The ancients, the Greeks and Romans, perceived the world of their day as one with the Mediterranean at its centre, surrounded by the conjoined land masses of Europe, Africa and Asia, comprising what the Greeks called oikouménē, the known, inhabited or inhabitable parts of the worldⓐ. This envisaged world was “a curious place where legends and reality could co-exist” [Vedran Bileta, “3 Legendary Ancient Lands: Atlantis, Thule, and the Isles of the Blessed”, The Collector, 03-Nov-2022, www.thecollector.com]. The Greeks believed that at the northernmost extremity of the existing world lay a fabled island called Thuleⓑ. The originator of this belief was 4th century BC Greek explorer Pytheas of Massalia (now Marseille, Fr.) who claimed to have visited and discovered Thule on a voyage beyond Britain to the northern sea and the Arctic. Pytheas introduced the idea of Thule—far distant and encompassed by drift-ice and possessed of a magical midnight sun—to the geographic imagination. Other ancient writers enthusiastically took up Pytheas’ fantastical notion, notwithstanding that the account of his journey (On the Ocean) had been lost to posterity…Pliny the Elder (1st century AD) described Thule as “the most remote of all those lands recorded”; Virgil (1st century BC) called the island Ultima Thule, (“farthermost Thule”, ie, “the end of the world”).
Thule, as Tile (1539 map) shown (with surrounding sea-monsters) as located northwest of the Orkney islands
Seeking Thule: The loss of Pytheas’ primary source text, the description of his voyage, led countless generations that followed him to speculate as to where the exact location of Thule might be. Many diverse places have been misidentified as Thule…the Romans thought it was at the very top of Scotland, in the Orkneys; Procopius (6th century AD Byzantine historian), Scandinavia; early medieval clerics located it in Ireland while both the Venerable Bede and Saxon king Alfred the Great asserted that Iceland was really Pytheas’s Thule, as did the famous 16th century cartographer Mercator. Other candidates advanced over the millennias include Greenland, Norway, the Faroe Islands, Shetland, “north of Scythia”, Smøla (Norway) and Saaremaa, an Estonian island.
Smøla island (Norway)
Other conjectures on Thule’s whereabouts have been meaninglessly vague, eg, Petrarch (14th century Italian humanist scholar): Thule lay in “the unknown regions of the far north-west”, supposedly inhabited by blue-painted residents (Roman poets Silius Italicus and Claudian), a probable conflation with the Picts of northern Britain. Thule, from as early as the 1st century AD on, “became more of an idea than an actual place, an abstract concept decoupled from the terrestrial map, simultaneously of the world and otherworldly”…an emblem of mystical isolation, liminal remoteness, a real discovered place and yet unknown” (F. Salazar, “Claiming Ultima Thule”, Hakai Magazine, 08-Sep-2020, www.hakaimagazine.com).
The Thule neighbourhood? (image: worldatlas.com)
Thule has continued to attract the interest of explorers right up to modern times. Continent-hopping scholar-explorer Sir Richard Burton visited Iceland, writing it up as the real “Thule”. Famed Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen having explored the Arctic region, produced an account of Pytheas’s ancient Arctic expedition, hypothesising that Thule was in fact a Norwegian off-shore island that the Greek voyager had identified [Nansen F., In Northern Mists, Vols I & II, (1969)]. Greenlandic-Danish explorer and Eskimologist Knud Rasmussen underlined the case for Greenland as the location by naming the trading post he founded in NW Greenland “Thule” or “New Thule” (later renamed in the Inuit language, “Qaanaaq”)ⓒ.
