A king finds his wife guilty of having an affair, he is so angry that he orders her death!

If that isn’t punishment enough, he decides to dole out judgement on all of woman kind and sets his mind to wed a new maiden every day, then have her meet the same fate as his wife every morning. 

 

Shaharazad is the daughter of one of the king’s council men. She is a clever woman and knows that she has to act and do something to stop any more girls from meeting this terrible fate. 

 

So she agrees to marry the king (against her father’s wishes, for he knows only too well the king’s dastardly temperament) and in the evening, after they have done what most newly wed couples will do, she decides to tell him a story. So complex and intriguing are her stories that the king is captivated by the web her words spin. As dawn draws near, she insists that she is too tired to tell the rest of the story. The king is so enraptured by the web of narrative that has been spun and so desperate to hear the end of the stories that he lets her live another day so that she may resolve the story. But Shaharazad is clever and weaves story within story, always ending on a cliff edge so that the king will let her live another day.

 

This is how the tales of One Thousand and One Nights were born.