The Shahnameh of Ferdowsi as World Literature

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The Shahnameh of Ferdowsi as WorldLiteratureFranklin LewisPublished online: 09 Apr 2015.

To cite this article: Franklin Lewis (2015) The Shahnameh of Ferdowsi as World Literature, IranianStudies, 48:3, 313-336, DOI: 10.1080/00210862.2015.1023063

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Franklin Lewis

Guest Editor’s Introduction

The Shahnameh of Ferdowsi as World Literature

This special issue of the journal of Iranian Studies takes its theme from Ferdowsi’sShahnameh1 seen as a work of world literature—a term (Weltliteratur) which,though it has earlier exponents,2 has generally been attributed to Goethe, whobegan formulating the concept in the 1820s. Despite his earlier fusion of a PersianateOrient with a Germanic Occident in theWest-Östlicher Divan of 1819, Goethe seemsto have harbored some residual ambivalence about eastern poetry,3 and by “Weltliter-atur” he had in mind primarily a European literature,4 the exemplary models for whichwould be ancient Greek.5 To be sure, he welcomed the reinvigoration of each nationalliterature that the cross-fertilization and refraction of other literatures and languagesmight bring.6 Ultimately, however, Goethe hoped that German national literaturewould occupy an important place in this new world literature:

Everywhere one hears and reads about the progress of the human race, about thefurther prospects for world and human relationships. However that may be onthe whole, which it is not my office to investigate and more closely determine, Inevertheless would personally like to make my friends aware that I am convinceda universal world literature is in the process of being constituted, in which an hon-orable role is reserved for us Germans.7

If we descend from the abstract empyrean of “world literature” as a system, to actualpaper and ink instantiations of “world literature,” what particular factors qualifyworks for inclusion in the pantheon? Despite the quip attributed to Mark van Dorenthat a classic book is “any book that stays in print,” works labeled as “world literature”or “classic” probably still carry, at least in the Anglo-American context, some presump-tion that they are informed by an edifying or ennobling quality. Such works (presumablyincluding titles like the Iliad and Odyssey, the Ramayana andMahabharata, the Aeneid,etc.) are thought of as exemplary of something—of the national genius, or of the genrethey represent—and likely to reward lifelong attention because they grapple in acomplex, transcultural and engaging manner with “timeless” big-picture questions rel-evant to the human condition. For Matthew Arnold, they required a quality of serious-

Franklin Lewis is Associate Professor of Persian Language and Literature in the Department of NearEastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.

Iranian Studies, 2015Vol. 48, No. 3, 313–336, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00210862.2015.1023063

© 2015 The International Society for Iranian Studies

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ness and high purpose, as literature, especially poetry, began to take the place of religionand philosophy in the modern world. The job of the critic, therefore, is to identify thebest in poetry, the timeless and universal, and to weed out from that pantheon worksthat claim our attention merely because of their historical importance or their personalappeal. “The best poetry is what we want; the best poetry will be found to have a powerof forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.”8 Arnold would eliminateChaucer from the category of “best poetry” because his purpose is not serious enough.Such attitudes are perhaps what ledMark Twain to quip that a classic is “something thateverybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”9

At first blush, it may sound quaint or retrograde to situate the Shahnameh within apantheon of what were sometimes called “The Harvard Classics,” “The Classics ofWestern Civilization,” or “The Great Books,” that proposed culturally specificliberal visions of a body of works that might somewhat prescriptively demand ourattention, as the best representatives of literary achievement in a particular languageor cultural context.10 It might be imagined that such curricula of western civilizationwere informed by Eurocentric assumptions, and would not readily have found roomfor Ferdowsi on their shelves. And yet when Sir John Lubbock proposed his list ofthe best hundred books in 1886, the Shahnameh was already there.11 As ProfessorRichard Gottheil (a Columbia University colleague of A. V. W. Jackson, a scholarof Iran and translator of Ferdowsi) noted in 1900 in his introduction to the twoPersian volumes of the Oriental Literature series:

A certain amount of romantic interest has always attached to Persia …. The “SháhNámeh,” or Book of Kings, may take its place most worthily by the side of theIndian Nala, the Homeric Iliad, the German Niebelungen …. In his descriptiveparts, in his scenes of battle and encounters, he is not often led into the deliriumof extravagance. Sober-minded and free from all fanaticism, he leans not too muchto Zoroaster nor to Mohammed, though his desire to idealize his Iránian heroesleads him to excuse their faith to his readers. And so these fifty or more thousandverses, written in the Arabic heroic Mutakarib metre, have remained the delight ofthe Persians down to this very day—when the glories of the land have almostaltogether departed and Mahmud himself is all forgotten of his descendants.12

Despite such welcoming gestures, some critics still stood their ground in the center ofthe western canon, arms folded against too easy an embrace of the alien. EpiphaniusWilson, in an otherwise informative introduction to Atkinson’s translation ofFerdowsi, finds that the “grotesque fancies” of the Shahnameh compare so unfavorablyto Homer that, as a critic, Wilson is moved to celebrate the Greek victory at Salamis,which turned back the encroaching barbaric tide of world literature:

While we read the “Sháh Námeh” with keen interest, because from its study themind is enlarged and stimulated by new scenes, new ideas and unprecedentedsituations, we feel grateful that the battle of Salamis stopped the Persian invasionof Europe, which would doubtless have resulted in changing the current of litera-