Thule Society, emblem
Thule Society: In the aftermath of World War 1 Thule provided stimulus of a very different kind for extreme-right racist nationalists in Germany. An emerging Munich-based secret occultist and Völkisch group named itself after Pythea’s mythical northern island. The Thule Society (Thule-Gesellschaft) propagated a form of virulent anti-Semitism which fed early Nazism in Bavaria, it also preached Ariosophy (an outgrowth of Theosophy), a bogus ideology preoccupied with visions of Aryan racial superiority, a key component of the later Nazis’ ideological frameworkⓓ. Out of the Thule Society came the ultranationalist Germany Workers’ Party (DAB)which in a short time transformed into the National Socialist Workers Party (Nazi Party). A number of Thulists (eg, Hess, Frank, Rosenberg) became prominent in the Nazi leadership during the Third Reich [David Luhrssen, Hammer of the Gods: The Thule Society and the Birth of Nazism (2012)].
Endnote: Hyperborea’s remote utopia Greek mythology throws up a parallel legend to that of Thule in the Hyperboreans. These were mythical eponymous people living in Hyperborea (hyper = “beyond”, boreas = “north wind”ⓔ). Their homeland was perpetually sunny and temperate (despite lying within a cold, frigid region), and Hyperboreans were divinely blessed with great longevity, the absense of war and good health…in other words, a utopian society [‘Hyperborea’, Theoi Project – Greek Mythology, www.theoi.com]. As with Thule, locating this paradisiacal northern land has proved elusive to pinpoint with the ancient scribes and geographers agreeing only that it lies somewhere on the other side of the Riphean Mountains (which themselves have been variously located). Homer described Hyperborea as being north of Thrace, some other classical geographers had it beyond the Black Sea, vaguely somewhere in Eurasia, perhaps in the Kazakh Steppes. Herodotus (5th century BC) had it in the vicinity of Siberia, while for Pindar (fl. 5th century BC) it was near the Danube. Apollonius of Rhodes (3rd century BC) identified the Hyperboreans with the Celts and Britain, Plutarch (fl. 1st century AD) , with Gaul.
Hyperborea, imagined (image: greek-mythology.org)
ⓐ which, they believed, itself was surrounded by an unbroken chain or body of water
ⓑ a belief shared by the Romans who saw Thule as the extreme edge of orbis terrarum
ⓒ from 1953 to 2023 the northernmost US Air Force base (NW Greenland) was called the Thule Air Base
ⓓ Thule was symbolically important to the right wing nationalists, a pseudo-spiritual home of Aryanism, further “proof” of the mythic origins of the “Germanic race”
The earliest tales of traditional Middle Eastern folk tales, commonly subsumed under the umbrella title of One Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights are thought to have have come from the Indian Sub-continent and Persia. The collection was built upon in piecemeal fashion in other Islamic lands throughout the Ottoman Empire, then at some point the compiled stories were translated into Arabic under the title Alf Layla wa-layla (or The Thousand Nights) [‘One Thousand and One Nights’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
The Arabian tales reached Western audiences in book form and ultimately the (English language) cinema courtesy of the work of many western scholars over many years – of which British explorer and orientalist Sir Richard Burton was but one important contributor, not to overlook the work of Henry Torrens the first translator of the 1001 Nights from Arabic to English⊙.
Hollywood first visited the “Arabian Nights” world for subject matter early on during the silent era…including the related fascination with Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheik character, but it wasn’t until the 1940s that it became a regular feature of Hollywood cinema✳. By the early 1950s the popularity of the sub-genre had passed its high-water mark and pretty much tapered off after that point. Subsequently Hollywood has shown only sporadic interest in the sub-genre.
‘Sword of Ali Baba’ (1965): Robin Hoodesque Ali
Cinema’s (especially Hollywood’s) harvesting of the “1001 Nights” for script material has been restricted to a handful of the better known stories, predominantly Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, Aladdin’s Magic Lamp and the frame narrative of the storyteller Shahryar and Scheherazade. In typical eclectic Hollywood style, filmmakers have “cherry-picked”, incorporating several of the Arabian Nights story narratives into the same film…with the character of Ali Baba generally given the predictable “Robin Hood” treatment, depicted as a liberator redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor!
