Ep 70: Middle Eastern Tales and Their Impact on Western Oral Tradition with Ulrich Marzolph

Did you know that many of the stories we recognize as Western, likely have origins in the Middle East? In episode 70 we are joined by author and scholar Ulrich Marzolp as we explore the rich tapestry of folklore across cultures, particularly focusing on narratives originating in Persia. Ulrich shares his extensive research on how these tales, including the classics like Arabian Nights, have influenced Western oral traditions and how they act as cultural bridges. We discuss his recent book, "101 Middle Eastern Tales and Their Impact on Western Oral Tradition" which which aims to highlight the shared heritage between Eastern and Western narratives while offering insights into specific tales like "The Fox and the Fleas" and "Belling the Cat." 
Links: 

Book: https://www.amazon.com/Eastern-Western-Tradition-Fairy-Tale-Studies/dp/0814347738

Website: https://wwwuser.gwdguser.de/~umarzol/Fables.html

The Encyclopedia is in German. It is called the “Enzyklopädie des Märchens.” The formerly active website is preserved at https://adw-goe.de/enzmaer/

Notes
•Ulrich Marzolp devoted energy to Persian popular literature
•Conducted research on Middle Eastern tales and their impact on Western oral tradition
•Joined Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales team in 1986
Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales(12:15 - 21:19)
•Comprehensive handbook of historical and comparative folk narrative research
•Covers folk narratives worldwide in various languages and cultures
•15 volumes with about 3,000 different entries
•Example: Cinderella versions found globally
Middle Eastern Narratives(21:20 - 32:15)
•Ulrich's passion for Middle Eastern narrative culture
•Importance of Iran as a bridge between India and Western countries
•Persian folktales similar to Western tradition
•Published books in Persian translation, appreciated in Iran
Arabian Nights and Persian Literature(32:15 - 41:46)
•Collected Persian folktales from British scholar L.P. Elwell-Sutton
•Discussed the history and impact of Arabian Nights
•Originated from Persian tales, translated to Arabic, then to French and English
101 Middle Eastern Tales Project(41:47 - 52:58)
•Ulrich's project to summarize Middle Eastern narrative heritage
•Aimed to objectify Western perspective on Middle Eastern culture
•Explored connection between Middle Eastern and Western narratives
•Book contains 600 pages and 101 tales
The Fox and the Fleas Tale(52:58 - 01:01:45)
•Simple story of fox ridding itself of fleas using clever method
•Tale has been around for over 1000 years
•Became part of natural history and school curriculum
•Now found in various languages and cultures worldwide
Belling the Cat Tale(01:01:45 - 01:10:07)
•Originally from Persian literature, not Aesop's fables
•Traveled through Arabic literature to Western tradition
•Demonstrates how tales travel between cultures
Impact of Middle Eastern Tales(01:10:07 - 01:18:39)
•Middle Eastern tales often lack explicit morals, unlike Western fables
•Ulrich's work aims to counteract xenophobia by showing shared narrative heritage
•Importance of understanding Middle Easterners as

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Transcript

Vanessa: 0:08

Welcome, welcome to Fabric of Folklore. My name is Vanessa Y. Rogers, and you're listening to the podcast where we unravel the mysteries of folklore. I came across a funny little phrase the other day. It's donkey years, and it's a British colloquial expression meaning a very long time. It may have been chosen simply because donkeys are long lived animals. It could also be a play on words with ears being pronounced similarly to years in some British accents. My grandmother from West Texas had another similar phrase in a coon's age, and it meant something very similar, a very long time. And it got me to wondering what other funny phrases also meant to take a very long time. So I found a couple funny ones. A month of Sundays is used in the UK and the US In A Blue Moon, which is used globally since the Ark in the uk. A cat's purr. It's an older phrase from northern England and Australia, says a donkey's breakfast, which literally means a mattress of straw. But it can also mean something that's been around for ages. And this show is all about exploring folklore, which a lot of people, including myself, when I first started getting into folklore, I thought that it just meant folk tales, but really it's so much more expansive than that. So we look at not just folktales and fairy tales and mythologies, but we also look at traditions and jokes and phrases, because exploring and comparing the ins and outs of all of these elements of folklore, including the traditions, it helps us to understand and get at the heart of that human experience. So if that sounds like a podcast you want to continue to listen to, make sure you hit that subscribe button. Whether you're watching on YouTube or you're listening on your favorite podcasting platform, such as Apple or Spotify or iHeartRadio. Whatever it is that you're listening to, hit that subscribe button so you get notifications on a weekly basis when our new episodes drop. We have a fantastic show for you today, and I actually forgot to ask how you pronounce your last name. Ulrich Marzolp. How do you say your last name?

Ulrich Marzolp: 2:31

Martzolv is the German pronunciation, but you might say Marzolf. That's fair enough.

Vanessa: 2:37

Okay. Okay. And he has devoted most of his energy to exploring Persian popular literature in the 19th and 20th century, in the history of the Thousand and One Nights, and the impact of Middle Eastern narratives both in the region and internationally. He conducted a research project that resulted in the publication of his book, 101 Middle Eastern tales and Their Impact on Western oral tradition as of 2019. He is enjoying his retirement, however, so we'll really be focusing a lot on his book 101 Middle Eastern tales and their impact on oral tradition. Thanks so much for joining us, Ulrich.

Ulrich Marzolp: 3:24

Well, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Vanessa: 3:28

So can you tell us a little bit about how you started on this journey to writing this book?

