Aladdin

• 1. Introduction

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  Aladdin is one of the best-known tales tied to One Thousand and One Nights, yet it was never part of the original text. The Frenchman Antoine Galland added it, based on a story he heard from a Syrian storyteller named Hanna Diyab. There is no authentic Arabic textual source for it at all. That single fact opens a thicket of questions. How did a tale with no original manuscript become one of the most retold stories on earth? Why does a story set in China read, line after line, like a Middle Eastern fable? And who was the man whose name vanished from the credits the moment the tale went to print? The answers run from a winter in Paris in 1709 to pachinko parlors in Japan.

• 2. The Orphan Tale

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  John Payne quotes passages from Galland's unpublished diary, which records a meeting on the 25th of March 1709, with Hanna Diyab, a Maronite storyteller from Aleppo. Diyab had traveled from Aleppo to Paris with the celebrated French traveler Paul Lucas. Galland's diary reports that he transcribed Aladdin for publication in the winter of 1709 to 1710.

  The tale appeared in volumes ix and x of the Nights, published in 1710, with no mention of Hanna's contribution. Known along with Ali Baba as one of the "orphan tales," Aladdin had no place in the original collection. Galden's translator role gave him sole public credit.

  Payne also recorded the discovery in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris of two Arabic manuscripts containing Aladdin. One was written by a Syrian Christian priest living in Paris, Dionysios Shawish, also called Dom Denis Chavis. The other is supposed to be a copy Mikhail Sabbagh made of a manuscript written in Baghdad in 1703.

  The Bibliotheque Nationale purchased that second manuscript at the end of the nineteenth century. As part of the first critical edition of the Nights, Iraq's Muhsin Mahdi showed that both manuscripts are "back-translations" of Galland's text into Arabic. Ruth B. Bottigheimer and Paulo Lemos Horta have argued that Hanna Diyab should be understood as the original author of some of the stories he supplied, with several, including Aladdin, partly inspired by his own life.

• 3. Lamp And Ring

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  Aladdin is an impoverished young ne'er-do-well dwelling in "one of the cities of Ancient China," in the Richard Francis Burton translation of 1885. A sorcerer from the Maghreb recruits him, posing as the brother of Aladdin's late father, Mustapha the tailor. The sorcerer's real motive is to send the boy into a booby-trapped magic cave to retrieve a wonderful oil lamp, the chirag.

  The sorcerer double-crosses Aladdin and leaves him trapped in the cave. Still wearing a magic ring the sorcerer lent him, Aladdin rubs his hands in despair and inadvertently rubs the ring. A genie appears and frees him, returning him to his mother with the lamp still in hand.

  When his mother tries to clean the lamp to sell it for supper, a second, far more powerful genie appears, bound to obey whoever holds the lamp. With its aid, Aladdin becomes rich, marries Princess Badroulbadour, the sultan's daughter, and foils her marriage to the vizier's son. The genie builds the couple a palace more magnificent than the sultan's.

  The sorcerer returns and tricks Aladdin's wife, who does not know the lamp's importance, by offering "new lamps for old." He orders the lamp's genie to carry the palace and everything in it to his home in the Maghreb. Aladdin summons the lesser genie of the ring, too weak to undo the lamp genie's magic directly but able to transport him to the Maghreb, where the princess's "woman's wiles" help him recover the lamp and slay the sorcerer. The sorcerer's more powerful, evil brother then disguises himself as a healing old woman, but the lamp's genie warns Aladdin, who slays the impostor and eventually succeeds to his father-in-law's throne.

• 4. A China That Isn't

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  The opening sentences in both the Galland and Burton versions place the story in "one of the cities of China," yet nearly everything else fits a Middle Eastern setting. The ruler is called "Sultan" rather than "Emperor." The people are Muslims, their conversation filled with Muslim platitudes, and a Jewish merchant buys Aladdin's wares. Buddhists, Daoists, and Confucians go unmentioned.

  Ethnic groups in Chinese history have long included Muslim populations, among them Uyghurs, the Hui people, and Tajiks whose origins trace to Silk Road travelers. Islamic communities have existed in the region since the Tang dynasty, which rose to power as the prophet Muhammad's career unfolded. Some have suggested the intended setting may be Turkestan, covering Central Asia and the modern Chinese autonomous region of Xinjiang.