1940 British production values
1940, The Thief of Bagdad: The spark for a steady stream of American “Arabian Nights” films♤
The 1940 version of The Thief of Bagdad (made in the UK but distributed internationally by American company United Artists) seemed to be a catalyst for the “Arabian Sands of the Desert” film. Itself a remake the 1924 silent flick with the same title starring Douglas Fairbanks Snr, the 1940 Thief of Bagdad was British made but completed in California because of the disruption of Hitler’s War in Europe. The British Thief of Bagdad had high production values, a big budget and technical innovations…Technicolour and the first significant use of bluescreening in films; elaborate sets and costumes; high calibre acting and top-notch British filmmakers Alexander Korda and Michael Powell.
Low-budget Arabian adventure flicks with a cast of exotics
The box-office and critical success of The Thief of Bagdad provided an impetus to Hollywood studios to try to cash in on its success. Columbia eventually responded with its own Arabian A-picture 1001 Nights (1945) [‘A Thousand and One Nights/1001 Nights’ (1945), www.1000misspenthours.com], but the Forties through to the early Fifties saw a spate of mainly B-flicks on the Arabian Nights theme. In essence these were blatantly escapist romantic/adventures which rehashed Arabian stereotypes through mainstream American eyes (see PostScript). These Middle Eastern adventures provided a new (exotic) setting and new material for studios to feed a public perhaps feeling a bit jaded from a surfeit of Westerns (“cowboys and indians” films). They were also a fresh alternative to the string of World War 2 pictures and historical costume dramas being churned out of Hollywood.
‘Arabian Nights’ (1942)
Universal Pictures in particular took to the sub-genre with gusto, casting exotic types of players to headline these movies, eg, using and re-using the likes of Dominican Republic born Maria Montez, Mysore born Sabu and Vienna born (of Turkish and Czech Jewish origins) Turhen Bey in US Arabian B-pics, starting with Arabian Nights (1942). This three-piece ensemble was always accompanied by the distinctly un-exotic, “All-American hero” Jon Hall! Universal’s approach was usually to alternate their adventure locales – a standard Arabian Nights pic would typically be followed by a “South Seas island adventure” (almost invariably with the same “front four” and with titles such as White Savage and Cobra Woman) – just in case the punters were getting tired of the studio’s fixation on all those dudes in flowing robes and endless sand hills!
‘Sinbad the Sailor’ (1947): D Fairbanks Jnr doing his best “Errol Flynn impersonation” – Sinbad as romantic swashbuckler!
Many of the top male stars in Hollywood had a stab at playing the swarthy Arabian hero role during the sub-genre’s heyday…Ronald Colman in Kismet (1944); Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, following in his illustrious father’s swashbuckling footsteps in RKO’s Sinbad the Sailor (1947); Rock Hudson in The Golden Blade (1953); Jeff Chandler in Flame of Araby (1951); Tony Curtis (teaming up with Piper Laurie always outfitted as a harem girl) in The Prince who was a Thief (1951) and The Son of Ali Baba (1952). On the female lead side, Universal and United Artists gradually moved from using Dominican Montez to Canadian brunette Yvonne De Carlo as its main Arabian princess/heroine in films like The Desert Hawk (1950) and Fort Algiers (1953)◈.
Columbia’s foray into the “Arabian Adventureland” Columbia Pictures maintained a sporadic interest in the sub-genre. It made three adventure features over a 19 year span around the heroic character of Sinbad, each heavily imbued with fantasy elements. In this series comprising The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger(1977), Sinbad, played by three different actors, all have to confront and triumph over all manner of malevolent mythical creatures (dragons, gigantic birds, supernatural monsters, etc) with the odd, nefarious wizard or grand vizier thrown in along the hero’s journey.
“Arabian Nights” meets “Sword-and-Sandals”
By around 1960 sword-and-sandal epic films (sometimes called Peplum) films were in vogue especially in Europe (see article ‘Review of The Epic Film’, March 2015 blog). At the centre of the “Sword-and-Sandal” flick was the invincible strongman-hero who would typically flex his massive muscles and battle Greek, Persian, Egyptian, Assyrian or some other despot from a mythical land. In a merging of Classical and Arabian adventure motifs, studios would occasionally reassign their contracted stars of “Peplums” to “1001 Nights” pics…so in the 1961 Italian made Il Ladro Di Bagdad) bodybuilder Steve Reeves trades his Classical Greek white tunic for some robes, a turban and a scimitar!