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ture from that orderly and stately course which it had taken from its fountain in aGreek Parnassus, and diverted it into the thousand brawding rills of Persian fancyand exaggeration.13

This was already something of an old trope: Ferdowsi is called the Homer of Persia inThe Works of Sir William Jones, who planned to write a poem on Rostam and Sohrāb,following the model of Greek Tragedy;14 and Sainte-Beuve called him “l’Homère deson Pays.”15 James Atkinson, the translator of “Soohrab,” avers that “the author of theSháh Námeh has usually been called the Homer of the East, but certainly not from anyconsideration of placing the Greek and Persian together in the same scale of excel-lence”—this even though he considers the Shahnameh “the finest production of thekind which Oriental nations can boast,” precisely because it “combines a greatportion of the energy and grace of western poetry.”16 No wonder, then, that in his1853 “Sohrab and Rustum: An Episode,” Matthew Arnold, conditioned from theoutset to the supposed inferiority of Ferdowsi’s poetics, tried to recast the poem ina Homeric mold. This effort led to a translation which critic Coventry Patmore recog-nized as Vergilian in tone, which, however, amounted to a derivative, if vivid, repro-duction of Homer’s manner and spirit, rather than a poem with an independent voiceof its own.17

A half-century later, at about the same time that the first complete line-by-linetranslation of the entire Shahnameh began to appear in English,18 the leadingwestern authority on Persian literature, Cambridge scholar Edward G. Browne, wasdismissing Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh in the pages of his influential Literary History ofPersian—not through unfavorable comparison to the Greek classics, but because hethought it inferior to other classic works from Persian or Arabic:

In their high estimate of the literary value of this gigantic poem Eastern andWestern critics are almost unanimous, and I therefore feel great diffidence in con-fessing that I have never been able entirely to share this enthusiasm. The Sháhnámacannot, in my opinion, for one moment be placed on the same level as the ArabianMu‘allaqát; and though it is the prototype and model of all epic poetry in the landsof Islám, it cannot, as I think, compare for beauty, feeling, and grace with the workof the best didactic, romantic, and lyric poetry of the Persians.19

Browne wanted to like the Shahnameh, but just could not bring himself to find thebeauty in it, in part because of a “constitutional disability to appreciate epic poetryin general,” and partly because he found it full of “unnecessarily monotonous”similes, mostly about battle scenes. Though he could admire the majestic sonorityof the poem as recited by the “professional rhapsodists of Persia” (the Shāhnāmeh-khvāns), he felt the poem appeared bald on the page, particularly in translation(even in passages translated by himself).20

Translation history. Indeed, the impediment to a wider embrace of the Shahnamehin the canon of world literature was not due solely to the dismissive attitude of criticswho found it wanting in comparison to Greek and Roman classics, or who found epic

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as a genre inferior to other kinds of Persian poetry. At least in English, the lack of anaccessible, accurate and aesthetically compelling translation may have been the largestbarrier to appreciation of the poem; after all, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in Fitz-Gerald’s translation, as well as the Arabian Nights (Alf Layla wa Layla) in varioustranslations, had both become quite central to the English canon by the later nine-teenth century. In English, a partial translation of the Shahnameh appeared alreadyin the eighteenth century (Champion, 1785), with many others following in thefirst half of the nineteenth century (Atkinson, 1814; Weston, 1815; Robinson,1819; Robertson, 1829; Costello, 1845),21 all before Matthew Arnold’s version ofthe Rostam and Sohrāb episode brought Ferdowsi to the general attention of theAnglophone poetry-reading public. These translations, as well as the later adaptationby Helen Zimmern, and the full verse translation by the brothers Arthur George andEdmond Warner, failed to a greater or lesser degree in bringing Ferdowsi to life inEnglish, whether because they did not fully understand and appreciate Ferdowsi’s aes-thetics, or were not fully capable of vivifying the English, or because the negative com-parisons to Homer had already poisoned the well.

The translation situation has changed greatly since the 1960s, with the appearanceof the abridged prose translation of Reuben Levy, and the stand-alone blank versetranslations of various episodes of the poem by Jerome Clinton and Dick Davis,and finally the latter’s full prosimetric translation, it is now possible for readerswith no Persian to appreciate the poem, either in choice episodes (Sohrāb, Seyāvash,Esfandyār) or in full.22 These translations, based on newer and more rigorous textcritical editions of the original Persian text,23 have laid the groundwork for a newappreciation and critical engagement with Ferdowsi’s epic, as it enters its second mil-lennium. Meanwhile, though the tradition of comparison with Homer or other epicsremains strong,24 Mahmoud Omidsalar has launched a salvo across its bow, arguingthat the literary-scholarly tradition of presumptively measuring the Shahnameh bythe aesthetics of Homer, or the assumptions of medieval European romances,smacks of Eurocentrism and Orientalism.25 Meanwhile, recent developments intheory grounded in a European perspective have tended to reconfigure world literatureas global literature, or as translation studies, reworking some of its earlier premises.26

