Edgar Allan Poe

The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade Edgar Allan Poe

HAVING had occasion, lately, in the course of some Oriental investigations, to consult the Tellmenow Isitsöornot, a work which (like the Zohar of Simeon Jochaides) is scarcely known at all, even in Europe, and which has never been quoted, to my knowledge, by any American - if we except, perhaps, the author of the "Curiosities of American Literature;" - having had occasion, I say, to turn over some pages of the first-mentioned very remarkable work, I was not a little astonished to discover that the literary world has hitherto been strangely in error respecting the fate of the vizier's daughter, Scheherazade, as that fate is depicted in the "Arabian Nights"; and that the denouément there given, if not altogether inaccurate, as far as it goes, is at least to blame in not having gone very much farther.