Ulrich Marzolp: 3:37

Well, Vanessa, I can keep it short and just tell you how the project went on, but I think I should make it a little longer because my interest entails in particular, my interest entails from foreign countries cultures is as old as I am. I remember the days as a kid when I compiled dictionaries of languages that I did not know just by referring to the large dictionaries my parents had at home and copying strange words and strange writing systems and all that. Right the very day after my graduation ceremony. I started on my first long travel when I was 18 years old and it was a traveler seven months that took me all the way via the Middle east and India to Japan. And for a period of more or less three years after high school, I traveled all over the world. This one travel in Asia. One year I spent traveling all over Western Europe, Western and Northern Europe. And third year I did a long travel in Western Africa. And that was a great experience. It was a great experience in the time because many of the places I went to, I would not dare going today just because it's simply too dangerous. But in those days it was possible, it was safe. There were quite a number of other young people traveling the world and for me it was a great experience to take in all those inspirations from foreign cultures. So when I came back and eventually thought of, well, doing something useful, I went to university mainly to study foreign languages and foreign cultures. And this is what I've been doing since when I was at university, I started doing Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Sanskrit and Spanish all at a time. And I regret that I didn't take more.

Vanessa: 5:52

Oh my gosh.

Ulrich Marzolp: 5:56

I did my studies in Cologne. My Iranian professor insisted that I take at least the term in Iran, which was before the revolution, before 79. So I went there and stayed for half a year. In 77 when I did my PhD and was looking for a job, I was really privileged to join a team of a big folklore encyclopedia which was edited under the auspices of the Gottingen Academy of Sciences in Germany. And it's called the Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales, but it's much more. It is a concise handbook of historical and comparative folk Narrative research. And this is exactly the field that has been interesting me for such a long time. At the time, in 1986, they were actually looking for somebody with expertise in, quote unquote, Oriental languages, Middle Eastern languages and whatever, because I mean, to cut a long story short, tales, travel, and a substantial amount of tales traveled from the Middle east to the West. So in order to consider this aspect, they needed a specialist in the field. And since my languages were Arabic and Persian, I knew those cultures. I had done my fair share of Sanskrit, so I knew about India, I was familiar with China, so it was just the person to join the team. And I joined the team in 1886 and stayed with the team until the very end of the encyclopedia in 2015, which was a long time in which I learned a lot, not only well about Middle Eastern and Oriental tales, but about fork net turf research in general. Our encyclopedia was at the heart of the discipline. It was finished in 2015 in a total of 15 volumes with about 3,000 different entries. And if it was only the encyclopedia, I could talk about for at least a day and your listeners an impression how important and how impressive that is because it deals with just about everything you would want to know. You would possibly want to know about folk narratives worldwide in all kinds of languages, cultures from Africa to the Inuit or whatever. It was a great job and I learned a lot. And the job also enabled me to pursue my own passion, which is Middle Eastern narrative culture, as I call it, and not only the Middle Eastern narratives themselves, but also the connections these tales have to Western tradition.

Vanessa: 9:16

Just to go back, can you give us an example of something in the Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales that might be more expansive than people might imagine?

Ulrich Marzolp: 9:27

Well, take Cinderella, which is an international tale. Origins are not that clear, but there are Cinderella versions all over the world, whether it's China, whether it's Africa, south of the Sahara, whether it's the Americas, it's all over the place. It is spread by various means. And part of the responsibility of folk narrative research is to find out how things work, how tales spread, because they usually spread by way of specific media, say specific publications. Often they, of course, travel in the mind, in the hearts of people, across the Silk Road, across the ocean. And every tale has a very specific history. And as for the history of Middle Eastern tales, that is my field. That's my passion, I might say, because I find it so extremely interesting. Wherever you scratch the surface concerning Middle Eastern narratives, you discover something new. It's like a gold mine that's only Covered superficially. And once you know the languages and once you know where to look for, there's always something interesting to find.

Vanessa: 10:52

And so why. Why are you so passionate about Middle Eastern or Persian literature? What about it really draws you?

Ulrich Marzolp: 11:03

Well, I guess in the first place, it was coincidence, the coincidence that I traveled to Iran, the Arab world, and Western Africa, where there's lots of Muslim culture. And the second place, it was the support my professor at university gave me, an Iranian professor who encouraged me to go to Iran, to stay in Iran, to learn the language so as to be fluent not only in reading, but also in speaking and listening. And I remember very well when I did the research for my PhD dissertation, which is a typology of Persian folktales, when I will just pick random collections of folktales in Persian. And I read those folktales and I said, wow, I not only understand, but I know those tales because many of those tales are very similar to those that we know from Western tradition, from European tradition. It's. It's simply that Iran is an Indo Iranian nation. The language is very close to Western languages, and the folktales they tell there are very similar to ours. So. So this was like an eye opener for me. We said, okay, I can do that, and I can do something nobody has done before. I know that in the scholarly literature of the 1950s, colleagues in the field had been saying, okay, we need a specialist who can tell us more about Persian folktales, because Iran is the one country which is between India and the Western countries. So if tales traveled as they were supposed to travel from India, they had to cross Iran. And we need to know more about that. Here I was, I knew the language, I had an interest. So I said, okay, here I am. I'm going to do the job. And this is what I did. And, and I mean, just to mention, it's. It's been a great pleasure to do that work, not only because it was part of an enterprise that is useful for Western research and the questions they have. But many of the books I published are also published in Persian translation.

Vanessa: 13:42

Wow.

Ulrich Marzolp: 13:43

And my. My doctoral dissertation alone has gone through three different editions. Many other books I published have several editions. A fairy tale collection of Persian folktales in Persian that I published in Iran is Now in its 23rd edition, after more than 20 years, still on the market. So that is a privilege and an extremely great pleasure to know that the work I'm doing is not only in, say, the Orientalist theater in Germany, but then I'm also doing Work that is being appreciated by the people in the country.

Vanessa: 14:22

And are those books, are they particularly for scholarship or are they for popular consumption?

