Old Middle East folktale retold in many modern forms

February 9, 2008|Joseph H. Kozak Jr., Portsmouth, Va.

Re the Jan. 22 "Abu's slippers": This story indeed is a Middle Eastern folktale and over a thousand years old.

I used to have a book, Eaters of the Dead, by Michael Crichton. It was a tale of a minor Baghdad diplomat, Ibn Fadlan, who was sent on a mission to another country by his caliph. On the way, he was captured by a band of Northmen and forced to accompany them on an adventure. During his forced accompaniment, he told the Northmen the story of Abu Kasem's slippers.

Eaters appears to be a plain English account of the event that led to the writing of Beowulf, the oldest surviving English ballad. Ibn Fadlan wrote his account in A.D. 926. Unfortunately, the original document is missing. Michael Crichton has gathered together all the bits and pieces of the original document: fragments, partial translations, quotes, etc. that exist in some 2 dozen languages and re-translated them. Then he pieced them together like a jigsaw puzzle, but like any 1,000-year-old jigsaw puzzle, it had a few pieces missing. These he filled in with fiction. It is well worth reading. This book was made into a movie, The Thirteenth Warrior. After the movie was released, the book was re-published as The Thirteenth Warrior.

Your story of Abu Kassem's slippers is exactly like the version in Eaters, except that the ending is slightly different. In the book, Abu Kasem dies penniless.

On a different commentary in the same section of the paper, Ralph De La Cruz has a brilliant idea: finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by taxing the super rich, and levying an overindulgence tax on the over-indulgers to balance the budget.

Joseph H. Kozak Jr., Portsmouth, Va.

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