SOURCE: A prologue to The Epic of the Kings: “Shah-Nama,” the National Epic of Persia, by Ferdowsi, translated by Reuben Levy, revised by Amin Banani, Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1967, pp. xv-xxvi.

[In the essay below, Levy offers an overview of Ferdowsi's Shah-Nama, commenting on its form and style and praising, in particular, the poet's skill in his laments for Persia's fallen kings and heroes.]

Before the land of Iran was converted to its present religion of Islam, or Mohammadanism, it had for many centuries followed the doctrines of Zoroaster. His religion, known in the West as Zoroastrianism or Mazdaism, had a literature of its own, which concerned itself largely, as might be expected, with doctrinal and ritual matters. But in its later stages there had also grown up a small body of secular works, of which some at least dealt with the history of the land, its monarchs and heroes.

The conquest of Persia by the Mohammadan Arabs, an event which took place in the years after 636 of the Christian era, wrought a profound change not only in the religion of the people but in its language and literature. The older Pahlavi script was displaced by the Arabic alphabet, and the older language, while remaining basically Indo-European, was blended with a great number of Arabic words relating not only to the new religion and the new worship, of which the sacred language was Arabic, but also to everyday life. In a measure it was a precursor of what happened to the Saxon vocabulary after the conquest of England by the Normans.

THE SHāH-NāMA AND ITS AUTHOR

Of the writers in the new Persian, the Iranians themselves look upon seven as outstanding, and of these the earliest and most linked with national sentiment is the poet known as Ferdowsi, author of the Shāh-nāma [Vowels are pronounced as in Italian: ä, i and u are long, representing the long vowels which occur in the English words ‘father’, ‘chief’, and ‘rule’, while a, e, and o are short, as in ‘cat’, ‘egg’, and ‘lot’.] (literally ‘King-book’, i.e. ‘The Book of Kings’). This work provides a more or less connected story, told in metrical and rhymed verse, of the Iranian Empire, from the creation of the world down to the Mohammadan conquest, and it purports to deal with the reigns of fifty kings and queens, the section devoted by the poet to each bearing little relationship to the length of his or her reign.

The author himself is normally spoken of by his poetical name of ‘Ferdowsi (or Ferdausi)’, i.e. the ‘Paradisal’, whose honorific title was Abo'l-Qāsem. His personal name is unknown and the dates of his birth and death are both conjectural, though the latter probably took place at some time between the years 1020 and 1025 of the Christian era. He came from the neighbourhood of Tus in the province of Khorāsān and appears to have been a member of a family not wealthy but which owned a certain amount of land that they cultivated themselves. They belonged in fact to the ‘Dehqān’ class, which seems to have been the depository of national and local tradition and which educated some, at any rate, of its sons.

THE ORIGINS OF THE SHāH-NāMA

Ferdowsi had in his possession a prose book on the history of the Persian kings, and possibly also one in verse, but it was not until middle life that he began his own poem which, from beginning to end, took him about thirty-five years. He was not continuously employed at it and this is known from the fact that here and there he tells us what his age was at the time when he was composing some particular episode. This enables us to deduce that the various portions of the work were not done in the order in which they appear in the final form of the Shāh-nāma. His method was to select episodes as the fancy took him and he, or a redactor, later put them together in the chronological order of the reigns.

THE CONTENTS OF THE SHāH-NāMA

As a whole the work is a collection of episodes, providing a fairly continuous story of the Iranian Empire from before the creation of the world down to Iran's submergence under the Muslim Arabs. The material was of ancient origin and much of it had been stored up in the minds of Dehqāns, who were able to refresh their memories from records written in Pahlavi [Middle Persian] or in Arabic prose translations. Ferdowsi indeed did not invent the legends he put into verse form; in other words, he was not a fiction-writer drawing on his imagination for the central characters or the actual plots of his stories. They were established parts of the national tradition. But he elaborated what he found already in existence and he himself composed the innumerable speeches he put into the mouths of his heroes, as well as the many long letters written at the dictation of the kings and other principal characters.