Frameworks for Reading

The articles gathered in this special issue grapple in various ways with the Shahnamehwithin a “world literature” framework, not to claim special privilege for a Persian epicamong other world epics, nor necessarily in hopes of creating greater parity on theliterary stage between European and non-western classics, but rather out of a criticalsensibility that appreciates the structure and dramatic scope of the poem, the charac-ters and characterization, the voice of the poem and the intrusions of its authorialpersona, and its centrality to the Persian literary tradition. Like Homer, Ferdowsimay occasionally nod, and there are major text-critical and interpretive questionsthat can make the Shahnameh a hard nut to crack. While Ferdowsi’s purpose is

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indeed serious—to find out how the kings of the world at first governed the world, andwhy it has come down to us in such sorry shape (keh giti be āghāz chun dāshtand / kehidun be mā khvār bogzāshtand)27—it is definitely not the sort of classic that, perTwain, everyone thinks should be read, but no one actually wants to read.28 Onthe contrary, the experience of reading Ferdowsi with students in the classroom inthe past two decades (whether in the Persian or in English translation) has taughtme that most younger readers engage fully and profoundly with the Shahnameh,read it with a sense of excitement, curiosity and suspense, experiencing a psychologicaldepth in the characters, and grappling to pin down a unitary meaning for the multipleand conflicting voices that speak to us with conviction and verisimilitude through thetext. What ultimately legitimates the Shahnameh’s claim to the status of a “classic” of“world literature,” then, is that contemporary readers (whether of the Persian or of agood translation) find that the Shahnameh repays reading and re-reading.

Of course, the Shāhnāmeh, as both a cycle of traditional tales handed down throughthe generations, and as a unified prose book, predates Ferdowsi.29 Hanaway callsFerdowsi’s Shahnameh the closest example in Persian literature to epic, defined as a“poetry of action, reflecting a court-centered society,” closely connected to “a particu-lar people,” and embodying their history, ideals and values, playing a role as a “cohesiveforce in ethnic or national consciousness.”30 It certainly functions as a foundationaltext, and the martial mode (razm, hamāseh) does play a dominant—though notrelentless—role in the narrative. To the extent that the poem sings of arms and themen (gordān, pahlavānān, the heroes and mighty men), we may overlook the shiftingvariety of genres found in different episodes of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh—includingmythical, legendary and historical narratives, as well as non-epic romances—andclass it as an epic, specifically a national epic.31 While this may encourage cross-culturalcomparison to Homer’s Iliad, Vergil’s Aeneid, the Ramayana, or the Mahabharata,Beowulf, or other works,32 this classification as “national epic” also serves to distinguishthe Shahnameh (1010) from other epics in the Persian tradition, such as the religiousepic of the ʿAlināmeh (1089), the romantic epic of the Bahmannāmeh (1092–1107)or the historic epic of the Zafarnāmeh (1335).33 It has been described not only as a“national epic,” but also as a “chronicle-epic,”34 or as a “tragic epic.”35 Indeed, asnational epic, we may think of the Shahnameh as the major over-arching narrative,a compendium of epic narratives relating to Iranian heroes and heroines, in contradis-tinction to the “minor epics,” or “heroic romances,” which later devolve from theShahnameh as individual episodes.36 A distinction has also been argued betweenthe Shahnameh as representative of an Iranian cyclical view of history, versus a com-peting, and more teleological, Islamic view of history.37 It has also been suggested thatthe individualism and political independence of a character like Rostam encodes a sub-versive undermining of the foundational narrative (the epic national narrative), thatwould too heroically and unconflictedly embrace the subordination of all differenceof class, tribe, subaltern ethnicity and creed out of a patriotic duty to the larger com-munal identity of the nation.38

At some point, in any case, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh crossed the threshold fromnational epic of Iran to a representative work of “world literature”—I would

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suggest, as early as 1772 in the “Essay on the Poetry of Eastern Nations” by Sir WilliamJones. Jones, perhaps as part and parcel of his larger program to put Persian languageand literature in conversation with its Indo-European cousins, describes Ferdowsi intandem with Homer. Jones does indeed bow the knee before the notion that equalstatus to that of Homer may be claimed for no poet, but nevertheless celebrates Fer-dowsi and Homer in the same breath:

both drew their images from nature herself, without catching them only by reflec-tion, and painting, in the manner of the modern poets, the likeness of a likeness; andboth possessed, in an eminent degree, that rich and creative invention, which is thevery soul of poetry.39

Jones seems genuinely enamored of the Shahnameh, writing exuberantly of its “beau-ties,” its “striking” characters and “bold and animated” figures, as well as its “sonorous,yet noble” diction, which is “polished, yet full of fire.”40

