A Story with No Ending

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

One Thousand and One Nights frames its entire collection of tales inside a single narrative device: the king Shahriyar, convinced of women's inherent unfaithfulness after his first wife's betrayal, marries a new wife each day and has her executed the following morning, until Scheherazade volunteers herself and begins telling him a story each night, deliberately breaking off before its end so the king must let her live another day to hear how it concludes. The device lets the collection nest dozens of otherwise unrelated tales, love stories, adventures, comic anecdotes and moral fables, inside one continuous frame, and it stands as the most widely cited example of the frame narrative form anywhere in world literature.