Ulrich Marzolp: 14:31

Well, that depends. This. This fairy tale collection I published, I should tell you a little bit more about that, is a collection that was actually amassed by the British scholar Lawrence Paul Elwood Sutton, who had been in Iran, first as an employee of the oil companies and then with the British Broadcasting Corporation during World War II. And in the 1940s, late 1940s, after the end of World War II, he was still living there. And he had an acquaintance who had a maid servant in the household of whom it was known that she was a miner. Folktales. So Elvis Sutton himself was interested to know more about that. So they met, and in the end, this old woman told him 110 folktales in Persian. Elvis Sutton was fluent in speaking and writing Persian, so he wrote those tales down. And shortly before he died, I was in contact with him or had been in contact with him for many years in the context of my. My dissertation. Shortly before he died, he actually sent me the original texts. So I edited the text in Persian. I translated the texts to German selection. But this is a book which has a tremendous appeal for the Persian audience because it is actually the one and only and the first book that is published in the Persian vernacular. Now, this might not mean so much for you as somebody living in the west, because we tend to think we speak as we write and we read as we speak. We don't. Our written language and literary. Literary language is a Polish language. And the difference between this Polish language and the vernacular is all the greater in Iran. So people write in literary language, and only when characters speak, they are allowed to speak the vernacular. But Persian Folktale book I published from the notes taken down by Elvis Sutton, the whole text, 500 pages, is in the vernacular. So that was actually quite sensational. And that's probably the reason why people love it when they read it, they hear the voice of their grandmother and even now. I just recently sent a copy of that book to an Iranian colleague, and she thanked me for bringing her back in time to the days when she was young. So that was something really. Well, a great service I could do for the Iranian community in Iran.

Vanessa: 17:38

Now, is that available to English speakers as well? Has it been translated to English as well? Or is it just.

Ulrich Marzolp: 17:45

We're working on it.

Vanessa: 17:47

Okay.

Ulrich Marzolp: 17:48

That's all I can say so far. There is a selection of the tales in German. I'm thinking of doing an English translation eventually. Yes.

Vanessa: 17:58

Okay. Yeah. Because I think that people would really like that. I find one of the things that I do on this podcast once a month is fairy tale flip with a co host. And one of the struggles that we found is that the majority of fairy tales that we have access to are all from European origin. Right. German, primarily Germany. Right. Grimm's Brothers, but also Danish. And there's just not a lot of, I guess, variety of locations that we have the access to. And so one of the things that we've talked about is trying to find fairy tales from other countries. But you know, the language barrier is definitely an issue if they haven't been.

Ulrich Marzolp: 18:49

Translated or yes, we need to do an English translation and yes, I, I, I'm thinking of that and I'll be working on that eventually.

Vanessa: 18:59

Fantastic. So the book 101 Middle Eastern Tales, what was your goal? What was your aim with that one?

Ulrich Marzolp: 19:13

Well, first of all, when I did the book, when I wanted to the book, I needed a job. My job with the encyclopedia had run out at the end of 2015 and that was definite. So I needed a job and I thought of applying to the one of the big German research foundations for a three year job until retirement, which would mean the years 1617. No, 16, 1718, yes, that's the usual span of their research projects. Now the research I had been doing until then with the encyclopedia and with my own funds was in this area of comparative folk narrative studies between the Middle east and the West. I had written, I don't know how many, 80 entries, I think for the encyclopedia. I had published essays, I had published books in the field. So I thought, okay, I'll do this, a sum of what I know and make it a big book. I applied to the research foundation, the research was granted. So I had a full three years in which I could write up everything that I had known previously and of course, lots of things that I learned new during the research. For the project, we had a perfect library in the city of Gottingen. I had access to the archives of the encyclopedia, which means an archive of, well, we usually said about 500,000 folk tale texts classified according to the tail type system, the international tail type system, so easily retrievable. In other words, I had all the material at my disposal and all I had to do is read it and write it up. The main idea behind that is of course, the feature that Westerners often tend to think of themselves as a closed unit. This has been on my mind for, well, as long as I can think, because the world is much larger than the area we live in the US where you live is a special problem. But be assured, it's similar everywhere, all over the world. And when Germans talk about folktales, they talk about Kim. When French talk about folktales, they talk about Perot. When English talk about folktales, they probably think of langs, fairy tales or whatever. So every nation, every people thinks of themselves as a closed unit. And it takes a lot of research to make them understand that particularly tales travel between the languages, between the cultures, between the nations. And that, say, Puss in Boots is not a typically German folktale because it was imported from France. And the same goes with other tales. My background with Middle Eastern languages, of course, resulted in the intention to make people understand that there is a certain percentage of Middle Eastern narrative heritage that people should know about. And Middle Eastern narrative heritage binds in with the whole complex of Middle Eastern tradition of which from which the west profited for many centuries, including philosophy, the sciences, many words in our everyday language. I mean, if you read a magazine nowadays, you wouldn't think that the word is Arabic, would you? And, and I. It's a, it's a very long story. Making people understand that we are indebted to the Middle Eastern world for many things. This is a historical perspective, but of course it also has a contemporary perspective with all the imminent problems and political problems, social problems we are having with the Middle east and Middle Easternness living in our midst. So I try to contribute by objectifying the perspective, this situation, the perception of the Middle east from the Western perspective, and tell people that there is a lot of Middle Eastern narrative, Middle Eastern heritage that we all share. It's in various areas. But since I'm a narrative scholar, I tell people how and to which extent we are indebted to a Middle Eastern narrative tradition. This is why I did this big book. A book of 600 pages and 101 tales. The book could have been twice as big, or maybe even more than that. There are hundreds and hundreds of tales that were mediated or that originated in the Middle east and that were then transported via various channels to a Western tradition. Just recently I'm having great fun. This is a little research I'm doing currently. Chaucer, of course, is a big name in English literature. And as soon as you attribute something to Chaucer, people will understand, hey, this is important. Now, in Chaucer's time, there was a proverb, drunk as a mouse, and nobody really knows what that means. The proverb lingered on until the 17th, 18th century. The Oxford English Dictionary gives you a list of occurrences. Apparently, the proverb is not current anymore, so it's obsolete. But in those days, it was there. And then, you know, this is where a folklorist's work starts. Why did Chaucer use that proverb? Now, about a century before Chaucer, we find a tale in a collection of fables compiled by a person who was British or English, but who had traveled to Spain for a number of years. This is a person by the name of Odo of Chariton, who has a book of fables. And in there's the tale of a mouse who fell into a jug of beer or wine. And Cass came and said, if I rescue you, will you come to me next time I called you? And the mouse said, of course I will. Yeah, sure. So the cat, rescued the mouse, took it out, and after a couple of days, the mouse. The. The cat called the mouse and said, will he come to me now? And the mom said, no, why should I come? And the cat says, well, you promised, and says, okay, so you should never believe the words of a drunkard, right? So this is. This is the tale behind the proverb, which was Karen in Latin, and we have French and a Spanish translation, so it was current in the vernacular to some extent as well. Chaucer could know the tale because it was current in his day. But Odo's tale also goes back. We have a Hebrew collection that has the tail, and eventually you can imagine, okay, this is where Middle Eastern folklore comes in and where we have the tail. Actually, about the year 1100 in a. In an Arabic historical source where three people are on an outing, riding along the countryside. It's the ruler and two of his favorites. And one of the favorites has fallen out of favor and tries to gain the ruler's favor again. So he tells them all kinds of fantastic things. One of them is, oh, ruler, when the day they will come that you die, you will certainly be one of the persons who go to paradise immediately. And the other courtier who is there, the current favorite, says, okay, you're so stupid. How can you know? I mean, you probably going to be dead, and you don't know what's happening after our death. And in order to ridicule his opponent further, he told exactly the same tale about the mouse who gets drunk, fallen into a jug of wine, is rescued by the mouse. The tale is a little bit different because the mouse feels so strong that the mouse calls out, where are the Cats, you know, wanting to fight the cat, then comes the cat and says, okay, here I am. And that's when the mouse says, okay, never believe the words of a junker. Right. So we not only can trace this tale over a couple of centuries, but we can also trace it from a proverb which was popular in Chaucer's England, to a couple of centuries earlier in a historically attested situation in the Arab world. This is what I find so fascinating and which sort of catches me every time I get down to such an a tale.