  The Arabicized Turkic Kara-Khanid Khanate, located in this region, identified strongly with China and resembles the setting. Its rulers adopted the Arab title of Sultan, even "Sultan of the East and China," alongside Turkic titles such as Khan and Khagan, though they called their chancellors Hajib rather than Vizier.

  Speculation about a "real" Chinese setting depends on knowledge of China that a folk-tale teller might not possess. Although the story was first recorded in French, early Arabic usage of China is known to have designated, in an abstract sense, an exotic, faraway land.

• 5. Full Moon Of Full Moons

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  Badroulbadour, written also as Badr ul-Badour, means "full moon of full moons," a name that uses the full moon as a metaphor for female beauty, common in Arabic literature and across the Arabian Nights. She is the princess Aladdin marries in The Story of Aladdin; or, the Wonderful Lamp.

  Wallace Stevens mentions her in his poem "The Worms at Heaven's Gate," in his book Harmonium. She is a character in Michael O. Tunnell's children's novel Wishing Moon, portrayed as a scheming, black-hearted villainess.

  The name Badroulbadour also appears in Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, in Booth Tarkington's The Turmoil as Princess Bedrulbudour, and in Russell Hoban's Come Dance with Me. Hoban also names an Arabian princess Badoura in The Arabian Nights. Monica Baldwin, in her novel The Called and the Chosen, gives the name Badroulbadour to a Siamese cat owned by her heroine, Ursula, before Ursula became a nun. In Disney's Aladdin, the princess was renamed Jasmine and made an Arabian princess.

• 6. A Family Of Tales

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  The story of Aladdin is classified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as tale type ATU 561, named after the character. It sits beside two similar types: ATU 560, The Magic Ring, and ATU 562, The Spirit in the Blue Light. All three follow a down-on-his-luck boy or soldier who finds a magical item that grants his wishes.

  German folklorist Hans-Jorg Uther, in his 2004 revision of the international index, remarked that the similarities between the three types make them hard to differentiate. Per Stith Thompson's The Folktale, in type 561 the magical item is stolen but recovered using another magical object. A Czech scholar distinguishes the types by helpers: type 560 uses animals, a snake giving the ring and a dog and cat retrieving the stolen object, while type 561 drops the animals and type 562 inserts another person to help the hero.

  Other genie-in-a-container tales include Homer's Iliad, where the god Ares is trapped in a bronze urn and offers to grant Hermes anything if set free. The Fisherman and the Jinni belongs to the same family.

  Since its appearance in the Nights, the tale has integrated into oral tradition. Scholars Ton Deker and Theo Meder located variants across Europe and the Middle East. Kurt Ranke, in Enzyklopadie des Marchens, notes the "greatest distribution density" in Europe and the Mediterranean, with variants also collected in Turkey, Palestine, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, India among the Santal people, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The three-wishes version became popular in the West in the 20th century.

• 7. Stage, Screen, And Pachinko

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  In the United Kingdom, John O'Keefe dramatized Aladdin in 1788 for the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, and the tale has been a popular pantomime subject for over 200 years. The pantomime tradition produced Widow Twankey, the character based on Aladdin's mother, and often relocates the story to a "China" set in the East End of London rather than medieval Baghdad. Since the early 1990s, these pantomimes have leaned on the Disney animation; a 2007 to 2008 Birmingham Hippodrome production starring John Barrowman used songs from the Disney films Aladdin and Mulan.

  Adam Oehlenschlager wrote his verse drama Aladdin in 1805, and Carl Nielsen composed incidental music for it in 1918 to 1919. In 1958 a musical comedy version was written for U.S. television with a book by S. J. Perelman and music and lyrics by Cole Porter. A London stage production followed in 1959, with a 30-year-old Bob Monkhouse playing Aladdin at the Coliseum Theatre.

  The 1926 film The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the earliest surviving animated feature, blended Aladdin with the prince's story. Walt Disney Feature Animation's 1992 Aladdin renamed and combined characters, merging the Sorcerer and the vizier into Jafar and moving the setting from China to the fictional Arabian city of Agrabah. The names "Jafar" and "Abu" were borrowed from the 1940 film The Thief of Bagdad. Disney's 2019 live-action remake starred Mena Massoud, Naomi Scott, Marwan Kenzari, and Will Smith.

  Sega Sammy have released a line of Aladdin pachinko machines since 1989, selling over 570,000 of them in Japan at an average price of about 5,000 dollars. The original Green Lantern comic-book character was partly inspired by the Aladdin myth, with a lantern-shaped power source and a power ring.