman. However, the fisherman tricks the demon into returning to the jar. When the demon offers to make the fisherman rich if he releases him again, the fisherman tells him a story about a king and a sage. 

Summary: “The Tale of King Yunan and the Sage Duban” 

King Yunan, who is afflicted with leprosy, meets the sage Duban who offers to cure him by fashioning a mallet filled with medicine. When King Yunan runs, his perspiration releases the medicine. Duban’s cure works, and King Yunan rewards him with money and friendship, arousing the envy of his vizier. The vizier then cunningly turns King Yunan against Duban, as told in “The Tale of the King’s Son and the She-Ghoul.”

Summary: “The Tale of the Husband and the Parrot” 

Shahrazad then tells a tale about a jealous man with a beautiful wife. When the man travels, he leaves his parrot at home. When the man returns, the parrot describes his wife’s unfaithfulness. The wife convinces the man that the bird is a liar, so the man kills the parrot. The man later discovers that the parrot told the truth, and he regrets killing it. 

Summary: “The Tale of the King’s Son and the She-Ghoul” 

The envious vizier tells King Yunan a story about a king’s son who, while hunting with the king’s vizier, is attacked by a she-ghoul. Both men escape, but the king kills the vizier for taking the son hunting in the first place. 

King Yunan now distrusts Duban, so he orders his death. Before his beheading, Duban gives the king a book, explaining that if the king reads it, Duban’s severed head will answer any question asked. However, the book is poisoned, and when King Yunan reads from it, he dies.

The tale then returns to the fisherman and the re-released demon. The demon takes the fisherman to a lake with fish in four colors. He tells the fisherman to take four fish to the king for a reward. When the fish are cooked, a beautiful woman emerges from the palace kitchen wall and then disappears. The king travels to the lake to learn the mystery of the fish.

Summary: “The Tale of the Enchanted King”

On his way to the lake, the king meets a man whose body is black stone from the waist down. The man tells his story. 

One day, the man tried to kill his unfaithful wife and her lover, but he only injured the man. His wife put her maimed lover in a mausoleum. Then, she turned half of her husband’s body into stone and all of the city’s people into fish. Every morning, the wife lashes her husband and visits her lover. 

To help the man, the king kills the lover, tricks the wife into releasing her husband and the city, and then he kills the wife. The king returns home and marries one of the fisherman’s daughters, while the enchanted man marries the other. 

Analysis: “The Story of the Fisherman and the Demon,” “The Tale of King Yunan and the Sage Duban,” “The Tale of the Husband and the Parrot,” “The Tale of the King’s Son and the She-Ghoul,” & “The Tale of the Enchanted King”

In this section, the pattern of storytelling continues, night after night, and the tales become even more interwoven and embedded, one “inside” the previous, like Russian nesting dolls. Shahrazad begins with a tale about a fisherman and a demon, a story that soon diverges into several other sub-stories that enhance, support, and prolong the main outer tale. These sub-stories have several motifs, themes, and characters in common: regret, infidelity, sorcery, and cured afflictions. They also come full circle as the collection of tales begins with a poor fisherman and his family and ends with him, too.

On the fourteenth night, Shahrazad tells “The Tale of the Husband and the Parrot,” a story that a king tells his envious vizier to warn that one shouldn’t do what one will regret later. This lesson runs throughout these tales as characters often do something that they wish they hadn’t after the fact. For example, the jealous husband regrets killing the parrot who told him the truth, and the king who had leprosy likely regrets falling for Duban’s trick about the severed head and the book. Readers may even wonder if the unfaithful wife of the enchanted half-stone man regrets taking her lover. Many of the characters in these tales make mistakes, often deadly ones. Usually, these mistakes are motivated by greed, lust, or delusionary thinking, so the tales not only keep Shahrazad alive, but they are cautionary and instructive for listeners and readers alike.

Unfaithful spouses continue to abound in the tales, and they are consistently punished with horrible deaths. The wife of the enchanted man, for example, is not simply killed, she is sliced in half by the king’s sword. Often, crimes and punishments involve some form of sorcery and magic. The demon who emerges from the jar has been there for more than a thousand years. The colored fish mysteriously summon a beautiful woman who emerges from the kitchen walls. The enchanted man’s wife turns him into an immobile, helpless creature half made of stone. She later turns the people of the city into fish. The supernatural elements in the tales make them more entertaining, more outlandish, and more imaginative, traits that hold the attention of both the king, Shahrayar, and modern readers who enjoy these ancient tales. Among the magical feats in these stories is the curing of afflictions, another motif that repeats throughout The Arabian Nights. For example, a king is cured of his leprosy by a magic mallet that contains previously unknown medicines.

The cast of characters diversifies in these tales, which makes the stories accessible to a broader range of readers and listeners. Instead of only featuring wealthy merchants, kings, and princes, along with their servants and slaves, this group of stories begins with a poor fisherman who does not have enough food each day to feed his family.

At the end of the twenty-seventh night, Shahrazad does something unusual. She ends the night’s storytelling with a resolved story instead of a cliff-hanger ending. However, she promises Shahrayar an even more amazing and entertaining tale the next night if he will spare her life. Perhaps Shahrayar is beginning to waver in his resolve a little because he agrees based on her promise.

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