The Versailles Version

This "French Fun" is based on Sir Richard Burton's version of Arabian Nights Entertainment, a sixteen-volumed set from the late 1880s. Arabian Nights is also called One Thousand and One Nights. It is a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales that were compiled in Arabic. The tales vary widely, and include comedies, animal fables, poems, burlesques and much else. In many stories there are magicians and killings.

The work as we have it today was collected over many centuries by various authors across the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa. The tales themselves trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Indian, Turkish, Egyptian and Mesopotamian folklore and literature.

The established composition of the Arabian Nights consists of tales within tales within tales in a certain order - and all are contained inside the first tale. Those who have studied such ways of composing fairy tale collections, say it is typically Indian - it a was very popular way of composing fairy tale collections in ancient India. Granted that, the earliest tales are from India and Persia, and some scholars have seen an ultimate Indian origin for the works. Indian folklore is clearly represented by animal stories made like those in ancient Sanskrit fables. The influence of such as the Panchatantra is particularly notable. And old Buddhist tales, Jataka Tales are more or less copied in the Arabian Nights too.

Somewhere in the 900s CE, the brilliant Abu Abd-Allah Muhammed el-Gahsjgari formed the Arabian Nights. Since then the work has been vastly popular, first in the Orient, and since the beginning of the 1600s in France, Europe, and America. There have been changes and additions to it. The most important one was done by the French orientalist Galland who inserted ten new stories. Among them were "Aladdin and the lamp" and "Ali Baba and the Forty Robbers": tales from the Middle East, but not of the Nights.

The famous frame story of Sjeherasad and her murderous husband existed in a Persian book already about AD 750. There is little doubt that Arabs had translated that book already in the 800s, says Waldemar Brøgger in the first volume of his translation [1.19].

The Versailles Version

In the Versailles Version - this one - I present stories one by one and without intertwining them, much as the Norwegian translator and publisher Waldemar Brøgger (1911-91) did it in a readable, almost complete translation that was released in six volumes in 1950.

The way of presenting tales one by one instead of intertwined is good for those who would like to read one story and know the end of it without having to leaf through many other stories to find that ending.

Much of the action in the Versailles Version is placed in Europe and quite often centred on France in the 15-1600s: more specifically on the court of king Louis XI at Versailles.

To name some other changes: what are Swiss in the Versailles Version, are Persians in the Arabian Nights; Cairo has become Florence; and the Infidels are the English. You may wonder why.

As I see it, if today's and tomorrow's children and youngsters are to benefit from fairy tales, they need to know about where the main action is, and the animals need to be quite easily recognisable too.

• The names of people might be changed and even stylized.
• Where the action first took place, mattered litte: it all took place "long ago";
• Names of people is often missing;
• The places don't get much specified, as a general rule.

In addition to those standards: Fairy tales today need to combat alienation and benefit little ones in urban settings. It calls for crossings and simplifications. I may leave that to others for the time being.

To me, the French Fun stories are mainly experimental, and formed in accord with many of the traditional ways of forming tales in the first place. And the result of the changes made? Agreeing that the tales are for fun and entertainment in the first place and throughout, judge for yourself.