Dale Nelson Wrote:
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> Sawfish Wrote:
>
> > ….the cycle stories are a
> > lot more like The Arabian Nights than most
> other
> > pulp fantasy writers' stories....
>
>
> I don't know The Arabian Nights well. A little
> acquaintance through children's books and odds and
> ends. The impression I have of them is that there
> is not very much mysteriousness in them, nothing
> haunting about them. There is plenty of interest
> in luxurious possessions, in outwitting or being
> outwitted, in rather extravagant magic -- that
> sort of thing, if I'm not mistaken.
I'm not widely, or deeply, read in the sense that an academic would be, so my comment is more of an enthusiastic dilettante's. I have read various version of the Nights over the years, piecemeal and incompletely. My daughter introduced me to Gilgamesh piecemeal (she wanted me to read some of her papers and I read some extended excerpts on which the papers were based), and very little else.
WRT to the comparison with The Arabian Nights it was mainly organizational and structural: the Nights and the CAS cycle stories are each in a known and uniform environment, informed by established cultural icons that are associated with each universe. E.g., nations, established societies, known and recognized deities or demigods, etc.
Each seems to use a sort of standard conventionalized magic, which is seldom the main focus of the tale, but is instead a narrative device to either advance the plot, or to provide a key mode of initial impetus to the story. To that end, magic is minimally used.
The mood of each suggest to the reader a degree of opulence (not Averoigne, though), and exoticism--in the case of the Nights, at least here in the west.
>
> More to my taste has always been Northern European
> myth, legend, and folklore, so as soon as I met
> them I took to things like "Soria Moria Castle,"
> Grettir's Saga, "Yallery Brown," The Princess and
> the Goblin and Lilith, The Water of the Wondrous
> Isles, etc.
To the degree that they are folk tales I enjoy them, but have never done well with pantheons, and stories directly concerned with the actions or motives of gods within the pantheons. I often get confused by the characters, like in a Russian novel, and when my daughter introduced just a little of the Hindu pantheon, I ran screaming from the room...
>
> The Oriental element is pronounced in Lord
> Dunsany's dream-worlds stories... and these I have
> found long since no longer appeal to me. I wonder
> if I would stick with The Shaving of Shagpat if I
> tried to give it a rereading. I've had Vathek for
> years and never felt inclined to read it! I'm
> more interested in Walter de la Mare than in
> Borges (who seems to have some taste for the
> North, though; but it's much more a leaning to the
> East I see in his fantastic stories ).
>
> This East-North contrast might be worth a thread
> of its own if the distinction makes sense to folks
> here. Of course the East is more than the Arabian
> Nights. What things that you have read fall more
> into the one category or the other? Of your
> favorite authors or stories, do you see more of
> one or the other of these.
> (By Near East, I am thinking of the region
> characterized in the Wikipedia entry below,
> including the Arabian peninsula.)
>
> [
en.wikipedia.org])
I'm not read much in any of these areas, Dale, but one outstanding exception was that I somehow was introduced to the existence of the Icelandic sagas, which are folk history, of course, and the few I read onlne were very, very powerful accounts. Jealousy, envy, revenge, etc. Something ike the Illiad, but small scale.
--Sawfish
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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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