In the Great Khan’s Tent

Welcome to a new special series In The Great Khan’s Tent! In The Great Khan’s Tent Presents: Tales for the Far East focuses on the tales from the Far East, also known as the Russian Colonized Far East, from the region of Siberia all the way east to the Pacific Ocean.

In this episode we focus on the tales from the Yakut ethnic group with three stories, “The Fern Girl”, “How the Birds Flew North”, and “The Obedient Daughter in Law”.

The first story “The Fern Girl” is in a similar vein to those that we encountered in the Tales from Central Asia series. Our hero, Kharzhit Bergen meets and falls in love with a girl who has magically appeared in the pasture of an old woman, first as a horsetail fern, and then when taken home turns to a beautiful girl whom she adopts as a daughter.

In the second story “How the Birds Flew North” is a story in a similar vein to traditional tales which feature animals as main characters which tend to explain how they do the things that they do. In this case the question is how the birds migrated northward. Though to be honest I have never seen a Crane carry a Duck before.

The last story “The Obedient Daughter in Law” is a short story which focuses on why it is important to think for oneself even when obeying commands.

In the next episode, we will continue our exploration of the One Thousand and One Nights.

On a side note, I would like to formally apologize to when these episodes are being released. Our release day is usually on Thursday every two weeks but the month of July has tested our technological limitations and I aim to improve the flow process to get episodes out sooner! Thank you with your patience as we sort this out!

In this series of In the Great Khan’s Tent I will be reading “The Thousand and One Nights” or commonly referred to as the “Arabian Nights”. Two translations will be used as the basis of this podcast, the four volume “The Thousand on One Nights: The Arabian Nights Entertainment” translated by Edward William Lane and Stanley Lane-Poole and the 3 volume “Tales from the Arabic of the Breslau and Calcutta Editions of the Book” by John Payne.

In this series of special episodes, I hope to highlight the historical background for the One Thousand and One Nights, by examining the history of the work, where the text drew its inspiration from, the original manuscripts, translators and translations, and how it found a new iteration in Children's Literature. In this Second special episode, I look into the brief history of oral literature, providing example from Gilgamesh and the Great Flood story, go into a surface level discussion about why my scholarly opinion disregards the monocausal hypothesis, and look into the first two inspirations from the subcontinent, the Jataka and the Panchatantra.

In this episode, we finally reach the end of the story of the Fisherman and the Jinn with Night VIII and Night IX. Within Night IX, we also begin one of the popular stories in the Arabian Nights, that of “The Porter, The Three Ladies of Baghdad, and The Three Dervishes”. Here we also encounter the first scientific wording which refers to bodily anatomy. We also begin to see more references to the Abbasid Caliphate, which will continue within this story as we go along.

In this episode, we begin the story of “The Third Royal Dervish” with Night XV and Night XVI. Note that the Third Royal Dervish is the first instance we encounter of a hero who enjoys sailing, owns ships, and is subsequently shipwrecked. This clearly shows that the fundamental ideas that were to be found in orphan stories like Sindbad do have some basis in the One Thousand and One Nights. We also encounter, for the first time, the mythological bird called Rukh or Roc, again a staple in the Sindbad and other stories as well. Keep in mind here, what the Third Royal Dervish is attempting to convey and how it differs from the First and Second Royal Dervishes stories.