Within the Arabian Nights unit there are many stories that
are actually stories within other stories originally told by a woman named Scheherazade.
Her own personal story is the first one within the unit. In her story there is
a Sultan who weds a different woman every single day then kills them off the
following morning. He does this because he once had a wife that he loved dearly
but she betrayed him. The Sultan had her executed and from that point on felt
that all women were truly evil deep down inside. In marrying so many women he
felt he could rid the world of their evil.
This is where Scheherazade came into play. Her father was the
executioner for the Sultan and he was the one in charge of bringing him a new
woman every day. She was a very intelligent woman and she pleaded with her
father to marry the Sultan for she had a plan to end the slaughter of the
innocent girls. Reluctantly her father obliged and brought her to the Sultan.
She married him then carried out her plan so that she may keep her life and he
could not marry others. Every morning she would tell the Sultan a story. Within
these stories the characters would then tell a subsequent story. This would go
on and on day in and day out.
We don’t often see a trickster as the hero or heroine of a
story but Scheherazade certainly was. We don’t learn much about her but we do
know she was able to save many people with her cleverness. The Sultan was quite
foolish and never caught on to what she was doing. Every day he simply listened
to and enjoyed her stories with the promise of it continuing the next day. She
is a pretty clever trickster, but I wonder what she would do when she ran out
of stories!
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