The narrative begins with the creation of the world ‘out of nothing’ and continues by narrating how the primordial kings invented the crudely conceived basic requirements of civilization. During the reign of Jamshid, who was king for seven hundred years, there appeared, born of a family with Arab blood in its veins, the monster Zahhāk, who was finally overcome by Kāva the Blacksmith, whose famous banner was for long the palladium of the Iranians. Another great character who appears in the primeval era is Faridun, whose division of the earth between his three sons, Iraj, Tur, and Salm, leads to the murder of Iraj by the other two, and, hence, to the long feud between Tur (Turān) and Iran.

Manuchehr it was who avenged the blood of his father Iraj; then later in his reign appears the warrior Sām. His son Zāl fell in love with Rudāba, by whom he became the father of the prince Rostam, mightiest of all the heroic figures who enter upon the scene in the Shāh-nāma. He makes his appearance intermittently during a number of reigns which between them cover a space of over three centuries. Born in the reign of Manuchehr he does not die until Goshtāsp is on the throne of Iran, when he is killed, treacherously, in vengeance for having caused the death, howbeit involuntarily, of the Shāh Esfandiyār. Even in his last moments the hero had strength enough to slay the miserable wretch who had betrayed him.

It was during the reign of the inept Shāh Kāvus that most of Rostam's heroic feats occurred, and also his combat with his son Sohrāb, who died tragically by his hand. During that reign also the war between Iran and Turān flared up with renewed strength. This was in part due to a quarrel between Kāvus and his son Siyāvush, who fled to the court of the Turanian king Afrāsiyāb. For a time all had gone well with the fugitive prince, to whom Afrāsiyāb had given his daughter in marriage, but then the Turanian king became offended with him and had him murdered. The need to avenge his death therefore became imperative. Key Khosrow, the son of Siyāvush, had grown to manhood in Turān and been with difficulty rescued from it. It was he who brought the war to a successful conclusion, Afrāsiyāb being killed after a long pursuit.

It is here that the romance of Bizhan and Manizha is inserted into the narrative.

After Key Khosrow there ascended the throne the Shāh Lohrāsp, member of a parallel branch of the Kaiānid dynasty. In his reign occur most of the adventures of his son Goshtāsp, who became the lover and husband of the daughter of the Caesar of Rum, i.e. Eastern Rome. It was in Goshtāsp's reign that Zoroaster introduced his new religion, being supported by the Shāh's son, Esfandiyār. He was kept from the throne long after his succession was due and was slain in the end by Rostam, who had to employ magic to achieve his aim.

The reigns of Dārā and Dārāb, both of which names represent Darius, are followed by that of Sekandar [Alexander] with the accounts of his more or less mythical adventures. Then comes Ardashir, with whom the narrative enters the historical period of the Sasanian Shahs, though it is interspersed with much that is romantic and legendary. Interest is chiefly concentrated on Bahrām Gur, one of the favourite heroes of Persian romantic poetry, and on Kasrā (Khosrow) regarded as the paragon of kingly wisdom. To another Bahrām, known as Chubin, who revolts against Kasrā, is devoted a lengthy portion of the Shāh-nāma and much attention is given also to the fall of the second Khosrow and the rise of his son Shiruy (Qobād).

With sympathetic detail the poet describes the fall of the Iranian Empire under its last Shah, Yazdegerd, after his army, led by a second Rostam, had been defeated by the Arab invaders at the battle of Qādesiya. Then the long story is brought to its close in a brief section containing some dates which purport to give the author's age at the time of his putting the finishing touches to the work.

THE CHARACTER OF THE SHāH-NāMA

The various episodes which compose the narrative are strung together very loosely, for, as we have seen, they were not composed in the chronological sequence proper to a work of history. The whole can be likened to a vast canvas on which the great heroes of Iran's past are depicted against the background of the poet's beloved country. From the nature of the work it cannot be an exact portrayal, for it begins from before the creation of the world and describes the careers of the Shahs who reigned during the era of myth and legend. Nevertheless it took the place of history with the audiences who listened to the stories recited to them; they were not concerned with the fact that no one could have been an eyewitness to the scenes described to them or could have been close to them in time.