From Neglect to Critical Acclaim and Scholarly Attention

But how did we get here, to the world stage? Little notice seems to have been taken ofFerdowsi during his lifetime, or indeed for about a century after his death, outside ofhis immediate circle. The first to mention him was his townsman, Asadi of Tus,writing in the Garshāspnāmeh, composed in Nakhjavān in 455–58 H/1063–66CE, which speaks of the Shāhnāmeh qua national narrative and prose book, butalso mentions the verse version of it by Ferdowsi, which had apparently inspiredAsadi’s foray into epic verse.41 The ʿAlināmeh of Rabiʿ, composed in 482 H/1089CE, probably also has Ferdowsi in mind as a model of emulation, while neverthelessrueing the fact that his earlier fellow-in-faith-and-in-verse had not spent his massivetalents on telling the even more heroic story of the Shiʿite Imams, like ʿAli.42 Noneof the Ghaznavid historians or poets speak of him, though lines of his poem arequoted in the Mojmal al-Tavārikh va al-Qesas in about 520 H/1126 CE.43 The ear-liest extended appreciation of Ferdowsi is given by Nezāmi ʿAruzi, writing about 551H/1156 CE in his Chahār Maqāleh, just under a century and a half after theShahnameh’s completion. By that time, a satire (hajvnāmeh) against SultanMahmud was circulating, along with a legend about how he had failed to properlyrecognize and reward Ferdowsi; whether authentic or not, the legend and the satiretestify to an audience of readers anxious to defend the poet’s stature in the canonof Persian letters against a patron perceived to have slighted him.44 Nezāmi ofGanjeh, at the end of the twelfth century, appears to allude to Ferdowsi in his HaftPaykar and his Sharafnāmeh, suggesting that another poet from Tus had alreadytold the tale of the kings of Iran in one book, but promising himself to fill the gapwhere the other poet had treated only half of the tale (presumably, such as thestories of Bahrām-e Gur and of Alexander).45 The earliest surviving manuscript ofthe Shahnameh, a partial copy discovered only in recent decades in Florence, dates

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to 614 H/1217 CE, almost two centuries after Ferdowsi’s death, though a hugenumber of manuscripts survive from the following centuries.46 In the thirteenthcentury, ʿOwfi’s survey of early Persian poetry, Lobāb al-albāb (w. 618 H/1221CE) reports that the poet Masʿud Saʿd-e Salmān (d. 1121) had made a selection (ekh-tiārāt) of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, though the veracity of this report has been calledinto question.47 Also in the thirteenth century, mention of Ferdowsi and his Shahna-meh appear in historical and literary works, such as Rāvandi’s Rāhat al-Sodur (c. 599H/1202 CE) and Shams-e Qays Rāzi’s al-Moʿjam (c. 630 H/1232 CE);48 allusions tothe Shahnameh also appear in the work of Rumi (d. 1273) or Saʿdi (d. 1292),suggesting that poets and litterateurs by this time had accepted Ferdowsi into thePersian literary canon. If at first the appreciation of Ferdowsi had been limited tocourtly and literate circles, by the Safavid period, the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi hadalso become popular in a recited form with the common folk in Persia.49

In the 1220s an Arabic prose translation of the Shahnameh was produced byBondāri, an Iranian from Isfahan working for an Ayyubid prince in Damascus,50

suggesting that, above and beyond the Iranian audience, there must have been acertain curiosity at Levantine Arab courts about the contents of this great poem ofthe Persian past, from which the Saljuq rulers in Anatolia had begun to adopt theirregnal names.51 In the Il-Khanid period, Hamdollāh Mostowfi was able to gatherenough manuscripts of the Shahnameh in the years 714–20 H/1314–20 CE tomake a critical edition of the text; at the Timurid court, in 829–33 H/1426–30CE, Ghiās al-Din Bāysonghor had an illustrated copy of the work prepared from mul-tiple manuscript exemplars.52 In Ottoman Anatolia, copies of the Persian text of theShahnameh were made by scribes living in the empire, while other copies made else-where found their way to Ottoman domains as gifts or as plunder;53 meanwhile, bythe fourteenth century a partial verse translation of the poem into Turkish(in hezec meter) had appeared, followed by a full prose translation in the fifteenthcentury, and then Hasan Şerifi’s full Turkish verse translation (56,000 lines), com-pleted in Cairo for the Burjī Mamluk ruler al-Qansawh II al-Ghawrī in 916H/1511.54

Copies of the Shahnameh were frequently illustrated in the post-Mongol period,from about 1300, and evidence suggests that the iconographic tradition had begunon tiles and other objects even before our first surviving manuscript copies of thepoem, illustrated or not.55 By the 1430s, illustrated copies were also being madebeyond Persia and Iraq, in the Delhi Sultanate in India.56 A royal Safavid copy ofthe Shahnameh commissioned for Shah Tahmāsp and produced in Tabriz over aperiod of years, probably between 1522 and 1540 (the truncated 759-folio manuscriptlacks a colophon), is considered the most exquisite example of the genre.57 Tahmāspgifted it to the Ottoman Sultan Selim II in 1568, and it stayed in Istanbul untilEdmond de Rothschild brought it to Europe sometime before 1903, where it was pur-chased in 1959 by an American, Arthur Houghton, who dismembered the manuscriptto sell off individual pages. It is possibly the world’s most expensive book.58

European awareness of Ferdowsi begins in the seventeenth century, with briefnotices by Adam Olearius and Barthélemy d’Herbelot.59 As noted above, translations

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of the Shahnameh into English began to appear in the eighteenth century; by the nine-teenth century, several notable literary translations—Mohl to French, Pizzi to Italian,Rückert and others to German—brought Ferdowsi’s work to the wider westernpublic.60 Also in the nineteenth century, major projects began to put the study ofthe Persian text on firm philological grounds.61 The body of research produced onAbu al-Qāsem Ferdowsi and his Shahnameh since then is by no measure insubstantial.Milestones of European scholarship include the 1896 study of Theodor Nöldeke,treating the Shahnameh as the national epic of Iran, at a time when the nation-states of Europe were busy recovering narratives of national origins.62 The late IrajAfshar dates the modern academic study of Ferdowsi in Iran to a number of articlesby Sayyed Hasan Taqizādeh, and notes by Mohammad Qazvini, that came out afterthe First World War.63 The commemoration of what was then presumed to be themillennium of Ferdowsi’s birth was held internationally, but especially in Iran, in1934 (we now know the poet was actually born in 940),64 inspiring the constructionof a monument to Ferdowsi and a plethora of scholarly assessments and reassessmentsof the poet and his opus, including Fritz Wolff’s still useful glossary of the Shahnamehlexicon, and the Beroukhim critical edition of the text, which completed the unfin-ished volumes of the Vullers edition.65

