SOURCE: Molan, Peter D. “The Arabian Nights: The Oral Connection.” Edebiyat: The Journal of Middle Eastern Literatures 2, no. 1-2 (1988): 191-204.

In the following essay, Molan argues that the stories of The Arabian Nights are grounded in folk tradition and attempts to trace changes in the various manuscript adaptations and translations, concentrating especially on a number of anomalous words and phrases that appear in a European translation but are not found in early Arabic versions.

In attempting to establish an “operational definition” of folk literature,

Francis Lee Utley has noted that:

In the Middle East we have vast repositories (of tales), like the Arabian Nights and the Midrash Rabbah, which certainly have some connection with folklore, but which bear always the marks of artistic handling.¹

Utley's statement raises certain obvious questions which have not been quite precisely posed in the scholarly literature on the Arabian Nights. What is the...