There is in the Shāh-nāma an amalgamation of the Persian equivalents of chapters in the book of Genesis, the Odyssey, Paradise Lost, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare. It is indeed astonishing how often the vocabulary of Shakespeare suits the incidents described in the Persian epic. Drama, comedy, tragedy—all are here. Nature has a conspicuous and felicitous place in the Shāh-nāma. Tree lore has a prominent part. The vast scene of operations is bathed in a wondrous light.

In two types of passages Ferdowsi's art is often at its highest: the laments for the fallen kings and heroes, and the descriptions of sunrise. Perhaps Ferdowsi has intended an organic artistic link between these two themes that like a great antiphony run through the whole of the Shāh-nāma. The endless procession of death is punctuated by the recurrent birth of the source and symbol of all life itself. For the technical solution to the difficult task of treating repetitive material Ferdowsi borrows a prevalent and highly-regarded art form, namely theme and variations, and proves himself a consummate master. The full range of poetic arts are brought into play so that no two sunrises are described in the same terms and the same manner and no two laments are identical. There is an unsentimental pathos and a measured humanity in these laments. They often contain some of the profoundest lines in the whole poem.

But the poet's main object is to tell the story of his fatherland. We are stirred by the constant clash of arms, more particularly caused by the attacks and counter-attacks that throughout the passage of time recurred between Iran and its enemies, the most formidable of whom was Turān, the great national antagonist. The air is nearly always filled with the dust of battle, the roll of drums of war or the clash of heavy mace on steel helmet when a warrior meets his adversary in single combat.

Yet there are intervals for peaceful pursuits, when the monarchs, their coronets firmly attached to their heads, play polo or go hunting the onager—their favourite game—or the gentle gazelle. Following on triumphs in the field of battle or the hunting ground they seat themselves before huge trays laden with viands of every kind, being waited on by moon-cheeked maids who are constantly at hand with flagons of red wine. From time to time they engage in amorous dalliance.

The events and characters described suffer no terrestrial limitations as they range over land and sky, though it is only rarely that anything is said of adventure by sea. In this connection it may be said that Ferdowsi was as little trammelled by the facts of geography as was Shakespeare. Territories separated by vast stretches of road are traversed in an instant or else brought for convenience into close proximity. Monarchs dictate their behests to the whole world from the height of their thrones and proclaim themselves the direct instruments of God's will. The prehistoric kings, and heroes such as Rostam, live and wage war for hundreds of years. Throughout the whole poem the struggle with the national foes is associated with the struggle between good and evil, where the good must in the long run gain the upper hand.

EDITORIAL NOTE

FERDOWSI AND THE ART OF TRAGIC EPIC

Ferdowsi's main object is to preserve the ‘history’ of his fatherland, but the sum of the Shāh-nāma's artistic worth outweighs the inherent shortcomings of the poet's conscious scheme. Broadly conceived, it belongs to the epic genre. But it is not a formal epic as the Aeneid or the Lusiad. Rather, it has the spontaneity of the Iliad and its episodic character reveals its kinship with the chançons de geste. More than any of its kindred poems, however, the Shāh-nāma is beset with paradoxes and conflicts. Paradoxes that are the protein of its art and the source of tragic nobility. If there is a unifying theme in the Shāh-nāma it is no simple ‘wrath of Achilles’, but the malevolence of the universe. Yet Ferdowsi is no passive fatalist. He has an abiding faith in a just Creator, he believes in the will of man, the need for his efforts, and the worth of his good deeds.

The pervading paradox of human existence is refracted and made particular in episodes and lives of mortals who, prism-like, reflect the light and shadow of character, the changes of moods and motives, and the many psychic levels of personality. In the strength, variety, and sometimes profundity of its characterization—often achieved with such economy of means—the Shāh-nāma is remarkable in the annals of classical literature. Very few of its many protagonists are archetypes. Alas, all too many of its noblest heroes are prey to the basest of human motives. And even the vilest among them have moments of humanity. Although outwardly many a character defies all natural bounds, none is exempt from the inner reality of human nature. The goodness of the best is possible and the evil of the most wretched is not incredible.

