A dandan or dendan is a mythical sea creature from The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (or Arabian Nights) appearing in the tale "Abdullah the Fisherman and Abdullah the Merman", where a merman describes the dandan as the largest and fiercest fish, capable of swallowing large animals in a single gulp. The fat of the dandan, described as "fat of oxen, yellow as gold and sweet of savour," is used like an ointment to allow humans to survive underwater.
‘What is this, O my brother?’ asked the fisherman. ‘It is the liver-fat of a kind of fish called the dendan,’ answered the merman, ‘which is the biggest of all fish and the fellest of our foes. Its bulk is greater than that of any beast of the land, and were it to meet a camel or an elephant, it would swallow it at one mouthful.’ ‘O my brother,’ asked Abdallah, ‘what eateth this baleful [beast]?’ ‘It eateth of the beasts of the sea,’ replied the merman. ‘Hast thou not heard the byword, “Like the fishes of the sea: the strong eateth the weak?”’[1]
In John Payne's translation of the tale, a footnote adds a conjecture that the creature "appears to be a fabulous monster, partaking of the attributes of the shark and the cachalot or sperm-whale"[2] while Richard Burton's translation likewise describes it as "a sun-fish or some such well-fanged monster of the deep". A dandan is capable of swallowing a ship and all its crew in a single gulp[3], but despite its massive size and lethality, the dandan is highly vulnerable to humans, as consuming human flesh or hearing a human cry can cause it to die instantly.[4]
While multiple translations of the tale mention the dandan, translators like Payne and Burton couldn't find the creature in dictionaries. A footnote in Burton's version adds his "conjecture that "Dandán" in Persian means a tooth".[5]
Fable is a literary genre defined as a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized, and that illustrates or leads to a particular moral lesson, which may at the end be added explicitly as a concise maxim or saying.
One Thousand and One Nights is a collection of Middle Eastern folktales compiled in the Arabic language during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as the Arabian Nights, from the first English-language edition, which rendered the title as The Arabian Nights' Entertainment.
In folklore, a mermaid is an aquatic creature with the head and upper body of a female human and the tail of a fish. Mermaids appear in the folklore of many cultures worldwide, including Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Sinbad the Sailor is a fictional mariner and the hero of a story-cycle. He is described as hailing from Baghdad during the early Abbasid Caliphate. In the course of seven voyages throughout the seas east of Africa and south of Asia, he has fantastic adventures in magical realms, encountering monsters and witnessing supernatural phenomena.
Bahamut, or Bahamoot, according to Zakariya al-Qazwini, is a monster that lies deep below, underpinning the support structure that holds up the earth.
A merman, the male counterpart of the mythical female mermaid, is a legendary creature which is human from the waist up and fish-like from the waist down, but may assume normal human shape. Sometimes mermen are described as hideous and other times as handsome.
Wahb ibn Munabbih was a Yemenite Muslim traditionist of Dhimar in Yemen. He was a member of Banu Alahrar, a Yemeni of Persian origin.
A Bao A Qu is a legendary Malay creature described in Jorge Luis Borges's 1967 Book of Imaginary Beings. Borges claimed to have found it either in an introduction to the Arabian Nights by Richard Francis Burton, or in the book On Malay Witchcraft (1937) by C.C. Iturvuru. The Burton reference was given in the original Spanish, but it was changed to the Iturvuru reference in the English text, possibly to make it sound more exotic, or as a reference to Borges' friend C. C. Iturburu. The writer Antares conjectures that Borges's tale might be inspired by Orang Asli myth, and that "A Bao A Qu" is a slurring of abang aku meaning "my elder brother".
The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1888), subtitled A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, is the only complete English language translation of One Thousand and One Nights to date – a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age – by the British explorer and Arabist Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890). It stands as the only complete translation of the Macnaghten or Calcutta II edition of the "Arabian Nights".
Mashur Abdallah Muqbil Ahmed Al Sabri is a citizen of Yemen who was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba until April 16, 2016. Al Sabri's Guantanamo detainee ID number is 324.
"The Fisherman and the Jinni" is the second top-level story told by Sheherazade in the One Thousand and One Nights.
In Arab folklore, Nasnas is a monstrous creature. According to Edward Lane, the 19th-century translator of One Thousand and One Nights, a nasnas is "half a human being; having half a head, half a body, one arm, one leg, with which it hops with much agility".
Genies or djinns are supernatural creatures from pre-Islamic and Islamic mythology. They are associated with shapeshifting, possession and madness. In later Western popular representation, they became associated with wish-granting and often live in magic lamps or bottles. They appear in One Thousand and One Nights and its adaptations, among other stories. The wish-granting djinns from One Thousand and One Nights, however, are the divs of Persian origin, not the Arabian djinns.
Les mille et une nuits, contes arabes traduits en français, published in 12 volumes between 1704 and 1717, was the first European version of The Thousand and One Nights tales.
"The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade" is a short-story by American author Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849). It was published in the February 1845 issue of Godey's Lady's Book and was intended as a partly humorous sequel to the celebrated collection of Middle Eastern tales One Thousand and One Nights.
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