Iraj Afshar, in the third edition of his bibliography of Ferdowsi and the Shahnameh(Ketābshenāsi-ye Ferdowsi), published in 2011, lists 5,867 separate items, includingarticles, books, manuscripts, editions and translations in various languages of eitherthe entire poem or of excerpted episodes. He points out how quixotic the projectto compile a bibliography of all this actually is, since every month a new studycomes out or a new manuscript comes to light.66 Afshar had initiated his monumentalbibliography in connection with the occasion of the 1968 restoration of Ferdowsi’smausoleum in Tus by the late Houshang Seyhoun, noting that though the literatureon Ferdowsi was at that time already voluminous, it was far from resolving many of themore meaningful questions that might be posed of the Shahnameh.67 Not long afterthat, a research institute was established, the Bonyād-e Shāhnāmeh-ye Ferdowsi(Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh Foundation), which was active from 1971 to 1978 in further-ing the literary and text-critical study of the poem, with support from the IranianMinistry of Culture and Art.68 By the time that Afshar finished compiling newitems for the second edition of his Ferdowsi bibliography in the middle of theautumn of 1975, it had almost doubled in size.69

Millennial celebrations and Shahnameh studies. Since then, a series of conferenceshave commemorated thousand-year anniversaries, such as the 1990 millennium ofthe poet’s death (calibrated to the Islamic lunar calendar, assuming a death date of411 Hijri, the millennial year of 1411 Hijri corresponded with July 1990 to July1991 CE),70 or the 1994 millennium of Ferdowsi’s presentation of the firstworking version of the Shahnameh (he disseminated the first of three authorial redac-tions of his poem in 384 H/994 CE, which, calibrated to the solar calendar, gives us1994 CE).71 The latest date mentioned in the poem itself, thought to correspond withthe author’s final redaction of the poem, comes in Ferdowsi’s verse colophon following

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the story of the fiftieth and last king of pre-Islamic Iran, Yazdegerd III.72 The date hegives there, in the last two lines of the poem, is 25 Esfand 400 H, corresponding with 8March 1010 CE:73

درازورذمرادنپسهامهبدرگدزیۀصقنونکدمآرسراگدرکروادناهجمانهبرابداتشهجنپهدشترجهز

The story of Yazdegerd has now come to an end,on the day of Ard [= 25th day] in the month of Sepandārmad [Esfand],having elapsed five times eighty years from the Hijra [= 400],in the name of the world-ruling Fashioner.

Thus, a number of international exhibitions and conferences and commemorationswere organized in 2010, which in turn led to a number of new publications, includinga previous special issue on Ferdowsi in the pages of the present journal.74 To this spateof new publications, and with great gratitude to Homa Katouzian as editor-in-chief ofthe journal of Iranian Studies, we now add this second special issue on Ferdowsi,which grew out of a series of classes, conference panels and presentations inspiredby the 2010 millennium of the Shahnameh.

Concerns that have predominated in scholarship on the Shahnameh include manu-script studies, codicology and text-editing strategies, as well as evaluation of thesources, written and oral, used by Ferdowsi;75 art history and the iconographic tra-ditions;76 the Shahnameh as a record of Iranian folklore, epic traditions, socialhistory and Indo-Iranian mythology and religion;77 the biography of the poet, thechronology by which he wrote and revised the text, and the presumed early reception(or rather, rejection) of his work.78 Several monographs attempt comprehensive treat-ments of the poet and the themes of his work.79 Some individual episodes of theShāhnāmeh have proven particularly captivating—just as certain Shakespeare playsare staged repeatedly, while others remain little read. The popularity of these particularepisodes has generated monographs devoted to their close reading and analysis.80

While there is no dearth of studies, there remains room for further close readingsand sustained arguments that grapple with the thematic, symbolic and literary struc-tures of the poem, and introduce ways for a new generation of readers to forge newunderstandings of the Shahnameh, both on its own terms, and in dialogue withother works of “world literature.” This is especially true as the publication of new criti-cal editions and manuscript facsimiles has altered the very content of the poem, thelines we understand the poet to have composed for us, which most often has meantthe erasure of interpolated lines, now thought to be scribal emendations, that hadtended to push our interpretations in particular directions. This naturally necessitatesreworking old readings and interpretations with fresh eyes, and thus opens up freshcritical vistas.

The post-millennial Shahnameh as world literature. The papers gathered here explorethe moral and biological universe depicted in the Shahnameh; probe the morphologi-cal, magical and gendered boundaries it creates; propose new rhetorical strategies to

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uncover ideological concerns encoded in the text; set the Shahnameh in dialogue withmedieval European epic and romance; and evaluate the extent to which Ferdowsireshapes his presumed sources and infuses them with his own voice. Reading thetext mostly through the new Khaleghi-Motlagh critical edition, some of the papersnevertheless step away from the meanings embedded by Ferdowsi, to try to understandhow later poets reconceive or misprise certain images or ideas, and how the enactmentof Ferdowsi’s presumed text in the performance by professional reciters (or scribes) ina particular textual community or politico-cultural context can itself illuminate andengender new possible readings and interpretations.

