You would be hard pressed to find a person living in america who hadn't heard of Disney's 1992 Aladdin. It has saturated American pop culture and is even due for a live action reboot this coming may. People will probably be beside themselves when they see what has become of their childhood memories of Aladdin's rise from street rat to future sultan. What you may not know is that Aladdin is a story first "appearing" in 1717 under the name Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp. This of course requires a little explaining.
It all starts with the French Orientalist and Archaeologist Antoine Galland. He came across a Syrian manuscript for The tale of Sinbad the Sailor, another story that reached critical acclaim. He would go on to translate and publish the whole of one thousand and one nights. He added the stories of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp and Ali Baba after receiving them from a monk from Aleppo. However the legitimacy of these stories is questioned by some scholars.
You may be asking yourself, "Max, what does this have to with Orientalism?". As much as I would to believe that Antoine Galland correctly translated every word of One Thousand and One Nights to french it simply isn't true. He romanticized the hell out of the stories, ironically by taking out the romance and poetry. This is where his and the Disney version are similar. They each removed aspects of the stories to make it appeal to the audience they were bring the stories to. Galland tailored the stories make them appeal to the masses by molding them into fairy tale like stories that were sweeping the continent. The success of his work, and most likely birthing Orientalism spread throughout Europe and in fifty years was translated into six languages. Undoubtedly Galland was a major actor in birth of Orientalism, if not the cause. Yet the all important question remains, did Galland make up Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp? I'm not sure, but Aladdin and the Wonderful lamp certainly do count as a fairy tale, certainly closer to those written by the Brothers Grimm. I highly recommend reading One thousand and One nights and enjoying the journey from one story to another story in a story that's in another story that is actually just a frame story for another story that resolves the conflict in another story.
I find it very interesting that you brought up the fact that he romanticized it. It's important to note that to appeal to a European audience he changed the story, most likely taking away the original purpose of the story. Thanks for sharing Max!
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