This paper aims at examining how far Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's The Stealing of the Mare represents what might, broadly speaking, be called the local color of the Bedouins, and highlights the significance of the Oriental myth in that epic. It solely examines the romance of Abu Zeyd Al-Hillali. The paper further decodes the customs, superstitions, heroism, chivalry, sentiments, sensuality and social codes of the Bedouins, and explores various representations of the Bedouin harem and the supernatural hero. In doing so, it considers Said's ideas of the eccentricity of the East. It can be concluded that Blunt attempts to transfer Arabic cultural codes into the English culture. He repeatedly accentuates the fact that the Arabs are people of many merits. Blunt's point is surely that Bedouin culture, which fosters a plenitude of honor-related virtues, especially hospitality, chivalry and defending the weak, deserves more sympathetic investigation by the Westerners.

The East is constructed as strangely different from the West. Western Orientalists who have lived in the East are overwhelmed by its strangeness. Consequently, some Western writers become hostile to the East, others intimate it. Blunt's encounter with the East, to consider an example from the latter group, is seen by him as a kind of self-fulfillment. He admits that the East is his place of romance. Said (1978, p. 1) suggests that "[t]he Orient [] had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences." Being strongly in love with Bedouin culture, Blunt was deeply immersed in the Arabs' mentality, customs, generosity, superstition, religion, dignity, poetry and other literature. Blunt's deep love of Arabic naturally culminated in his versification of his wife's translation of The Celebrated Romance of the Stealing of the Mare.

Blunt's epic poem's aim is to show how the `Other', the Arabs, are different from `us', the Westerners.On the whole, Blunt's poem gives a vivid insight into Bedouin culture's notions of gender. Said (1978, pp. 2-3) demonstrates that "a very large mass of writers [] have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, `mind', destiny, and so on". Moreover, Said (p. 102) also suggests that "the whole Orient can be made to serve as an illustration of a particular form of eccentricity." That is, according to Said (p. 103), "the Orient becomes a living tableau of queerness." He emphasizes (pp. 31-32) that "[o]ne could speak in Europe of an Oriental personality, an Oriental atmosphere, an Oriental tale, Oriental despotism, or an Oriental mode of production, and be understood." The Blunts were able to naturalize the queerness of Bedouin culture into English by decoding its strange themes and setting. Said (p. 103) suggests that "[i]ts [the Orient's] foreignness can be translated, its meanings decoded, its hostility tamed; yet the generality assigned to the Orient, the disenchantment that one feels after encountering it, the unresolved eccentricity it displays, are all distributed in what is said or written about it." He suggests (p. 167) that "[t]he eccentricities of Oriental life, with its odd calendars, its exotic spatial configurations, its hopelessly strange languages, its seemingly perverse morality, were reduced considerably when they appeared as a series of detailed items presented in a normative European prose style."

English Studies Journal, Bedouin Romance, English Poetry, Social Codes, Arabic Cultural Codes, Social Descriptions, Western Orientalists, Traditional Stories, Egyptian Society, Traditional Domestic Chores, Decision Making Process, Transformational Process.