One very large-order question that many readers bring to the text of the Shahna-meh, or perhaps leave with after reading it, is what religion—if any—informs itsworldview. We know the author strongly professes his ʿAlid sympathies in the prolo-gue, and can therefore be thought of as a Shʿi Muslim with an obviously keen interestin the pre-Islamic history of Iran. Dick Davis, in his contribution to the current issue,“Religion in the Shahnameh,” speculates about why Ferdowsi chose to borrow fromDaqiqi the thousand lines of the poem that describe the advent of Zoroaster, ratherthan rewriting the section afresh, since, as Ferdowsi explicitly tells us, he foundDaqiqi’s verse of inferior quality. In describing the creation of the world in theShahnameh’s prologue, and beginning its history at the court of the first primevalking, Ferdowsi portrays a rather deist God, incorporating neither a noticeablyQur’anic view of creation and human origins, nor a particularly Zoroastrian theology(though the tales of the first mythic kings do preserve structural and linguisticelements of the old Indo-Iranian gods and myths). Against this backdrop, Davisexplores the larger role of religion in the work, and especially the seeming absenceof a theodicy.

Laurie Pierce, in “Serpents and Sorcery: Humanity, Gender, and the Demonic inFerdowsi’s Shahnameh,” explores the world depicted by Ferdowsi for what dis-tinguishes human from demon and man from monster. This taxonomy of naturaland supernatural beings intersects with questions of cosmologic and moral, even theo-logical, import. When humans are nurtured or cultivated by demons (as in the case ofZahhāk and Eblis) or animals (as in the case of Zāl and the Simorgh), they do theythereby become less human, even demonic, or superhuman? Though evil need notalways be embodied in supernatural or monstrous form—and indeed Ferdowsi some-times explicitly reduces demons to symbolic or abstract representations of psychicforces and impulses—evil nevertheless often manifests in biologically demonic or ser-pentine shape, though the connection between evil and the supernatural is notstraightforward. After the initial binding of the demons, the binary categories ofhuman versus non-human, natural versus magic, become increasingly blurred, and,as Pierce shows, when demons and humans intermingle, serpents and sorcery areoften implicated, but in a gendered way that differentiates between white magic asa masculine and black magic as a feminine domain.

If evil morphs and fluctuates in the Shahnameh such that human and demonicidentities are blurred, we may rightly expect a cultural-ethnic fuzziness as well, inwhich not all of Iran’s enemies will be evil, nor all Iranians virtuous. Readers may

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well find that, although the Shahnameh for the most part confidently assumes theIranian identity of the legitimate rulers of Iran, the notion of Iranianness and thevery category of ethnic identity is continually blurred, whether by Rostam as a misce-genated descendant of Zāl and Rudābeh, by the plethora of exogamic marriages in theroyal line, or by the formative experience of numerous Iranian nobles, princes andkings in foreign lands or in a form of internal exile (e.g. Zāl in the nest of theSimorgh, Fereydun in the grasslands of Barmāyeh the cow, Key Kāvus in “Māzan-darān,” Sohrāb in Samangān, Seyāvash and Key Khosrow in Turān, Goshtāsp inIndia and Rum, Dārāb on the banks of a river at the home of a fuller, Sekandar inRum, Sāsān son of Dārā—and four generations after him—as shepherds and cameldrivers in India, Shāpur Zu al-Aktāf in Rum, Bahrām-e Gur in “Yemen,” KhosrowParviz in Azerbaijan). Because modern scholarly reception of the Shahnamehemerged in the era of nationalism, and because it was vigorously promoted in thatcontext during the Pahlavi era in Iran, we have become conditioned to think of thework as a “national epic.” However, as Edmund Hayes argues in his contributionto this special issue, “The Death of Kings: Group Identity and the Tragedy ofNezhād in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh,” Ferdowsi’s concern as a member of the dehqānclass whose project it was to collect and preserve the Shāhnāmeh narratives, was tounderstand the place occupied in the social hierarchy by the remnants of the oldIranian nobility (dehqān, āzādegān, bozorgān, sepahbod) in a new era where lineage—in the sense of birth, breeding and mettle (a constellation of concepts the Shahna-meh conveys with nezhād, tokhm[eh], gowhar, etc.)—is no longer the necessary deter-minant of Iranian group identity. Hayes closely analyzes the idea of lineage (nezhād) inthe story of the death of Yazdegerd and the coming of the Muslim Arab army at theend of the Shahnameh to understand Ferdowsi’s own construction of Iranianness as a“social theory” linking the Iranian nobility of fourth/tenth-century Iran across thesocial rupture of the end of the Iranian monarchy back to the heroic lineages ofthe pre-Islamic past. While Ferdowsi might have taken some comfort in Shi‘ibeliefs about legitimacy and continuity, as Hayes proposes, his Shahnameh reflectsan essentially ambivalent predicament for Muslim Iranian dehqāns of Ferdowsi’sera, who cannot satisfactorily explain their attenuated situation either by theologicalspeculation or philosophy.

