Tales of The Marvellous and News of the Strange

What makes these 18 stories of fantasy and adventure – newly

translated by Malcom C Lyons, a life fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge, from “a single, ragged manuscript in a library in Istanbul” – remarkable is that they are over 1,000 years old; six of them were included in the more famous Thousand and One Nights around half a century later, but the remaining 12 are new to the Western world.

All life is here: romance and betrayal, faith and ambition, loyalty and comedy, endurance and reversals of fortune; the thrill of adventure and the shock of monsters and Fate.

We have wizards and djinn, sword-wielding statues and people transformed into animals, along with human protagonists who feel love, lust, hate, greed, envy, fear and wonder as we would.

Robert Irwin, author of the Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabian Literature and The Middle East in the Middle Ages, gives an excellent overview of their history, context and content in the detailed introduction.

The stories seem remarkably fresh, bound neither by Christian morality nor familiar folklore tropes. Their convoluted plots, stories within stories, Sinbad-like episodic adventures, and titles such as ‘The story of Six Men: the Hunchback, the One-eyed, the Blind, the Crippled, the Man whose lips had been cut off, and the Seller of glassware’ remind me of the late Steve Moore’s Tales of Telguuth.

Irwin suggest these tales should be classed as literature; they were clearly not of the genre that is told in the marketplace, but carefully crafted for the entertainment of the educated.

The collection opens a welcome window into the mediæval Arabic world, untainted by modern views.

While not explicitly fortean, the anthology is perfectly enchanting, being full of “Strange and Marvellous Things”.

Bob Rickard