Andrew Lang's Arabian Nights is the selection that introduced generations of English-speaking children to Shahrazad's stories. It opens with the frame tale…
Andrew Lang's Arabian Nights is the selection that introduced generations of English-speaking children to Shahrazad's stories. It opens with the frame tale of King Shahriar and runs through the merchant and the genie, the fisherman and the jinni in the bottle, the Greek king and the physician Douban, the three calenders, the seven voyages of Sindbad, the little hunchback, Camaralzaman and Badoura, Aladdin and the wonderful lamp, the adventures of Haroun al-Raschid and the enchanted horse. Lang trimmed whatever was unsuited to young readers, so the tales move quickly from one marvel to the next.
Context and significance
Lang, the Scottish scholar and folklorist, published the book in 1898 in the same series as his coloured Fairy Books, working from Antoine Galland's French version and the English translations that followed it. Sixteen LibriVox volunteers share the reading, about ten and a half hours in all: a gentle way into the stories of Baghdad and Basra that the Arab world gave to everyone.
This is a LibriVox recording, read by volunteers and dedicated to the public domain; its audio files are kept by the Internet Archive, which plays and serves them here. Public-domain status differs from country to country, so check the law where you live before republishing it. Do you hold rights in this work? Request its removal
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