Vanessa: 29:43

Yeah. And so there were two particular criteria for the tales to make it into your book. What were those two criteria?

Ulrich Marzolp: 29:55

Well, it's very simple. First of all, the tales had to be. Had to have some connection to Middle Eastern literature, whether they originated from a Middle Eastern literature or whether they were transmitted by a Middle Eastern literature, which could mean that the original tale or the oldest version of tale is Indian or whatever else, and was transmitted by the Middle east to Western literatures. That's the first criterion. And the second is that I wanted the tale to be current in at least 19th or 20th century oral tradition of the Western world. The reason behind the second criterion is manifold. We have a strong impact of Middle Eastern narrative tradition in Western literature. In the Middle Ages, for instance, there are collections that were translated and adapted to the Western vernacular. But many of those tales are not current anymore. So they were current for some time, but nowadays people would not know them, would not retell them. So my idea was, if people tell tales, they are familiar with them, they know them by heart, and that means that the tale mean something to them. Most of the collections of published folktales go back to collecting activities in the 19th and 20th centuries. So by referring to those collections, I was pretty sure that the tales were actually current in our tradition. And if you have a look at the book, you might have noticed that I have even indexed all the storytellers. That was, that was extremely important to me because even scholars often only talk about oral tradition as if it was something abstract, something taken for granted. It's not. Oral tradition is always linked to a person who tells the tale. And okay, if you have 10, 20, 15 people telling the same tale, you might say, okay, this is part of a larger tradition. But Even then, all 50 versions you might have recorded will have been told by living persons. So it's these people, these persons that we owe our knowledge to, and I think they deserve to be mentioned by name.

Vanessa: 32:30

Yeah, I found that very unique when I was reading through some of the entries, I've never seen the oral storytellers be listed as the artist, but they are. They're artists and they deserve credit. So I appreciated that as well.

Ulrich Marzolp: 32:49

Yes, well, there's many different terms to denote oral tradition. Some people speak of oral literature, which is a bit misleading. One of the favorite terms for folklorists, of course, is verbal art that stresses the artistic competence of the storytellers, who are not simply reproducers of something they have heard. But most of them, if not all of them, are artists in the right. They retell. But by retelling, they also add a personal tone to the tales and they shape the tales into pieces of art.

Vanessa: 33:38

And they could. They could tell it differently to different audiences based off of the reactions of the audiences.

Ulrich Marzolp: 33:45

Yes, yes. That is also something very important. I don't know how that the situation might be in the US In Germany, we have professional storytellers who dress up and beat them. Aya costume, like the costume from the period of the Grimms. And they retell the Grimm tales word by word, thinking that this is the authentic style, that it should be done, which is very funny because the published tales or the tales published by the Grimms were never told in that wording. The wording was added by the Grimms. They edited the texts according to what they thought was proper fairy tale language. But aura performance was certainly different. And of course, as you said, a storyteller is always interaction with her or his audience. People ask questions, people make gestures, people shout in between, they laugh, they cry, they yawn, they do all kinds of things to which the storytellers usually react by, well, doing whatever they can do. They might make additional remarks. They might transgress, they might cut the story short. They have all means of elaborating their verbal art to please the audience.

Vanessa: 35:22

So how did a lot of. I know that you mentioned that a lot of these stories came in through oral transmission, but where. Where did they meet Westerners? Where, where did these stories come together so that they were able to be transmuted? What is the word I'm transmitting? Transmitted. And also, would language not be a barrier since these people would probably not be speaking necessarily the same language?

