Blood on the Wedding Bed: The Capture of Troy, Agamemnon's Murder, and the Arabic Story of al-Zīr as Variants of the 'Avenging Bride' Tale Type

A number of modern Arab thinkers have compared the Story of al-Zīr, a little-known Arabic folk epic, with accounts of the Trojan War and the Oresteia. After dealing with the pitfalls of comparing stories from different cultures, I argue for criteria to distinguish between weak and strong parallels, and then analyse the similarities between the story of Jalīla, that constitutes the first part of the Story of al-Zīr, and the Graeco-Roman stories of Helen’s abduction and Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon. Such a comparative approach, based on the method of folktale studies, sheds new light on a number of much-discussed elements from the story of Clytemnestra, such as 'blameless Aegisthus' (Odyssey 1.29), Agamemnon’s minstrel, and the purple fabric and 'bathtub' that figure as stage props in the Oresteia.