Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

I’m really not sure how Aladdin got to be a hero. I’m not talking about the monkey-owning, Jasmine loving guy of Disney fame, but the original Aladdin. Like a lot of fairy tales the story has changed quite a bit from the original source, but here, we’re not even sure we have the original source. I first encountered Aladdin in the same place most people my age did, in the classic Arabian Nights collection of stories. I have to admit it was one of my favorites, despite the fact that the main character wasn’t a very likeable guy, simply because the illustrations were incredibly beautiful.

In that version, Aladdin isn’t a street orphan at all, he’s just too lazy to ply the trade he’s been taught, leaving his mother to try to earn a living for them both by spinning thread. Instead of working, he’s off in the streets playing ball, or possibly gambling, all day long. He’s described as handsome, but that isn’t enough to redeem him in my book.

Besides being lazy, the boy is an idiot. He goes to work for a sorcerer on the promise of easy money, to enter a cave full of treasure and retrieve an old lamp. Why it does not occur to Aladdin that this was a setup, I don’t know. Of course it is, and the sorcerer double crosses him in a seriously predictable way. Our questionable hero is trapped alone in a dark cave, and at least in the version of the story that I first read, he tackles this problem by sitting down to have a good cry. No, really.

Of course, the ring he’d gotten from the sorcerer gets rubbed during his tear-fest, releasing a genie, that carries him and the lamp home. In the original story, there are no limits to the number of wishes the guy can get, just to the powers of the genie itself, and the genie of the ring is only a minor guy. Still, he’s pretty darn powerful for a poor kid to own, even before his mother cleans the lamp and they find they have two genies.Aladdin spends the next several days righting the wrongs in his community and pampering his diligent mother. Unfortunately, not so much. It’s ordering delicacies of food and luxurious clothes that take up his time, before the princess decides to come visit the town.

In the Disney version, she escapes the palace and goes to see what normal life is like. In the original, she wants to go to the baths in town, so everyone is ordered to stay in their homes with the windows shut so no one can even glimpse her beauty, doing so is punishable by death. So our fine, upstanding, young hero sneaks into the baths to see her. Since even princesses bathe in the nude, he certainly does get to see her, and decides he is in love. Probably lust, since they’ve never even exchanged a word or a glance and he’s a creepy stalker, but I guess this was deemed romantic by someone.

Unfortunately before he could woo her, she was married to the grand vizier’s son. Logical and loving man that he was, though she didn’t know him from Adam, he had the genie kidnap her and her brand new spouse on their wedding night, and every night thereafter. Each night he’d have a genie lock the boy up in the tiny outhouse, while he would lie on the bed with the princess, with a sword between them, but never say a word. Eventually they could take it no longer and asked to have the marriage anulled.

There are a lot more adventures and misadventures, but in not one of them does Aladdin prove to be anything more than a self-centered twit. Weirdly, he might have been a fraud all along, as his story got added to the Arabian nights in the 1800’s by a Frenchman that claimed to have heard it in his travels. No evidence of the story prior to that point has been found.

I guess that’s one way to get published.

Cheers,

Michelle