In the authorial prologues and epilogues to many episodes of the Shahnameh, Fer-dowsi rails against the malevolent working of the spheres of time, often almost perso-nified as destiny or fate (the lexicon for it includes sepehr, falak, bakht, zamāneh,zamān, ruzegār). In the most poignantly tragic tales (e.g. Sohrāb, Seyāvash, Esfandyār),Ferdowsi surely expects his readers to be shaking their fists at the heavens right along-side the characters and the narratorial persona of the tale, as they lament the tragedyand the injustice of heroic characters driven to death by a relentless, malevolentlyindifferent fate, a force that manifests itself as historic predicament, father–son con-flict or psychic conflict. But perhaps nowhere in the Shahnameh is the sense of injus-tice and tragedy more starkly and palpably voiced than in the tale of Sohrāb andRostam, and so it is fitting that two of the articles in this issue frame their discussionsaround this episode, and Ferdowsi’s strategies to control the narrative in the absence of

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a theodicy or other redeeming explanatory mechanism to invest the horror of whathappens with meaning.

The contribution of Cameron Cross, “‘If Death is Just, What is Injustice?’ IllicitRage in ‘Rostam and Sohrab’ and the ‘Knight’s Tale’,” situates the Shahnameh’sconcern for justice as against tyranny in the wider discourse of medieval literatureand philosophy, setting it in conversation with the Knight’s Tale from Chaucer’s Can-terbury Tales, which he shows to be a cogent parallel. Cross sees the narrators of bothtales invested in denying the right—to their characters as well as to their readers—of asense of moral outrage or poetic justice, yet shows that the emotional pressures causedby the tragic sequence of events eventually stress both narratives to the breaking point,allowing resistant counter-narratives to well up through the cracks. Neither Chaucernor Ferdowsi intervene decisively to adjudicate between these conflicting frameworksfor understanding; in the case of the Sohrāb tale, Ferdowsi points wildly at one char-acter or force, and then another, unable to fix blame in a particular locus—perhaps it iseverywhere, perhaps nowhere.

Meanwhile, Richard Gabri, in “Framing the Unframable in Ferdowsi’s Shahna-meh,” allows that the conundrum presented in the thought experiment aboutjustice that frames the tale of Sohrāb is a paradox produced in part by the juxtapositionof two different cosmologies: a monotheistic, Abrahamic one in which meaning andredemption are possible; and a pre-Islamic, possibly Zurvanist one in which the work-ings of the world and fate are either meaningless or at best inscrutable. But anotherequally important aspect of this paradox—and this paradoxically so, for a poet other-wise adept at illuminating his characters’ internal psychological conflicts and con-flicted motivations—is the limitation of language (sokhon/sokhan) itself. Gabriargues that in the prologues and epilogues to many episodes, Ferdowsi is keen tostake out, if not a philosophy, then a condition of language, namely that it is incom-mensurate to the task of explaining events, either in the world interior to the text, or inthe world outside the text inhabited by the poet and his readers. Gabri also points outa tone of dark humor, a subtle irony and playfulness in the poet’s language, thatmirrors what he describes as an epistemological agnosticism about our ability to“get to the bottom of phenomena through words,” because the meaning of phenom-ena are beyond our ken. For Gabri, Ferdowsi’s perspective on the events he narratesultimately remains, at the end of the poem, enigmatic and equivocal, not susceptibleof weaving into a unitary meaning or consistent vision.

The final two papers take a somewhat different approach, reading particular pas-sages in Ferdowsi’s poem through the telescoped lens of a particular later momentin the text’s reception history. This process brings us to a clearer vision of what Fer-dowsi’s tales and symbols meant, or did not mean, to his contemporary readers. Forexample, study of the scribal and performance traditions of the Shahnameh canshow us how new plot twists or narrative arcs have been introduced to certain episodesfor ideological or practical reasons; elements of the narrative can thus be restructuredand re-contoured to produce new or altered meanings. Likewise, we may trace in thework of later poets ways in which the semiotic horizons of certain salient tropes orscenes appearing in the Shahnameh have shifted, morphed or been repackaged over

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time. As we see in these concluding articles, despite the repetition of conventionaltropes over a period of centuries, classical Persian literature remains a dynamic culturalfield, responding to socio-political developments which can set in motion a refashion-ing and revalorizing of earlier tropes, metaphors and plots, even (or especially) thoseappearing in central canonical texts, like the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi.

Asghar Seyed-Gohrab’s contribution, “Corrections and Elaborations: A One-NightStand in Narrations of Ferdowsi’s Rostam and Sohrāb,” also takes as its focus theSohrāb episode, but not the question of justice set up in the framing of the storyand considered here in the articles by Cross and Gabri, but rather the scene ofTahmineh and Rostam’s nocturnal tryst, in which they conceive Sohrāb. Seyed-Gohrab describes the interpolations introduced by scribes into the manuscript tra-dition of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, as well as the way the story is refashioned inmodern times in performances of this episode by professional shāhnāmeh story-tellers. After describing the modern practice of naqqāli, Seyed-Gohrab walks usthrough the account of this scene as given in the text of the Haft Lashgar, a tumāror story-teller’s prompt-book for reciting the Shahnameh, dating to 1913. He alsodescribes a performance of the scene by a particular twentieth-century naqqāl,Morshed ‘Abbās Zariri. Here we find audience considerations, and a sense ofdecorum, modifying the plot of the love tryst to make it more modest and Islamicthan one finds in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, or indeed in other Persian narrative versethat depicts heterosexual love-making. “Censorship, not by means of excision, butby interpolation of new text,” is thus a phenomenon of both the scribal traditionand the performance tradition, Seyed-Gohrab concludes, and helps adapt older cano-nical works like the Shahnameh, just as modern stage productions of Shakespeareadapt his plays to the considerations of modern audiences.

