When I sat down to write about Charles Perrault and Tales of Mother Goose, I had no intention of writing more about the writers who “created” fairy tales as we know them . But as I wrote about Perrault I remembered some of my favorite stories,[1] and stumbled across a new one. Suddenly a small series of blog posts presented themselves.[2]

Next up, Antoine Galland (1646-1715) : classical scholar, linguist, diplomat and the man who made Les Mille et Une Nuits (The Thousand and One Nights), better known in English as The Arabian Nights, a canonical work in Western literature.

Trained as a classical scholar, Galland worked as an interpreter for the French diplomatic mission in Constantinople, from 1670 to 1675, where he studied Turkish, modern Greek, Arabic and Persian. Back in France, he became the curator of the royal collection of coins and medals.[3] He held the chair of Arabic at the Collège Royal in Paris from 1709 until his death in 1715. Over the course of his career, he collected, transcribed, and translated many Turkish, Persian and Arabic manuscripts.

The Thousand and One Nights was a diversion for Galland. He worked on the tales after dinner as a way to unwind after a long day of serious scholarship—I picture candlelight, a glass of wine, and perhaps a large cat purring next to him on the work table.[4] (

Galland drew most of his stories from several Arabic manuscripts of collected tales. The collections were drawn from a a body of oral tradition—popular tales told by street entertainers, based on folklore that stretched from India to Egypt. Each storyteller augmented plots, embroidered descriptions, and filled the tales with literary allusions and quotations to reflect both his own taste and that of his audience. Over time, Arab literati collected the stories, much as Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm collected fairy tales from German peasants in the 19th century, and the tales in the resulting manuscripts varied according to the time and place they were heard and the taste of the man compiling the collection.

In some ways, Galland was not unlike the Arab coffeehouse storytellers who recounted—and often tailored—familiar tales to their audiences. Galland selected the stories he deemed most suitable for a European audience, and in so doing established a canon of tales for Europeans that is distinct from the original material. Aimed at a courtly rather than a scholarly audience, Galland’s translation was often deliberately inaccurate. As he wrote to Cuper, his version was not “attached precisely to the text, for that would not have given pleasure to the readers. To the extent that it was possible, I have rendered the Arabic into good French without being slavishly attached to the Arabic words.”

Galland’s Thousand and One Nights was published in France in 12 small volumes between 1704 and 1717. He deliberately targeted the audience who had enjoyed Perrault’s fanciful tales. If anything, he was even more successful. The ladies of the court were so impatient to know what happened next that Galland had to lend them manuscript versions that they passed from hand to hand until the next volume was published. That’s the kind of audience an author can only dream of.

[1] Including one outlier in the mid-nineteenth century.

[2] And happy I was to see them. I have a long list of possible posts, but none of them were calling my name.

[3] Just to make the timing clear, Galland , like Perrault, worked during the reign of Louis XIV

[4] It’s a seductive image. It’s taken me several years to break myself of the habit of going back to work after dinner. I can imagine all too well the lure of working on something that isn’t really my work. Luckily I have My Own True Love to keep me honest. (Ms. Whiskey would be all for going back to the desk.)