The sea serpent motif in The Thousand and One Nights as catalogued by nineteenth-century folklorists

Record summary

Nineteenth-century folklorists compared serpent, dragon, whale, and island-animal episodes in The Thousand and One Nights with European and Asian wonder traditions. This is a research lead into motif history rather than a single encounter. It may clarify how later writers assembled a purported “Arabian sea-serpent tradition” from disparate tales, translations, and comparative mythologies. The specific corpus should be located through bibliographies and indices, since folklore authors did not always use consistent creature names. Genre, manuscript variation, and editorial selection are central uncertainties.