Ulrich Marzolp: 35:55

Oh, language is not a strong barrier. Language can also. Can. Can always be surpassed. Now, let's. Let's talk about the areas first. There are five, about five areas where Middle Eastern narratives were transmitted to the west. One, of course, is the crusade period, so say 11, 1200 in the middle east, in what is Palestine and from there, we actually have very beautiful examples. There's a French preacher by the name of Jacques de Vitry who says in his sermons where he quotes tales and some of them from Middle Eastern lore, that heard the tales himself, so he probably knew some Arabic. And we also know, of course, somebody like him who was an important people person. He was a bishop of Acre in Palestine. He had a household. And in the household, he definitely also had local people. So the local people had to be in conversation with. With his own people. And so they. They must have got along somehow. Language is not an important barrier. Geography is a barrier. But geography can also be surpassed by travel. And in addition to Palestine during the Crusades, we have Byzantine, the Byzantine Empire and. And Byzantium, where cultures mingled. We have Muslim Spain, which was a totally multicultural country, and the period when the Muslims ruled. We had southern Italy, particularly Sicily, where you had Arab rule for some time. One of my favorite instances is the tales that traveled by way of merchants. And there is a very funny instance, a papal secretary, a secretary of the pope in Rome by the name of Porgio Bracciolini, who wrote a book of jokes in the middle of the 15th century. And in the preface to this book, he says, okay, we secretaries, we used to hang around in the kitchen. And he actually calls the kitchen a place of lying. So they were not only hanging around in the kitchen and eating and drinking, but also telling tales. And some of them, obviously all tales. Fortunately, Pojo published his collection of jokes. And so we can read the jokes and we can identify some Arab elements in there which must have come by way of trade. People from Venice trading with the Middle east, picking up stories here and there and transporting them back to their own country. So this is the main region, Spain, Italy, Byzantium, Palestine. And of course, sometimes it's people who transmit the tales. Two people meeting. And Middle Eastern is love to tell stories, not only for entertainment, but for instruction. Each tale has a message. And so by telling tales, you can not only transmit something useful and entertaining, but some. Something instructive people can learn. So people tell tales, but often you have tales written down in literature, and some of them might be forgotten for not only years, but hundreds of years. For instance, there is a Greek joke book dating to the 5th century of the Common Era, which was only rediscovered a thousand years later. So a thousand years it had been dormant. Suddenly somebody found the manuscript and said, hey, this is interesting. I didn't know the Greek had joke books like that. They edited the book, they translated the book, they published the book, and the moment it was published, it was accessible to people in Europe. So some took the tales from that ancient Greek joke book and published it in the kind of vatimaikum books. I mean, just books travelers would take along for their own entertainment. So sometimes it can happen that tales survive in a literary source where they're written down and they only rediscovered later. Arabic literature is a strong instance in transmitting tales. Hebrew sources by Jewish authors are also very important because the Hebrew community was spread all over Europe. So if you would write a book in Hebrew in, say, Spain, people in England could read it right. There was no language barrier because they shared a common language due to the common religious background. So Hebrew and Jewish literature is also a strong medium of transmission of tales, which then from the Jewish context could go into the vernacular and different religious context as well.

Vanessa: 41:47

You talked about how in the Middle east storytelling was used a lot for instructions. I always imagine that the Middle east has a stronger storytelling heritage than do we in the West. Is that true today? Or is that a misconception, perception, or what do you. What are your thoughts on that?

Ulrich Marzolp: 42:17

Well, it is true that different cultures probably have different preferences in how they use narrative sources. I mean, Greek, ancient Greek culture developed a drama which is quite unique and which had a strong impact. The Middle east did not have anything similar. But the Middle east had, for instance, Mirrors for Princes. That's a genre called by that name, which usually implies a book of stories told to instruct the younger generation of rulers and to prepare them for the day that one day they will have to rule and they will have to make different decisions in all kinds of situations they have not yet encountered before. The most important of those, Mirrors for Princes, is a book by the name of Kalila Wadimna. In its Arabic version, it goes back to an Indian source, the Panchatantra, which is a book of five big chapters of wisdom. Pancha is five. And Kalila Wadimna is an adaptation which already has gone through a Persian state, an intermediary stage, because the book initially was translated from Sanskrit to Persian and then from Persian to Arabic. It's a extremely complicated and highly interesting story just to follow this book all over the world. It's. It's essentially a book about a ruler who is the lion and two competing jackals which are his advisors. And then there's all kinds of intrigues and all kinds of arguments the different parties use to make their point strong and to convince the other side or simply tell, okay, I'm looking at it. This Way I tell you a story to illustrate my point. And. And this book was so popular that in the Middle Ages it was translated into virtually all single vernaculars in the Western world. I think There are about 40 or more than 40 different versions in different languages, from Spanish to English to a Norse language. And wherever you have that book, just because the structure of the. The work as an instruction for the future rulers and the embedded tales were so appealing, convincing and instructing that people in all different cultures and language, reason, regions, could relate to that book. There are other books with a similar impact and many other large collections that not only transported single items of narratives to Western culture, but whole complex structures and whole collections. I mean, everybody in the west knows the Arabian Nights, that's. That's for sure. I doubt how many people know about the history of the Arabian Nights, how it was transmitted, what it actually means and all that.

