Read the fairy tale Anna loves
Aladdin
A poor boy, a hidden cave, and a lamp with a spirit inside it who could grant any wish: one of the most famous tales in the Thousand and One Nights, carried west from Aleppo three hundred years ago.
Aladdin was the son of a poor tailor who had died young, and he had grown up doing very little except wander the streets of the city with the other boys. One day a well-dressed stranger stopped him, said he was Aladdin’s uncle, come home at last from far away, and asked Aladdin to help him with something the next morning.
The stranger led him out past the edge of the city to a bare hillside, where he lit a small fire, spoke some words over it, and a slab of stone in the ground swung open onto a stairway going down. He told Aladdin to go down, walk through the rooms he would find, touch nothing, and bring back only an old brass lamp that hung at the very end.
The cave
Below ground Aladdin found a garden where the trees were hung with fruit made of coloured glass, or so he thought, and he filled his pockets and his sleeves with the brightest before he took the lamp from its hook. Climbing back up, he could not manage the last high step with his arms so full, and asked the stranger to pull him out first and take the lamp after. The stranger, who wanted the lamp and nothing else, flew into a rage, and slammed the stone shut over Aladdin’s head.
In the dark, Aladdin remembered a ring the stranger had put on his finger for luck. He turned it, wringing his hands, and a figure of smoke rose up and asked him what he wished. Aladdin only wished to be at home, and in a breath he was, in his mother’s small room, with the lamp and his pockets still full of glass.
The lamp
His mother went to rub the dust off the old lamp so they could sell it, and a second figure rose from it, taller than the room, and far greater than the first. From that day the family never went hungry, but Aladdin, remembering how the cave had felt, asked the spirit only for what they truly needed. In time he saw the Sultan’s daughter pass in the street and lost his heart, and sent her a gift of the fruit from the cave, which had turned out to be real jewels. After some trouble with a jealous minister, the Sultan agreed, and the spirit raised a palace, and Aladdin and the princess were married.
But the stranger from the hillside had not forgotten the lamp. He came back to the city disguised as a pedlar, walking the streets below the palace and calling out, new lamps for old. The princess, who did not know what the old brass lamp truly was, sent it down to be traded for a shiny new one. That night the pedlar rubbed it, and the palace, with the princess inside it, was carried across the desert to his own country.
The long way home
Aladdin still had the ring. Its spirit could not undo what the lamp had done, but it could carry him to where the palace now stood. He came to the princess by night, and she told him she had already thought of something. The next evening she offered the stranger a cup of wine that she had quietly seen to herself, and when he had drunk it and fallen asleep, Aladdin took the lamp back from his belt.
The spirit of the lamp brought the palace, and the princess, home before the Sultan had finished his breakfast, and everything was forgiven. Aladdin lived a long life after that, with a spirit that could grant him anything at all, and the strange thing people remembered about him was not the palace or the jewels, but how seldom, once his family was safe, he ever asked for a thing.
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Yalla Tnam
Play this softly while you read Aladdin aloud: Yalla Tnam, one of the best-loved lullabies of the Levant, from the same corner of the world the story travelled out of.
More stories, more lullabies
This is one tale in a growing collection of traditional stories from around the world, each one paired, where we can, with a real lullaby from the same culture.