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    LIFE Aladdin
    LIFE Aladdin
    LIFE Aladdin
    Ebook124 pages59 minutes

    LIFE Aladdin

    By The Editors of LIFE

    ()

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    About this ebook

    The editors of LIFE Magazine present Aladdin.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLife
    Release dateMay 24, 2019
    ISBN9781547849031
    LIFE Aladdin

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      Book preview

      LIFE Aladdin - The Editors of LIFE

      Aladdin

      The Origins and Journey of the World’s Most Magical Tale

      A 1965 illustration from Dean’s Gold Medal Book of Fairy Tales.

      Contents

      ALADDIN AND THE GENIE participated in a parade at Florida’s Walt Disney World, 15 years after the animated movie’s 1992 premiere.

      INTRODUCTION

      A Boy and His Lamp

      The Story Behind the Story

      The World of The Arabian Nights

      Aladdin Takes Flight

      The Genie Chronicles

      GALLERY

      The Many Lives of Aladdin

      A Whole New World

      Royal Portrayal

      Introduction

      A Boy and His Lamp

      Imagine if it could all come true—all your hopes, your wants, your needs—and all with the rub of a strange old lamp. What joys might follow? What troubles? Full of such enticements, the age-old story of Aladdin lives on and on

      BY RICHARD JEROME

      MENA MASSOUD IN DISNEY’S new live-action Aladdin.

      I wish . . .

      How many times have we uttered those two words? Often we toss them off without even thinking: I wish I knew how to open this aspirin bottle; I wish it were Friday; I wish you’d stop cracking your gum, because it makes me crazy. But there are other wishes too, deeper ones, when we reach into our souls and fantasize about making our deepest desires come true—for love, wealth, peace, a Mets world championship. We’ve even endowed certain objects with supernatural munificence, wishing on stars, wells, fountains, turkey bones, and, of course, birthday candles.

      That dream of magical wish fulfillment drives one of the most beloved tales in all literature and lore: the story of Aladdin, a teenage boy from the ancient Middle East who finds an old lamp which, when rubbed, summons a genie that grants his every desire. It’s a timeless notion, and irresistible. Who hasn’t put themselves in Aladdin’s curl-toe slippers and imagined all the things they’d wish for if given the chance? Small wonder that the tale has endured for centuries, told and retold all over the world, in innumerable forms and venues—from ancient times right up to Disney’s Aladdin, a 2019 live-action remake of the studio’s animated 1992 blockbuster.

      Where did this enchanting story come from? Aladdin and the Magic (or Wonderful) Lamp is arguably the best-known entry in The Arabian Nights (or The 1,001 Nights), the fabulous collection of narratives that has dazzled and entranced listeners and readers ever since medieval times. Mostly originating from the Middle East, the Nights evokes a fantastical vision of Arabia and points beyond filled with romance, suspense, flying carpets, scimitars, mighty sultans, and dastardly sorcerers and viziers. There are plenty of those exotic elements in Aladdin—although the story was not, in fact, part of the original Arabian Nights. Rather it was a relatively late addition, and one that may be as much French as it is Arabian. That’s because the template for all versions of the Aladdin tale was a 1709 translation of The Arabian Nights by Antoine Galland, a French scholar who either heard or read it courtesy of a young Syrian traveler named Hanna Diyab. The story has been translated into countless languages since, and each edition has its own special style, character, and syntax. But broadly, the plot goes like this:

      Fifteen-year-old Aladdin is the ne’er-do-well son of a tailor named Mustapha who resides in the capital city of one of the largest and wealthiest provinces in China. (Spoiler alert: There isn’t anything remotely Chinese about it. As British scholar Robert Irwin, author of the indispensable The Arabian Nights: A Companion, says, China here just means a distant once-upon-a-time land and it is in all respects perfectly Arab and Islamic.)

      After Mustapha’s death, Aladdin gives himself completely to idleness and vagabondism. But his world changes when he meets a sorcerer from the Maghreb (North Africa) who poses as Mustapha’s brother and promises to set up his layabout nephew as a wealthy merchant. In fact, the sorcerer merely wants to trick Aladdin into retrieving an oil lamp that is stuck in a magic cave—and gives him a magic ring for the task. Aladdin finds the lamp—but gets trapped in the cave. Beside himself with despair he rubs his hands together—inadvertently rubbing the ring, from which springs a genie (or jinni in the original Arabic)—a horrid being with supernatural powers who frees Aladdin from the cave. When the youngster returns home he brings the lamp with him. Hoping to sell it to buy food, his widowed mother tries to clean the lamp, and a second genie, far more powerful and

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