Lovecraft was a big fan of the The Arabian Nights in his youth, and he’d no doubt be pleased to hear the the foremost British writer on myth and fairytale has written a 500-page book about it. Independent scholar Marina Warner‘s Stranger Magic: Charmed States in the Wake of the Arabian Nights is due to be published by Chatto & Windus in the UK, and Random House in the USA. Seems they’re going to try and get it out for the New Year book token market.
“A dazzling history of magical thinking, exploring the power of The Arabian Nights and its impact in the West, and retelling some of its wondrous tales. […] Translated into French and English in the early days of the Enlightenment, this became a best-seller among intellectuals, when it was still thought of in the Arab world as a mere collection of folk tales. For thinkers of the West the book’s strangeness opened visions of transformation: dreams of flight, speaking objects, virtual money, and the power of the word to bring about change. Its tales create a poetic image of the impossible, a parable of secret knowledge and power. Above all they have the fascination of the strange — the belief that true knowledge lies elsewhere, in a mysterious realm of wonder. […] With startling originality and impeccable research, this ground-breaking book shows how magic, in the deepest sense, helped to create the modern world, and how profoundly it is still inscribed in the way we think today.”
Marina Warner can be heard discussing The Arabian Nights on BBC Radio 4’s highly recommended In Our Time programme (UK access only, those outside the UK try here).
Do you know of any essays on Arabian Nights influences on Lovecraft? I’ve been looking at this recently and I would have thought that someone must have done it before but cant find references. Can you help?
(I’ve written a novella exploring this idea called The Elder Ice)
“Some Ancestors of Vathek” springs to mind: http://crypt-of-cthulhu.com/someancestors.htm “Sufi Motifs in the Stories of H. P. Lovecraft” may also interest, as may any essays on Irem and the story “The Nameless City”. But a quick look at Joshi’s monumental Lovecraft bibliography, specifically the references for “The Nameless City” (which one might expect to be referenced in an essay on The Arabian Nights), brings up almost nothing. There may be more, but the problem with much older Lovecraft scholarship is that it’s locked away in rare or expensive volumes and journals, which are not available online.
Thanks! That’s really helpful.
I read Robert Irwin’s rather brilliant “The Arabian Nights: A Companion” and a lot of things leapt out at me (for example reading the whole of the Nights was supposed to be fatal…). And Azathoth is repeatedly called ‘daemon sultan’ …I will see what I can find on The Nameless City, but I suspect there’s nothing scholarly out there yet.