X-rated ‘Arabian Nights’, the Pasolini Arabesque
Continental “Arabian Nights”
Enthusiasm for Arabian “desert and minaret” films was by no means restricted to Hollywood film sets and the US, nor did the sub-genre entirely disappear after the 1950s. Among the subsequent efforts there was The Conqueror of the Orient, a 1960 Italian adventure flick shot in the De Laurentiis Studios in Rome; Shéhérazade, a 1963 French production with Anna Karina; Captain Sindbad (1963) an independent production starring Guy William’s (better known as TV’s Zorro) was made in Munich. And of course there was the sexed-up, X-rated Continental version of The Arabian Nights (1974) by the always different, always polemical and confronting Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini – the third in his trilogy of takes on the greats books of the world literary canon (following The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales).
Sub-continent Hindi, Bengali and Tamil “Arabian Nights”
Considering that the South Asian Sub-continent played a formative part as an early contributor to the compilation of Arabian folktales, it wouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that Indian cinema had embraced the Arabian Nights sub-genre. The Wadia brothers made Alibaba Aur 40 Chor in Hindi/Urdu in 1954 (remade in 1966 by Homi Wadia). Additional entries from India include Alibabavum 40 Thirudargalum (‘Alibaba and the Forty Thieves’), a 1956 Tamil-language “fantasy-swashbuckler” and a Bengali version of the Ali Baba story, Ali Baba and his Wonderful Lamp (1957).
Mr Magoo’s ‘1001 Arabian Nights’ animated feature
“1001 Nights”, longevity in animation
The one movie genre where the Arabian Nights movie has achieved real staying power and ongoing popularity has been in animated feature films. There has been numerous attempts at telling the Arabian tales through animation on the big screen. In the US, Columbia led the way with its 1959 1001 Arabian Nights, very loosely based on the Arab folktale of Aladdin, but essentially a vehicle for the popular, myopic TV cartoon character Mr Magoo. The big box-office inroads in Arabian Nights animations were made by those that came later… especially the Disney classic, eg, Aladdin (1992), which spawned successful sequels, Aladdin 2: The Return of Jafar (1994) and Aladdin and the King of Thieves (1996). Hanna-Barbera also produced its comic cartoon critters take on “The Book of the 1001 Nights” with Scooby-Doo! in Arabian Nights (1994, made-for-television). Another in the animated category was the Indian/US co-production, Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists (2000).
Aladdin, he of the lamp with remarkable transformative powers, has been well served cinematically in animation features, viz a Soviet (Russian) fantasy version of Volshebnaya lampa Aladdina/Aladdin’s Magic Lamp in 1966; a French version, Aladin et la Lampe Merveilleuse/Aladdin and His Magic Lamp in 1970. There has even been a Japanese manga anime feature on the 1001 Nights theme, Doraemon: Nobita’s Dorarabian Nights (1991).
PostScript: Hollywood’s stereotypical representation of Middle Eastern Muslims
❝(Aladdin) from a faraway place, where the caravan camels roam, where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face. It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.❞
~ opening song from the original theatrical release of Disney’s 1992 Aladdin (due to protests Disney subsequently modified the offending lyrics but kept the ‘barbaric’ reference✤)
The bulk of Hollywood movies like those above have resorted to over-simplified, usually demeaning, representations of Arabs and of the Arab world回. Lebanese-American academic Jack Shaheen pioneered research in this area, unearthing the extent to which Hollywood filmmakers manipulated the images and perpetuated orientalist stereotypes on the screen¤. So, in the typical 1001 Nights movie, we get totally formulaic story-lines which have become an established trope in the trade…the (often eponymous) hero suffers an injustice (imprisonment, exile, etc) at the hands of an evil cabal of usurper sheiks/caliphs (aided and abetted by greedy merchants who covet all the wealth and power for themselves). The princely hero recovers and ultimately overthrow the tyrant/regime, and in the process of course wins the beautiful, entrapped princess!
