The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade

"The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade" is a short-story by American author Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849). It was published in the February 1845 issue of Godey's Lady's Book and was intended as a partly humorous sequel to the celebrated collection of Middle Eastern tales One Thousand and One Nights.[1]

"The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade"
AuthorEdgar Allan Poe
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Genre(s)Satirical short story
Published inGodey's Lady's Book
PublisherLouis A. Godey
Media typePrint (Periodical)
Publication dateFebruary 1845

Plot summary

The tale depicts the eighth and final voyage of Sinbad the Sailor, along with the various mysteries Sinbad and his crew encounter; the anomalies are then described as footnotes to the story. While the King is uncertain — except in the case of "the earth being upheld by a cow of a blue color, having horns four hundred in number" — that these mysteries are real, they are actual modern events that occurred in various places during, or before, Poe's lifetime. The story ends with the king in such disgust at the outlandish tales Scheherazade has just woven, that he has her executed the next day.

Wonders and anomalies described
  • Coralite ("an island, many hundreds of miles in circumference ... built in the middle of the sea by a colony of little things like caterpillars")
  • Maelzel's Chess Player ("a man out of brass and wood, and leather ... with such ingenuity that he would have beaten at chess, all the race of mankind")
  • Antlion pits ("myriads of monstrous animals with horns resembling scythes upon their heads ... dig for themselves vast caverns in the soil, of a funnel shape")
  • Mammoth Cave ("a cave that ran to the distance of thirty or forty miles within the bowels of the earth ... far more spacious and more magnificent palaces ... there flowed immense rivers as black as ebony, and swarming with fish that had no eyes")
  • Babbage's calculating machine ("constructed ... a creature ... so great were its reasoning powers that, in a second, it performed calculations of ... the united labor of fifty thousand fleshy men for a year")
  • Hot air balloon ("This terrible fowl had no head that we could perceive, but was fashioned entirely of belly, which was of a prodigious fatness and roundness, of a soft-looking substance, smooth, shining and striped with various colors. ... in the interior of which we distinctly saw human beings ... and then let fall upon our heads a heavy sack which proved to be filled with sand!'")

Publication history

The story first appeared in the February 1845 issue of Godey's Lady's Book.[2] The story was reprinted in the October 25, 1845, issue of The Broadway Journal and in 1850 in the collection Works.[3] It also appeared in the January 1855 Boy’s Own Magazine in London in a condensed version[4] and in the May 1928 Amazing Stories science fiction magazine.[5]

Further reading
  • Atkins, Beth. "Lady Mesmer Circumnavigates the Scientific Imagination in Poe's 'The Thousand-And-Second Tale of Scheherazade'." In Futures of the Past: An Anthology of Science Fiction Stories from the 19th and Early 20th Centuries, with Critical Essays, edited by Ivy Roberts. Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland and Company, 2020, p. 26.
  • Pangborn, Matthew. "The Arabian Romance of America in Poe’s 'Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade'." Poe Studies, vol. 43 no. 1, 2010, p. 35-57. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/508857.
  • DeNuccio, Jerome D. "Fact, Fiction, Fatality: Poe's 'The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade'." Studies in Short Fiction; Newberry, S.C. Vol. 27, Iss. 3, (Summer 1990): 365.
  • Olney, Clarke. “Edgar Allan Poe—Science-Fiction Pioneer.” The Georgia Review, vol. 12, no. 4, 1958, pp. 416–421. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41395580. Accessed 24 Dec. 2020.
  • Abouddaha, Rédouane. "'The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Sheherazade' de Poe: Intertextualité, interculturalité, intersubjectivité", in A Myriad of Literary Impressions: l’intertextualité dans le roman anglophone contemporain, sous la direction d’Emile Walezak et Jocelyn Dupont. Perpignan, Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 2010, pp. 171-195.

References
  1. Sova, Dawn B. (2001). Edgar Allan Poe A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work (Paperback ed.). New York: Checkmark Books, pg 237. ISBN 978-0-8160-4161-9.
  2. "The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade". Publication History. The Poe Society of Baltimore. Retrieved 2020-12-25.
  3. Publication History. Poe Society.
  4. Publication History. Poe Society.
  5. Publication History. Poe Society.
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