Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp Coloring Pages
The genie in the lamp gets all the attention, but there is a second genie in this story who lives in a ring and hardly ever makes it into the retellings. There is also a magician who turns up claiming to be Aladdin's long lost uncle, and a princess whose real name is so long that most versions quietly trade it for something shorter.
Jump to: Aladdin | The Magic Lamp | The Genie | Jasmine | Aladdin and Jasmine | The Sultan | Jafar | The Palace | Animals
Aladdin
Aladdin does not start out as a hero. In the oldest written version he is a boy who will not learn a trade and who runs his widowed mother ragged, and the stranger who finds him picks him precisely because nobody will miss a boy like that. Everything brave and clever about him happens afterwards.
The Magic Lamp
The whole plot turns on the lamp looking like nothing special. It is a battered old oil lamp of the sort any household might own, which is why the magician can walk the streets later in the story calling out an offer of new lamps for old, and why the princess hands it over without a second thought.
The Genie
Genie comes from jinni, a spirit out of Arabic folklore, and the word only looks French by accident. A translator reached for génie because it sounded close enough, and the name stuck. Jinn in the older stories are nobody's servants. They can be helpful or dangerous depending on the day and they mostly want to be left alone.
Jasmine
In the oldest written version the princess is called Badroulbadour, which means something close to full moon of full moons. It is a lovely name and almost impossible to say twice in a row, which is probably why nearly every retelling since has given her a shorter one.
Aladdin and Jasmine
Their engagement is not the end of the story, which catches a lot of readers out. The magician comes back after the wedding, carries the palace off with the princess still inside it, and it is Jasmine who has to think her way out of that one.
The Sultan
The sultan spends most of the tale being talked into things. He promises his daughter to one man, changes his mind when a tray of jewels arrives, and changes it back again the moment somebody frightens him. For a ruler with absolute power he is remarkably easy to steer.
Jafar
The villain of the written tale is a magician from far away who finds Aladdin by reading the sand, then walks up and introduces himself as a long lost uncle. He is good enough at it that Aladdin's mother cooks him supper. He also has a brother, who turns up later in disguise to finish what he started.
The Palace
The genie builds the palace in a single night, and the detail everyone remembers is the one window left deliberately unfinished so the sultan can admire how impossible the rest of it is. Later the magician lifts the whole building off its foundations and sets it down again on the other side of the world.
Fairy Tale Castles coloring pages
Animals of the Story
Not one of these animals appears in the written tale. The parrot, the monkey and the tiger all arrived with later retellings, and they have been part of the picture for so long now that most people would feel a bit cheated without them.
Aladdin is the most famous tale from the Thousand and One Nights and it was not in the book to begin with. A young Syrian storyteller named Hanna Diyab told it to a French translator in Paris in 1709 and it was added to the collection from there. For about three hundred years people assumed the translator had simply made it up. Then Diyab's own travel diary turned up and proved he had been telling the truth.
The oldest written version sets the whole story in China, which surprises almost everyone. Later illustrators moved it to a market city of domes and narrow lanes and that is the Aladdin most of us picture now. The flying carpet came from somewhere else again. It belongs to a different tale in the same collection and got borrowed into Aladdin so often that it never left.