RIDDLES, POETRY, AND TALES; REVIEW

Week 15: Tuesday

Videos:

The Hobbit: Riddles in the Dark (3:00 min.):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5rhgSylpH8

“The Thief of Baghdad” (silent film, 1924, starring Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.):

Trailer (2:27 min.):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoShIORLbuU
Mortimer Wilson, original score (21:08 min.):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlWfv3GW4oE

Readings:

Alcuin of York, “The Debate Between Pippin and Alcuin”
http://www.gillianspraggs.com/translations/alcuin.html

Very revealing about scientific knowledge and understanding in the Carolingian world, and the fondness for riddles and word-games

Anglo-Saxon poetry and riddles from the Exeter Book: Excerpts from The Ruin and The Wanderer, and three riddles
https://sites.uwm.edu/carlin/exeter-book-excerpts/

Provide glimpses of the physical and psychological landscape of the Anglo-Saxons:

who viewed ruined Roman cities with awe
for whom to be a kinless wanderer was to be a lonely and vulnerable outcast
and for whom riddles and word-games were a favorite form of entertainment (at least for the literate)

Two tales from The 1001 Nights (translated by Sir Richard Burton):

“The Ruined Man Who Became Rich Again Through a Dream”
https://web.archive.org/web/20160910123737/http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/burt1k1/tale14.htm

“The Sweep and the Noble Lady”
https://web.archive.org/web/20160910123737/http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/burt1k1/tale12.htm

The “Thousand and One Nights” (often known in English as the Arabian Nights) is a collection of  Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic beginning in the 9th century.  (The earliest manuscript in Arabic dates from the fourteenth century.)  The collection survives in various versions, but all employ the initial frame story of the Persian king Shahryar and his wife Scheherazade.

Note the features of life in Baghdad, Cairo, and Mecca that appear in these two tales.

How would you compare the Muslim world with that of Western Europe, as seen in these primary sources?