Vanessa: 45:58

Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Ulrich Marzolp: 46:02

Sure, with pleasure. The. The Arabian Nights is the term we are used to nowadays, which is actually short for the early 18th century English title, the Arabian Nights Entertainments. So it was a night's apostrophe Entertainments, which is again the English version of a title that was first translated from aric to French. And the French version was still a rather faithful translation of the Arabic title, which goes by the way of the Thousand One Nights Arabic. Alf leila wa leila A Thousand Nights and One Night, or A Thousand and One Nights in French. The history of the book is very complicated, goes back at least a thousand years, if not more. The short version is that a 15th century manuscript, which was not complete, was discovered by this French Orientalist scholar by the name of Antoine Gallon at the beginning of the 18th century. So here we are at the court of Louis Catores, the Sun King. It's a splendid atmosphere. It's a courtly atmosphere. Particularly the women met in literary clubs telling each other tales. And they knew tales from Greek tradition, they knew myths and whatever, but they had an insatiable hunger for new tales. So when this scholar, Antoine Gallon translated the Thousand and One Nights with genies coming out of the bottle with, well, a flying carpet that appears quite later, but would. With all kinds of magic people had never heard of. The tales met with an incredible success and were read by just about everybody who could read them. And I mean, this. This was really a best seller at the beginning of the 18th century. That's also the reason why the book was soon translated into English and other Western languages. And that is the point where the success story of the Arabian Nights in the west starts. But it goes back a thousand years before that, when we know from sources in Arabic literature that the original version of the Thousand One Nights was Persian. Still today, the main characters in the frame story of the class have Persian names. Shahrazad, the storyteller. It's a Persian name. We know that this Persian book was translated to Arabic in an adapted version, but unfortunately the original Persian version is lost. It must have been popular at some point, but it was destroyed. It's unretrievable. It does not exist except for the frame story that is familiar and that is essentially that the storyteller aims to distract the ruler from his cruel habit of killing women after the wedding night. And in doing so, she tells him attractive tales, breaks off at a certain point. This is a technique we know today as a cliffhanger. Well, the king does not kill her, but allows her to live on until the next night so that she can continue the tale she continues to tell. She finishes the tale, she starts a new tale, she ends with a cliffhanger again. And this way she manages to survive, well, as they say, for a thousand and one nights. In the meantime, she had been pregnant and she had been giving birth to a couple of children. So in the end, the king pardons her and they live together happily ever after. But the interesting point is that the Thousand and One Nights is also a mirror for princes. It's a collection of stories that tells you essentially, if you want to survive, you need to know a story. If you don't know a story and you come into a difficult situation, your life is over. And this is the dilemma that happens in the frame tale of the Thousand One Nights. And this dilemma is also evident in the early stories of the connection where people usually have to tell tales to survive. It is lost. This technique, this technique of storytelling is lost at a certain point because we don't have a complete redaction, a complete copy of the Thousand and One Nights as they might have existed a thousand years ago. We only have this century manuscript, which is the oldest manuscript preserved. And this manuscript breaks off at a certain point and we don't know what happened after that.

Vanessa: 51:52

A cliffhanger. A built in cliffhanger.

Ulrich Marzolp: 51:55

It is, yeah. And it gives rise to a new story because Galant, who published the Knights, of course, was. Well, we can even say he was pressured by the Paris audience. We have funny stories of Paris students coming to his place at night and throwing stones against the windows and shouting Mr. Galon, we want more tales. So, I mean, he was more or less forced to continue. This is another long story. He. He met a very talented young storyteller from Aleppo in Syria who had come to Paris in the company of a friend of Gal's or a colleague of Gal's. And this storyteller told Gal more tales orally, one of them in writing. And Galand used those tales to complete his nights. Because he didn't have manuscript material, he took recourse to the notes he took from the storytelling sessions. And this is the interesting point, because the most famous stories of the nights everybody knows today, Aladdin, Alibaba, the Ebony Horse, are all related, told by this storyteller. They are not part of the ancient manuscript tradition in Arabic, but they were added at the 18th century to complete the collection.

Vanessa: 53:32

Oh, yes. You know, when I first read Aladdin, I was so surprised that it took place in China. Yes. And I did not understand. I was like, but that doesn't make sense. This is a collection of Arabic tales, and in the Disney version, it takes place in. I'm not exactly sure what nation, but, you know, an Arabic nation. And so it just did not compute in my head. So that is why Aladdin takes place in China, because it came from a different area.

Ulrich Marzolp: 54:03

Well, I guess the point is that if you tell strange stories, you should never tell them about your own culture, because if you tell them about your own culture, people could be. Feel tempted to check whether you are actually telling the truth. Right, yeah, fact check. You rather transport those tales and make that happen somewhere very far away. I mean, even the Disney version tells us it's a country far away. This town, Arkadaba, that the Disney company invented is somewhere in between, God knows where. Right, Right. So this storyteller, who told or who actually wrote down Aladdin for Galore, he made the tale happen in China. And of course, it's a Muslim atmosphere because, I mean, the storyteller had probably no idea about Chinese culture, but he was talking about, I don't know, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, somewhere in. In. In Middle Asia and in. In a. In a Chinese context. And he did his best to sort of create an atmosphere that he thought people would take as being China. The interesting point is that we have early illustrations of the tale, and one of the early English illustrators actually illustrated the tale with Chinese costumes, Chinese interiors, Chinese costumes. And even in his days, everybody thought that, okay, we have Aladdin, but it's an Arab name, so it's an Arab tale. And this illustrated Here was actually accused of a shinoiserie, so an overt. What's. What's the word liking for. For Chinese culture, which he himself sort of adapted to the tale, whereas people did not know that the tale actually had been taking in China. And all the illustrator did was to illustrate it as faithfully as he could. So there's some very funny aspects to that.

Vanessa: 56:23

Yeah, absolutely. So let's get back. I wanted to let you talk a little bit about some of the specific tales in your book, the 101 Middle Eastern Tales. The very first story is one that I had never heard of, but was very interesting in part because you mentioned how it's really been incorporated into different places in even their locality. So I think the first one was the fox and the moss. Is that what it's called?

Ulrich Marzolp: 56:59

And the fleas.

Vanessa: 57:00

The fleas. Okay. Can you tell us that story?