Nowhere is this depth of characterization more evident than in the person of Rostam, the foremost of Iranian heroes. He is essentially a man of the arena. Chivalrous, intensely loyal, pious, fearless, steel-willed and obdurate, he is nevertheless subject to occasional moods of disenchantment and indifference accompanied by gargantuan gluttony. He has a mystic reverence for the crown of Iran that inspires him to all his heroic feats. But he is quick to take offence and, at the slightest bruise to his ego or threat to his independent domain, wealth or power, he reacts with the full fury and resentment of a local dynast. For all his ‘active’ temperament he can be very wordy and didactic. When the occasion demands he is wise, temperate and resourceful. Of the more than three hundred years of his life, so lovingly recounted by Ferdowsi, only one night is spent in the amorous company of a woman. It serves the purpose of siring the ill-fated Sohrāb. For the rest, he is infinitely more devoted to his horse. Sometimes he is unable to rein his pride, which results in the two monstrous deeds of his life—and shapes the final tragedy of his life.

It is partly this depth of characterization that enhances and ennobles the tragic episodes of the Shāh-nāma. Jamshid the priest-king, world-orderer, and the giver of knowledge and skills, is the victim of his own hybris. The tragedy of Sohrāb is not merely in the horror of filicide but in the fear and vanity of Rostam and the repulsed tender premonitions of Sohrāb. The tragedies of Iraj and Siyāvush evoke the cosmic anguish and the inconsolable pity of the guileless and the pure, ravaged by the wicked. Forud and Bahrām are the promise of sweet and valorous youth cut down by the senselessness of war. Esfandiyār is rent by the conflict of his formal loyalties and his piety and good sense. But it is his vanity and ambition that send him to his doom. Nor is this moving sense of the tragic reserved for the Iranians alone. Pirān, the hoary Turānian noble, shows compassion to captive Iranians and risks his own life to protect them only, in the end, to lose it for remaining loyal to his sovereign. Even the villainous Afrāsiyāb—a prisoner of his evil nature—is pitiable and tragic in the helpless moments of self-awareness.

Ferdowsi has no set formulae for tragedy, yet in the early and mythical part of the Shāh-nāma an inexorable divine justice seems to balance most of the scales. Iraj and Siyāvush are restored and triumphant in Manuchehr and Key-Khosrow, Rostam is reconciled to his fate as the price for the slaying of Sohrāb and Esfandiyār, and Afrāsiyāb cannot escape his share. The tragic impact of the Shāh-nāma, however, is not simply the sum of its tragic episodes. It pervades the encompassing conception of the work, and the sources of it are to be found in the conscious and unconscious paradoxes that form the personality, the emotional and the intellectual outlook of Ferdowsi.

The overriding tragic fact of the poet's life is that the glory of which he sings is no more. But this is not to say that the Shāh-nāma is a defiant nostalgic lament. The intellectual horizon of Ferdowsi is that of a rational and devout Muslim. Mohammad and Zoroaster are venerated as if they were of the same root, but Ferdowsi's pride in Iran is his constant muse. His concept of history is thoroughly Islamic, but there is no Augustinian righteous indignation in him. The cumulative emotional tensions of his ‘history’ are unresolved. Even in his stark treatment of the final reigns of the Sāsānian empire, when the succession of evil, tyranny, rapacity, treachery and chaos is unrelieved by any sign of grace, he cannot quite bring himself to a condemnation of the Iranian empire. The only possible catharsis is in the contemplation of the ideal of justice, essential in Islam—yet already far detached from the realities of his time. Nor is the holocaust so distant as the fall of the Sāsānians. Ferdowsi was undoubtedly inspired by the renascent Iranism of the Sāmānid epoch and may have even conceived of his masterwork as an offering to that illustrious house, only to witness its demise at the hand of the Turkic Ghaznavids. The bitterness of the mythical Iranian-Turānian epic struggle that permeates the Shāh-nāma and gives it its dramatic tension is largely the pressing phenomenon of the poet's own time. Thus he has experienced a re-enactment of the final tragedy of his poem. The necessity of dedicating the Shāh-nāma to the very Turkic destroyer of the Iranian Sāmānids must have been a bitter and demeaning fact. Much of the traditional denunciatory epilogue addressed to Mahmud of Ghazna may be accretions of later times, but the tone is true.

