Reading Week 6: Persian Tales Part B

Peri on Wikimedia

This is a continuation of my Persian tales unit notes. In my last post, I mentioned that all of the stories there began with “Once upon a time there was a time when there was only God,” and end with “And now my story has come to an end, but the sparrow never got home.” I tried researching these two phrases, and had no luck with the first. The only information that I found on the ending about the sparrow was from a book of Susan Fletcher’s who claims that her mother would end her tales this way. She suggests that storytellers may simply have their own way to end their tales. For the second part of this reading unit, however, the tales did not actually begin and end in this manner.

As in Reading A, some of these tales had ambiguous morals to try and figure out while others were quite clear and more similar to Aesop’s fables. One tale that had a clear moral yet was still a little backwards, in my opinion, was Fayiz and the Peri Wife. In the story, Fayiz already had a wife and a family, but meets a beautiful Peri, a type of fairy, who he runs away with. He creates another family with her, but she warns him that if he is ever unfaithful to her that she will punish him. Fayiz ends up visiting his old family and telling his wife the secret that the second woman is a Peri, and the Peri punishes him. In my opinion, Fayiz was already an extremely unfaithful man and deserved to be punished, anyway. The moral becomes kind of muddy when considering why he was not made to answer for his initial mistake of randomly leaving his first family.

The Hemp-Smoker’s Dream was the second tale of the part B Reading. I believe that this tale was more for entertainment purposes rather than moral instruction. I wanted to mention this story because of the way that is was presented. Throughout these Persian tales, dreams play an important role. The Hemp-smoker goes to the barber’s where he dozes off and tells a whole story of how he went to claim the King’s daughter as a bride, but the reader does not know that he is dreaming until the barber makes him snap out of it at the end of the tale. At this point, the smoker realizes that he has been foolish and apologizes for the absurd story.

Unlike the last set of readings for this unit, I was disappointed with how women were presented. In the last set, it seemed as though the knowledge possessed by women played an important role, such as when the mother goat outsmarted the wolf. In this set, there were a number of sexist incidents that I would have rathered to not read in these tales. In some of the tales, women were talked about only as property that men were able to claim for marriage. Perhaps the most annoying episode of sexism to read was in the tale The Man Who Went to Wake His Luck. A foolish man happens across his brother’s Luck who gives him directions to find his own. Along the way to find his Luck, many animals and people give the man questions to ask his Luck. One of them is a King who is actually a woman who wants to know why no one listens to her. When the man finds his Luck, Luck says that no one listens to her because she is a woman.

Read these tales here: link.

LORIMER, David Lockhart Robertson, et al. Persian Tales. Written down ... in the Original KermāNī and BakhtiāRī and Translated by D.L.R. Lorimer and E.D. Lorimer. With Illustrations by Hilda Roberts. London, 1919