Ulrich Marzolp: 57:05

Well, the. The story is very simple. It's nowadays often retold as a tall tale, a hunter's tall tale. And I think in the Internet, when doing the research, I. I found a. A typical version from the Appalachian Mountains or whatever, where people actually tell it, tell the tale as having happened to them. And it goes like the. The fox is as all animals in the wild, infested by fleas. So when the fox wants to get rid of the fleas, what does he do? He takes a bit of tuft or a bit of bird's bark and he goes to the river or the lake and gets into the lake with his tail first, slowly, slowly, immersing his whole body. And the fleas, of course, don't want to drown, so they jump upwards until they reach his head, until they reach his nose, until they reach his mouth. And then they jump onto this little tuft of wall or bark or whatever he has in his mouth. He lets go and he's gotten rid of the fleas. It's. It's. It's a simple story. It's an incredible story, but it binds in with other incredible stories about the fox, who is said to have to. To be one of the cleverest animals that hunters know. Historically, the tale has been around for more than a thousand years. It's first told in an Arabic source where the author actually says, people tell this tale, which means I have not seen it, I have not read it anywhere. I don't really know whether we should trust the people, but it's part of oral tradition. They. And then the tale, over a thousand years, goes through a really miraculous journey because it soon becomes part of natural history. All the works, natural history from the late Middle ages to early modernity, cite that tale as fact. I guess nobody has seen a fox doing that. But since somebody said it and somebody before that said it, and many people before you said it must be true, right? So people cited as fact in works of natural history about the fox, it becomes part of hunter's manuals, instructing people about the wondrous behavior of the fox. Some people doubt the veracity. So at one point it also becomes part of tales of tall tale collections. In the end, the books. I mean, natural history is. Is not a scientific subject per se, but natural history is part of the school curriculum. So children in the school books are instructed with this story. And a story you hear as a child, you might later retell as a grown up to instruct your own children. Or if some strange folk narrative researcher comes to your village and says, okay, I want people who can tell me a good story. So in the end, after a thousand years of doing this large trajectory through natural history and all kinds of other scholarly books, detail again becomes part of oral tradition. I found research doing research on that tale extremely fascinating because all you have to do is sit in an armchair, take your laptop, go to the Internet and search for fox and fleas if you want. You can add water or you can add lake or whatever, but you will find hundreds of stories. Now, nowadays, it's easy to translate words into other languages. So you can not only search in English, but you can search in French and Russian and God knows what language. You will find that story in every single language around the world.

Vanessa: 1:01:31

Wow.

Ulrich Marzolp: 1:01:32

And, and people usually take it for granted that, okay, it might not have happened to you, but it certainly happened to somebody you know, somebody who knows somebody who, you know. No, it's this, this kind of. Today we would probably call it a modern legend, this kind of tales that never happened to. To you, but somebody you know. There's an interesting term for those tales. They are called. Sometimes they're called a foaf tale. A foaftail is an unusual word, foaf. It's an abbreviation of friend of a friend. You haven't, you haven't experienced. It's not somebody who you know, but somebody in, say, the third generation of storytellers, a friend of a friend. This is. That kind of tale is very appealing, very successful. And that as the fox and the fleas stayed alive for really over a millennium.

Vanessa: 1:02:35

Wow, that is crazy. Now, the second story in your collection, I had heard of, I hadn't heard of the. The fox who rid himself of fleas. But I also am not around a lot of hunters, even though I'm in Texas, but I don't know that there's a lot of fox hunting was the belling of the cat, which is one I have read to my children multiple times, and I did not realize that it was from the Middle east, so I was really intrigued to find that out. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Ulrich Marzolp: 1:03:11

Well, but first, tell me, what was the version you read to your children?

Vanessa: 1:03:15

So I read a couple of different versions. I've been trying to, you know, not only for myself, but also introduce my children to different folk tales and fables. The tale I remember was there were a bunch of mice on a farm, and a farmer decides he needs to get rid of the mice who are causing havoc, and he gets a cat. And the cat is very good at eating the mice because he can sneak up on them without making any noise. And so there is a convening of the mice, and the leader says, who has an idea about how we can survive this cat? And someone finally says, let's put a bell on the cat. And the leader says, yes, that's a good idea, but who would do that? And so basically the idea falls flat because no one wants to risk their life to belle the cat.

Ulrich Marzolp: 1:04:16

Yeah, but you don't remember who. Who told the version you read?

Vanessa: 1:04:20

No, I read it in a. In a. It was just an Aesop fable book.

Ulrich Marzolp: 1:04:27

Yes, yes. See, this is. This is the point. Why I think, in all due honesty, that my work is still important. I. I know, I know the tale is in books that label are labeled Aesop's fables, which is wrong. It's not an esopic fable. It's at best a fable in the esopic tradition. We are not quite certain about the oldest versions of the tale, where it comes from. Some scholars say that it was part of the original Persian version of the book that later became known as Kalila Wadimna. This Mir for Princess and fable collection, I think the oldest manuscripts we have are dating from about the 12th century or so. So it's not that very old because the original version of that book goes back at least to the 9th century. But we have, in medieval Arabic literature, we also have versions of the tale outside of the collection Khalila Wudimna. So we know the tale was not only told as part of the larger collection, but it was also told separately. And then comes a person I already mentioned earlier on this English preacher, Oto of Cheriton, because he was in Spain, he lived in Spain and taught at Salamanca for a couple of years. In this multicultural atmosphere of Muslim Spain, he must have heard the story there. Probably he read it in some written source. At least he is the first one to publish an adapted version in English. Well, first in Latin, of course. And he introduced the tale to Western tradition and then it was adapted and adopted by people after this order of Sheraton. But he is the one who's usually credited as the author. If you have a book of esopic fables. Okay, it's. It's a misconception, which is understandable because the fable scholars in the Western world, they had no idea about Arabic fables outside of Khalil. Khalil was known, but they had no idea about the Arabic fable in written or a tradition of the Arab world. So whenever they read a tale that would fit into the tradition they called esopic, they would simply label it as, okay, tales in the esophic tradition. This tale of Belling the Cat is for instance, included in this big and influential collection published by Ben Edwin Perry, who was one of the most influential scholars in the field. And he has this section, okay, Esopic fables in Medieval Latin Literature. But he does not question where the medieval Latin authors took the tale from. So that is where work on Middle Eastern Arabic tradition comes in, showing you that the medieval authors often took their tales from Middle Eastern tradition. Now, what I find interesting and what I had not known when I wrote the book is that nowadays Bellingcat is the name of a company.

Vanessa: 1:08:03

Oh, it always makes your research harder.

Ulrich Marzolp: 1:08:08

Well, and interesting. And interesting. I mean, over the past years we had a couple of wide reaching, whistleblowing events going on. And Belling Cat is actually a whole company devoted to whistleblowing.

Vanessa: 1:08:29

Oh, wow.

Ulrich Marzolp: 1:08:30

To connecting people, to protecting people because they might face charges and all that. And Bell and Cat is exactly the story who puts a bell to the cat, like who advertises a dangerous situation. This is essentially what it means. And I find it fascinating that this year, again, with an old age of more than a thousand years, suddenly becomes a brand name.

