"The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade" is a short-story by American author
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (; Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is wid ...
(1809–1849). It was published in the February 1845 issue of ''
Godey's Lady's Book
''Godey's Lady's Book'', alternatively known as ''Godey's Magazine and Lady's Book'', was an American women's magazine that was published in Philadelphia from 1830 to 1878. It was the most widely circulated magazine in the period before the Civil ...
'' and was intended as a partly humorous sequel to the celebrated collection of Middle Eastern tales ''
One Thousand and One Nights''.
Plot summary
The tale depicts the eighth and final voyage of
Sinbad the Sailor
Sinbad the Sailor (; ar, سندباد البحري, Sindibādu al-Bahriyy; fa, سُنباد بحری, Sonbād-e Bahri or Sindbad) is a fictional mariner and the hero of a story-cycle of Persian origin. He is described as hailing from Baghdad ...
, along with the various mysteries Sinbad and his crew encounter; the anomalies are then described as footnotes to the story. While
the King is uncertain — except in the case of "the earth being upheld by a cow of a blue color, having horns four hundred in number" — that these mysteries are real, they are actual modern events that occurred in various places during, or before, Poe's lifetime. The story ends with the king in such disgust at the outlandish tales
Scheherazade
Scheherazade () is a major female character and the storyteller in the frame narrative of the Middle Eastern collection of tales known as the '' One Thousand and One Nights''.
Name
According to modern scholarship, the name ''Scheherazade'' de ...
has just woven, that he has her executed the next day.
Wonders and anomalies described
*
Coralite ("an island, many hundreds of miles in circumference ... built in the middle of the sea by a colony of little things like caterpillars")
*
Maelzel's Chess Player ("a man out of brass and wood, and leather ... with such ingenuity that he would have beaten at chess, all the race of mankind")
*
Antlion pits ("myriads of monstrous animals with horns resembling scythes upon their heads ... dig for themselves vast caverns in the soil, of a funnel shape")
*
Mammoth Cave
Mammoth Cave National Park is an American national park in west-central Kentucky, encompassing portions of Mammoth Cave, the longest cave system known in the world.
Since the 1972 unification of Mammoth Cave with the even-longer system under F ...
("a cave that ran to the distance of thirty or forty miles within the bowels of the earth ... far more spacious and more magnificent palaces ... there flowed immense rivers as black as ebony, and swarming with fish that had no eyes")
*
Babbage's calculating machine ("constructed ... a creature ... so great were its reasoning powers that, in a second, it performed calculations of ... the united labor of fifty thousand fleshy men for a year")
*Destructive
Wave interference
In physics, interference is a phenomenon in which two waves combine by adding their displacement together at every single point in space and time, to form a resultant wave of greater, lower, or the same amplitude. Constructive and destructive ...
("Another of these magicians ... took two loud sounds and out of them made a silence. Another constructed a deep darkness out of two brilliant lights.")
*
Hot air balloon
A hot air balloon is a lighter-than-air aircraft consisting of a bag, called an envelope, which contains heated air. Suspended beneath is a gondola or wicker basket (in some long-distance or high-altitude balloons, a capsule), which carries ...
("This terrible fowl had no head that we could perceive, but was fashioned entirely of belly, which was of a prodigious fatness and roundness, of a soft-looking substance, smooth, shining and striped with various colors. ... in the interior of which we distinctly saw human beings ... and then let fall upon our heads a heavy sack which proved to be filled with sand!'")
Publication history
The story first appeared in the February 1845 issue of ''Godey's Lady's Book''. The story was reprinted in the October 25, 1845, issue of ''The Broadway Journal'' and in 1850 in the collection ''Works''. It also appeared in the January 1855 ''Boy’s Own Magazine'' in London in a condensed version and in the May 1928 ''
Amazing Stories
''Amazing Stories'' is an American science fiction magazine launched in April 1926 by Hugo Gernsback's Experimenter Publishing. It was the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction. Science fiction stories had made regular appearances ...
'' science fiction magazine.
[Publication History. Poe Society.]
Further reading
*Atkins, Beth. "Lady Mesmer Circumnavigates the Scientific Imagination in Poe's 'The Thousand-And-Second Tale of Scheherazade'." In ''Futures of the Past: An Anthology of Science Fiction Stories from the 19th and Early 20th Centuries'', with Critical Essays, edited by Ivy Roberts. Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland and Company, 2020, p. 26.
*Pangborn, Matthew. "The Arabian Romance of America in Poe’s 'Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade'." ''Poe Studies'', vol. 43 no. 1, 2010, p. 35-57. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/508857.
*DeNuccio, Jerome D. "Fact, Fiction, Fatality: Poe's 'The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade'." ''Studies in Short Fiction''; Newberry, S.C. Vol. 27, Iss. 3, (Summer 1990): 365.
*Olney, Clarke. “Edgar Allan Poe—Science-Fiction Pioneer.” ''The Georgia Review'', vol. 12, no. 4, 1958, pp. 416–421. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41395580. Accessed 24 Dec. 2020.
*Abouddaha, Rédouane. "'The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Sheherazade' de Poe: Intertextualité, interculturalité, intersubjectivité", in ''A Myriad of Literary Impressions: l’intertextualité dans le roman anglophone contemporain, sous la direction d’Emile Walezak et Jocelyn Dupont. Perpignan'', Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 2010, pp. 171-195.
References
External links
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1845 short stories
Works based on One Thousand and One Nights
Short stories by Edgar Allan Poe
Satirical stories
Works originally published in American magazines
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