The Zaratan in Burton’s Arabian Nights

Record summary

The Zaratan is the enormous sea creature mistaken for an island in the Sindbad cycle and related Arabic wonder narratives. Richard Francis Burton’s late-nineteenth-century translation made the episode readily available to English readers, although the story had a much older manuscript and oral transmission history. It is relevant to cryptid comparison because island-whale narratives are sometimes cited as alleged evidence for surviving giant marine animals. The more defensible research question concerns narrative motifs, translation history, and medieval natural philosophy rather than zoological identification.