The tensions and contradictions in the experience of the poet that are reflected in the tragic paradoxes of the Shāh-nāma and are a source of validity, profundity, and universality of its art, are not all conscious or external. The interactions of his innate character, his inculcated traits, his social position, his changing environment, and the nature of his creative genius, all fail to achieve a synthesis. Instead, they fashion a personality marred by unresolved intellectual conflicts and spiritual anguish.

He belongs to the class of dehqāns, or landed gentry, and has an inherited sense of expectation of privilege, which is embittered by gradual impoverishment. He is not yet free of the impulses of generosity and noble detachment that sometimes flourish in the serene and self-assured middle plateaux of wealth and power of a social class; but he is already afflicted with the material obsessions, if not greed and avarice, that characterize the periods of rise and fall of those classes. Thus he seeks, and needs, the patronage and the emoluments of the Ghaznavid court, yet he is too proud, too detached and too dedicated to his ‘uncommercial’ art to secure that patronage in the accepted mode of the day. He is contemptuous of the servility and the parasitic existence of the court poets, of the artificiality of their panegyric verse, of the ignobleness of their self-seeking and mutual enmity, yet he is not without the artist's vanity, envy and acrimony and, occasionally, he succumbs to the temptation of proving himself in their terms.

Ferdowsi's genuine compassion for the poor and the wronged, his remarkable and persistent sense of social justice, his courageous and vocal condemnation of irresponsibility of rulers, his altruism and idealism—in short, his profound humanity—account for some of the most moving and ennobling passages in the Shāh-nāma and endow it with a consistent integrity. At the same time he had the conservative impulses of the dehqān. His yearning for legitimacy, his outrage at disregard of position, his abhorrence of anarchy, his fear of heresy, and his dread of unruly mobs provide the narrative with moments of eerie drama and Jeremiah-like visions and nightmares of the apocalypse.

However much may be said of the formal and philosophical diffuseness of the Shāh-nāma, it is transcendentally successful as a true epic. In that sense only a comparison with the Iliad can be meaningful and instructive. In their origin, nature and functions as well as in form and content, there are arresting similarities between the two poems. This is not to say that the likenesses outnumber the differences. The Shāh-nāma is, of course, the product of a much later and more self-conscious age, and it draws from a vast fund of literary conventions and clichés of ‘Near Eastern’ cultures. But the Shāh-nāma and the Iliad partake of the fundamental mysteries of epic as art. They both represent the instantly and eternally triumphant attempts of conscious art to immortalize the glory and the identity of a people. It does not matter that neither Homer nor Ferdowsi were the very first to attempt such a task in their cultures. It is the supreme elixir of their art which accomplished the miracle. They ennobled the natural epic without losing its spontaneity. Furthermore, they did so at a time when the cement of past associations was crumbling and the common identity of their peoples was in danger of effacement. Thus by their creations Homer and Ferdowsi succeeded at once in immortalizing the past and bequeathing the future to the language and life of their nation.

