Open Questions

Open Robinson Crusoe

Why It Is Open Defoe never named a source. Alexander Selkirk's widely publicized 1709 rescue is the real-life account most often cited as the model, but historian Andrew Lambert and others argue this single-source reading is a false premise, since the novel differs from Selkirk's own story in concrete ways: Crusoe is shipwrecked rather than self-marooned, and his island is already inhabited rather than solitary.

What Would Settle It A surviving Defoe letter, manuscript note, or contemporary account naming his source or sources directly; no such document is currently known.

Expertise Needed Literary history and eighteenth-century book history

Question posed in Robinson Crusoe (Wikipedia), Background section, on the single-source versus composite-source debate.

Open One Thousand and One Nights

Why It Is Open The collection has no single author, origin date or fixed original text. It grew across centuries by absorbing Persian (the Hezar Afsan), Indian, Arabic and Egyptian material, and some of its now most famous tales, including Aladdin and Ali Baba, are not found in the oldest surviving Arabic manuscripts at all. Those two tales entered the collection's Western reputation only through Antoine Galland's early eighteenth century French translation, which drew partly on oral storytelling rather than a written Arabic source, so even the question of which tales count as original is unsettled.

What Would Settle It A complete manuscript stemma tracing every tale's earliest attestation across the Persian, Arabic, Indian and Egyptian branches of the tradition. Comparative philology and codicology have recovered only a partial picture from the surviving fragmentary manuscripts, the oldest of which dates to around the ninth century.

Expertise Needed Comparative philology and Arabic manuscript studies

Question posed in One Thousand and One Nights (Wikipedia), Origins and history.