The story of the enchanted king
The story of the enchanted king is a fairy tale from the Arabian Nights . It is in Claudia Otts translation as The Story of the Enchanted King (Nights 22-27), in Max Henning and in Gustav Weil as the story of the petrified prince .
content
The young king overhears two servants talking about his wife hanging around at night. He throws away the sleeping potion, follows her out of town to the garbage dumps and watches her with a leper black slave. He hits the sword on the neck and runs home unrecognized. She builds a grave dome with a stone coffin, where she feeds her now paralyzed lover every day. After three years, her husband reveals himself to be guilty in anger and wants to kill her. Then she turns his lower body to stone and punishes the defenseless with a whip every morning. The townspeople, Muslims, fire worshipers, Christians and Jews are transformed into white, red, blue and yellow fish in the lake. The sultan, to whom the petrified king tells this, kills the slave, lays himself in the coffin and, in a disguised voice, gets the woman to redeem her husband and the city before he kills her. He accepts the redeemed as a son. The fisherman, who showed the Sultan the way, and his children also come to his court.
classification
The fairy tale closes the preceding The Fisherman and the Djinni . The king's jealousy recalls the beginning of the collection, The Story of King Shahriyar and Shahrasad, the daughter of his vizier .
literature
- Claudia Ott (Ed.): A thousand and one nights. How it all started Based on the oldest Arabic manuscript in the edition by Muhsin Mahdi, first translated into German and appended by Claudia Ott. Title of the original Arabic edition: The Thousand And One Nights (Alf Layla wa-Layla). dtv, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-423-14611-1 , pp. 84-98 (first CH Beck, Munich 2006).
Individual evidence