The western reader of the Shāh-nāma will learn much—and may gain in enjoyment—by some comparison of its similarities and differences with the Iliad. Although Ferdowsi works with a number of written and even ‘literate’ sources, at least in the first half of the Shāh-nāma, as in the Iliad the roots of oral tradition are close to the surface. Both poems employ a simple, facile metre and their rhyme schemes are suited to the long narrative and aid in memorizing. The heroes in both epics are affixed with appropriate epithets and are easily recognizable even without mention of their names. Both poems make use of a certain amount of repetition to assist recapitulation. Episodes of battle and heroism are modulated by sequences of chase, ostentatious banquets and idyllic revels, and ceremonious councils and parleys. Semi-independent sub-episodes are interspersed to vary the mood and relieve the tedium of the narrative. Of these, several romances in the Shāh-nāma, particularly those of Zāl and Rudāba and of Bizhan and Manizha in their exquisite lyricism, poignant intimacy and self-contained perfection, have no peers in the Iliad. Both poets lavish masterful attention upon the details of the martial life—the description of armours and weapons, the personal and near magical love of the heroes for their mounts and their armour, etc.—that breed and sustain a sense of epic involvement. Both poems abound in little warm human touches that evoke pathos and enhance the evolving drama.

Transcending these more or less formal similarities are the fundamental parallels of human behaviour under similar relationships and social conditions and the recognizable range of human types in the Iliad and the Shāh-nāma. The affinities of the indispensable hero Rostam with Achilles; of the capricious, covetous, apprehensive and envious monarch Key Kāvus with Agamemnon; of the stolid and martial Giv with Ajax; of the wily and wise Pirān with Odysseus; of the dutiful and sacrificial Gudarz with Hector; of the impetuous and handsome Bizhan with Paris; of the youthful, loyal and pathetic Bahrām with Patroklos; of the impulsive, sensuous and beautiful Sudāba with Helen; of the adoring, meek and resigned Farangis with Hecuba; are only a few of the evocative suggestions of artistic kinship between the two epics. In the fragile social order depicted in the Iliad and in the first half of the Shāh-nāma tension and strife are never far from the surface. But Ferdowsi has endowed his cosmos with a higher morality and thus the lapses of his heroes are more grave and aweful.

In addition to mortal humans both epics are peopled by several supernatural orders of goodly spirits, demons and magical creatures who intervene in the affairs of men and profoundly affect their fate. But the God of Shāh-nāma is the unknowable God of Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians and Muslims. Unlike the deities of the Iliad He is not implicated in the struggle of the mortals though he is constantly evoked and beseeched. Only twice does an angel intervene to alter the course of battle. At other times there is only indirect confirmation of the righteous and chastisement of the wayward. On the other hand prophetic dreams count for more in the Shāh-nāma. Fate is the unconquerable tyrant of both poems, but in the Shāh-nāma it is sometimes unravelled by the stars, robbing the drama of its mystery.

The Shāh-nāma is inordinately longer than the Iliad. Essentially it is made in two segments: the mythical first half and the ‘historical’ second half. The psychological and artistic seam cannot be concealed. The fundamental affinities with the Iliad are primarily true of the first half. But even there the unity of theme, the limitation of action and time, the rapid devolution of the ‘plot’, the resolution of the conflict and the uncanny proportions of the Iliad are missing. Ferdowsi's ‘historical’ mission undoubtedly scatters the artistic impact of the Shāh-nāma and diffuses the focus of its aesthetic concept. But the wrath of Achilles', after all, is not the sole catalyst of Homer's art. The validity and viability of the Iliad rests in its general relevance to the human situation. In this sense the artistic ‘flaw’ of the Shāh-nāma is more than made up by, and perhaps makes for, its greater universality. Thus in the Shāh-nāma we come across characters who have no counterparts in the Iliad, and one must cull the whole of Greek mythology, mystery and drama for parallels. Jamshid, the primal priest-king, the divinely inspired creator of civilization, the bringer of world order, whose hybris causes his fall and plunges mankind into evil and darkness. Zahhāk, the grotesque tyrant, the personification of irrational and demonic forces who grips the world in a thousand-year reign of terror. Kāva, the rebellious vox populi triumphant in a just cause. Faridun, the ideal and wise king, compassionate pastor of his people. Siyāvush, the tragic guileless youth, maligned, helpless and martyred. Key-Khosrow, the messiah-king, avenger and restorer. Every one of them is a focal realization of a master figure in the history of man's existence and aspirations.

It is this universality together with its faithful and unresolved reflection of the human paradox that is the essence of Shāh-nāma's art and the cause of its timelessness; for it permits every generation to seek its own resolution.