Relief after Hardship

Western tales of the marvelous and the strange have dominated much of the narrative literatures of the premodern Muslim world. The quintessential collection, The Thousand and One Days, was first published in the early eighteenth century by French Orientalist scholar François Pétis de la Croix. Research has found that The Thousand and One Days actually had an earlier start, as it is an adapted translation of a fifteenth-century, anonymous, Ottoman Turkish collection titled Relief after Hardship, which is, in turn, the enlarged translation of an equally anonymous Persian collection of tales that likely dates back to as early as the thirteenth century.

Ulrich Marzolph now provides a detailed assessment of the Ottoman Turkish compilation and its Persian precursor. Based upon Andreas Tietze’s unpublished German translation of the Ottoman Turkish Ferec ba'd es-sidde, it traces the origins of the collection’s various tales in premodern Persian and Arabic literatures and its impact on Middle Eastern and world tradition and folklore. As the concept of "relief after hardship" has the same basic structure as the European fairy tale, Marzolph contends that the early reception of these tales from Muslim narrative tradition might well have had an inspiring impact on the nascent genre of the European fairy tale as we know it today.