The Harem Girls’ pool shot in the 1942 film
The films are usually decorated with an obligatory harem of young, gorgeous and seemingly empty-headed girls lounging round doing nothing, occasionally belly-dancing or reclining in a pool (kind of your Arabian equivalent of the bikini girls in the 1960s beach movies). Universal’s Arabian Nights for example is full of sexy, seductive veiled dancers. Not exactly Islamic orthodoxy here! Sightings of the Taj Mahal in the 1942 film also illustrates how Hollywood mangles geography in the Arab World…the same goes for history, many plots involve ahistorical scenarios, eg, in the 2000 Arabian Nights miniseries the 8th century AD narrator recounts stories in which 17th-18th century muskets are in use [Arabian Nights (miniseries), Wikipedia, http://en.m.wiki.org; ‘Veils, Harems and Belly Dancers’, Reclaiming Identity: Dismantling Arab Stereotypes, (Arab American National Museum) www.arabstereotypes.org].The settings for the movies are equally formulaic – bustling bazaars with narrow, crowded alleys full of pickpockets, cardboard palaces that look like flimsy, fake Alhambras. Genies, flying carpets, robotic guards – a scene of frivolous adventure and fantasy. Outside of the city everything is amorphous desert, endless sand hills punctuated by outposts of tents and a caravan of camels❦ [‘Ancient Egypt and Desert Landscapes’, Reclaiming Identity: Dismantling Arab Stereotypes, (Arab American National Museum) www.arabstereotypes.org].
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⊙ the most popular of the 1001 Nights tales, and the most utilised by movie-makers – the Voyages of Sinbad, Aladdin and his lamp, Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves – were not part of the original collection of stories but were added by the French translator Antoine Galland in the 18th century
✳ I would hesitate to describe the “Arabian Nights” movie as a genre in itself, it would be more correct to call it a sub-genre, in the same way that road films and biopics are sub-genre films. Arabian Nights films are sub-genres, usually of the genre of Adventure or Adventure/Fantasy (occasionally Adventure/Comedy) ♤ Americans insist on the spelling ‘Bagdad’, rather than the traditional Anglo/Commonwealth preference for ‘Baghdad’…just as they prefer ‘Sinbad’ rather than ‘Sindbad’, as it is sometimes rendered
◈ movies such as Fort Algiers also cross-over into related-type territory, the North African Bedouin/French Foreign Legion desert film
✤ the Disney animated version makes a further sin of omission common to cinematic portrayals of the character Aladdin – making him a boy of Arab appearance. One of the few screen adaptations to heed the textual evidence which indicates that Aladdin is a Chinese boy is the 2000 Arabian Nights miniseries, casting a Chinese-American in the role
回 Hollywood has shown itself to be notorious at marginalising “the Other” on-screen, note the very strong parallels between its characterisations of Arabs/Muslims and of Native American ‘Indians’ and Mexicans ¤ Shaheen spent decades scrutinising not just the Arabian Nights movies but all Hollywood films and television that dealt with Arabs and Muslims, concluding that Hollywood depicted Arabs in overwhelmingly negative terms – as bandits, as duplicitous, naive, rapacious and malevolent people of a savage, nomadic race (and after 9/11 in particular, as one-dimensional terrorists) [JG Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilified a People (2001)]
❦ Hollywood productions reinforce the European orientalist construct, as identified by Palestinian scholar Edward Said, reducing the Orient to no more than “a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences”
Aladdin, he of the lamp with remarkable transformative powers, has been well served cinematically in animation features, viz a Soviet (Russian) fantasy version of Volshebnaya lampa Aladdina/Aladdin’s Magic Lamp in 1966; a French version, Aladin et la Lampe Merveilleuse/Aladdin and His Magic Lamp in 1970. There has even been a Japanese manga anime feature on the 1001 Nights theme, Doraemon: Nobita’s Dorarabian Nights (1991).