Vanessa: 1:09:02

Right. And I wonder how many people are aware of the origin of that story. I mean, I, I don't think I had read it. It's possible I read it as a child, but I didn't recall it until I started reading it. Aesop fables to my children. And so I'm curious how many people Connect the title of their brand to that tale?

Ulrich Marzolp: 1:09:31

Yes, I. I would not know. I guess most people simply take it as what it is. They say belly cats or what. But of course, nowadays it's fairly easy. If you are interested to get some basic information, you go to a Wikipedia entry and you have the basics of the content and the history of that tale. So it just depends whether you want to inform yourself or whether you take things at face value without questioning them.

Vanessa: 1:10:02

And now, how old is that tale and do we know where its origin is? Its specific origin?

Ulrich Marzolp: 1:10:08

Well, it's hypothetical origin or the oldest version we know should be Persian dating to the 9th century or so. The oldest extant versions are dating to the 12th century, and I think the oldest European versions date from the early 14th century.

Vanessa: 1:10:33

One thing I found interesting is, you know, at the end of each Aesop fable, there's kind of a moral of the story. And I felt like the moral of that story, you know, it changes per who's publishing the story. And I'm wondering if people read it differently through the times because, you know, we live in a time where we watch a lot of thrillers where there's always a hero who takes on the bad guy. And so you just expect them, someone to step up and try and keep everyone safe. But in the story, everyone just kind of gives up and it. And it doesn't feel like it jives with at least American culture, modern culture. What was your take on that?

Ulrich Marzolp: 1:11:27

Well, the fables from the esopic tradition usually have an introduction promisian and an epilogue or a moral epimythean. In the end, while we call it moral, the author or whoever else would tell you why they tell that tale and what you should learn from it. So they really make a strong effort to drive their message home and to make you understand the tale the way they want you to understand it. In the Middle Eastern tales, or in the Middle Eastern fable tradition in particular, we have two different strands. We have a strand of written and authored tradition where the tales are fairly similar. The fables are bound in as an argument, a narrative argument, and they are usually introduced. Okay, I will tell you a tale to illustrate my argument. And they are, and they end with a moral saying, okay, I've told you that tale, so they. That you can understand so and so. So that's actually very similar to the esopic fables. The moral in the Middle Eastern versions are, is often tainted by Islamic religion and the ethical concerns of the Muslim region, some of which are germane to humanity. But Some of which might also be special to the situation. But the interesting point is that in addition to this written fable tradition in Arabic, we have a strong tradition of tales encountered scattered all over various sources of Arabic literature. And there, the tales don't have a moral. I find that very interesting because they are simply told, and it is clear what they mean and why they are told. So you don't have to, well, with strong words, beat the moral into your readers. So to make them understand, you just tell the tale and that's it. Right. I give you an example of one of my favorite tales, which is a tale that could easily be adapted to a modern context. But I'll tell you the original version. In the original version, there's a gazelle riding a donkey, and they're just happily riding along. They meet a hyena, and the hyena says, hi, gazelle. And the gazelle says, hi, hyena. And hyena says, oh, gazelle, I see you're riding a donkey. Would you let me ride along with you? And how you. Gazelle says, okay, jump on. So here are now, gazelle and hyena riding along on the donkey. After a while, hyena says, oh, how swift your donkey is. And gazelle is very pleased about that. And still a little while later, hyena says, oh, how swift our donkey is. And at that moment, gazelle is still a little bit pleased, but also worried, and says to a. Now you get off, because else next you would say, how swift my donkey is. Right. So, I mean, does this tale meet a moral?

Vanessa: 1:15:06

Right.

Ulrich Marzolp: 1:15:07

It's so obvious that hyena, who, by the way, is the impersonation of greed in Eric fables so greedy that the next step would be to appropriate something that does not belong to him. I've told that tale through friends, also American friends, Jack and Jill riding in Jill's new car. Right. And Jack says, okay, how. How fast your. Your car goes. And then he says, how fast our car goes. And then Jill tells him to get off. Right.

Vanessa: 1:15:45

Yeah, it's.

Ulrich Marzolp: 1:15:46

It's a perfect adaptation. You don't have to think long about why this makes sense and why this tale is so strong and attractive.

Vanessa: 1:15:55

Mm. Yeah. Well, we've covered quite a bit. Is there. I know that there's a. A lot that we haven't actually touched on, but is there anything that you wanted to mention before we. We close up this lovely conversation that we've been having?

Ulrich Marzolp: 1:16:12

Well, thank you. I also enjoy very much, and as you can see, I get very passionate talking about the tales that constitute my field of research. I think it's not only an area that is fun to deal with, but it's important. And in my books I never forget about daily reality and the xenophobia that is spreading all over the world, in the United States as well as in Europe and other regions. And I find it hard to bear, I find it impossible to bear. As a folk narrative researcher. This is my small contribution to counteracting the political developments. It's probably not much, but as we know, events don't go by large steps, but they go by small steps, making people understand. And so my contribution is to make people understand that Middle Easterners are not foreigners, but siblings.

Vanessa: 1:17:32

Well, I think it's an important work and I really appreciate that you're doing it. And thank you for coming on our show and telling us all about it.

Ulrich Marzolp: 1:17:41

It's been a great pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Vanessa: 1:17:44

And thank you, folksy folks, for joining us on this journey, this deep dive into Middle Eastern tales. Were you surprised about anything in our discussion today? Were you surprised by any of the tales that we discussed that were actually of origin in the Middle East? We would love to hear from you. We're on social media, Facebook and Instagram, sometimes on Twitter and LinkedIn as well. All the links to Ulrich's website with his books we will have on the website fabricafolklore.com so we'll be adding all of his links there. So if you are interested in purchasing a copy or any of his other books, you can find the link at our website. Thanks so much for joining us. Like I said before on Fabric of Folklore, I'm Vanessa Y. Rogers and until next time, keep the folk alive.