Demonic Narrator, Angelic Interpreter
Embedding in Two Variants of a Solomonic Legend
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5617/jais.10123Abstract
An Arabic legend tells how King Solomon arrived at a magnificent castle, half buried in the sands. Roaming through its corridors, Solomon wonders who could have built such a magnificent edifice and why it had been abandoned. Two variants of the tale employ two different strategies for solving the conundrum: in one variant, the answer is hidden in an inscription that Solomon cannot understand till a mysterious youth appears from the desert and deciphers it for him. In the second variant, the solution is offered in an embedded tale told to Solomon by a serpent demoness, who witnessed the building of the castle and partook in the final demise of its inhabitants.
In this paper, I offer a reading of this legend as a midrash, i.e., an exegetical tale that attempts to “fill in the gaps” of the Qurʾānic portrayal of Solomon. Considering the narrative questions raised by the frame tale and exploring the ways in which the embedded elements in each of the two variants employ competing strategies of “filling in the gaps” of the frame tale, I show that the divergent solutions offered in each of the variants to an ostensibly identical narrative problem lead to a different interpretation of each version. This leads to a discussion of the hermeneutic function of embedding as a form of “inner-midrash.” In the conclusion, I suggest that the two variants offer competing epistemologies of storytelling.
Key words: Solomon, qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ, midrash, storytelling, narrative interpretation, narrative embedding
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