Finally, Dominic Brookshaw’s “Mytho-Political Remakings of Ferdowsi’s Jamshidin the Lyric Poetry of Injuid and Mozaffarid Shiraz” traces a major shift in theJamshid legend as presented by Ferdowsi, in which Solomon and Jamshid are conflatedfrom the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries CE onward, a conflation accomplished bypoets writing in the ghazal and qasideh forms, using the rhetorical device of talmih(allusion), or “re-remembering.” Drawing on the idea of a lieu de mémoire, Brookshawtraces the changing political use of the ruins of Achaemenid Persepolis during the cen-turies after Ferdowsi, from the Sasanians through the Buyids and Salghurids, and arguesthat poets, in knowingly ahistorical ways, mapped elements of the Judeo-Islamicaccounts of Solomon’s kingship with Ferdowsi’s pre-Islamic account of Jamshid, intro-ducing new elements (such as the Jamshidian cup) in the process. This deliberate con-flation served a particular legitimating function in the fourteenth century, namely tomake the pre-Islamic past relevant to the post-Ilkhanid present. We may imaginethat Ferdowsi himself, by some process and dynamic similar to what Seyed-Gohraband Brookshaw describe, has in places, similarly introduced new wrinkles into theversion(s) of the Shahnameh which came down to him (the ideological impetus thatmight have motivated Ferdowsi to do so are laid out in the article by Hayes).

No doubt we will continue to read and re-read the Shahnameh for some time, pro-ducing new interpretations or reviving old ones, while creative artists will revisit and

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refashion enduring elements of the poem that focus communal memory and embedcultural and human values. It would be foolish to predict that we will still bereading the Shahnameh with equal attentiveness when its second millennium rollsaround; by that time, some 900 years of as yet unwritten works will be jostling fora place in the global, or galactic, canon, and our current idea of what constitutesworld literature will doubtless be radically reconfigured. But for the moment, as forthe past many centuries, Ferdowsi’s literary monument continues to inspire poets,scribes, critics, politicians, historians, etc., and to claim our attention on the pageand in the republic of letters.

Notes

1. Throughout this current special issue of Iranian Studies, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh is treated as a nati-vized English title, italicized, but spelled without diacritical marks. Where it is clearly a Persian word,such as in bibliographic entries transliterated from Persian, the word appears with diacriticals, as perthe journal’s transliteration system for Persian words: Shāhnāmeh. The author Ferdowsi (Firdawsī,Firdausi, etc.) and his poem, Shāhnāmeh (Shāhnāma, Sháhnámih, etc.) have been spelled in diverseforms in western scholarship; in quotations and bibliographic citations, these spellings are left as is.

2. For the prehistory of this term, see the introduction in Pizer, The Idea of World Literature. Mufti,“Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures,” 459–60, sees the “philological knowledgerevolution” precipitated by the “‘discovery’ of the classical languages of the East, the invention ofthe linguistic family tree whose basic form is still with us today, the translation and absorptioninto the Western languages of more and more works from Persian, Arabic, and the Indian languages,among others” as the catalyst for world literature. As non-western literary and sacred texts elbowedtheir way into “the international literary space that had emerged in early modern times in Europe as astructure of rivalries between the emerging vernacular traditions, transforming the scope and struc-ture of that space forever” (459), a “gestalt shift” caused by the “assimilation of the Oriental exemplathat became increasingly available to European reading publics in large numbers for the first timefrom the 1770s gradually onward” created the conditions for a world literature (460).

3. See Veit, “Goethe’s Fantasies of the Orient,” 164, who argues that though Goethe was drawnthroughout his whole career (beginning as early as 1774 with his “Mahomets-Gesang”) to “Orientalsubjects” (encompassing for him both the Far and the Near East), he also “expressed a marked dislikefor the Orient because he experienced it as a threat to his aesthetic sensibility.”

4. See Birus, “Goethean Concept of World Literature,” 7; and Pizer, “Goethe’s ‘World Literature’ Para-digm,” 216.

5. Damrosch, What is World Literature, 1 and 12, quotes the elderly Goethe speaking in January 1827to his young friend Eckermann (who helped popularize Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur with the1835 publication of their conversations, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens):“I therefore like to look about me in foreign nations, and advise everyone to do the same. Nationalliterature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyonemust strive to hasten its approach … But, while we thus value what is foreign, we must not bindourselves to some particular thing, and regard it as a model. We must not give this value to theChinese, or the Serbian, or Calderon, or the Nibelungen; but, if we really want a pattern, we mustalways return to the ancient Greeks, in whose works the beauty of mankind is constantly represented.All the rest we must look at only historically; appropriating to ourselves what is good, so far as itgoes.”

6. In 1828, Goethe remarked: “Every literature dissipates within itself when it is not reinvigoratedthrough foreign participation. What researcher into nature doesn’t rejoice at the marvelous thingswhich he sees brought forth through refraction?” (“Eine jede Literatur ennuyiert sich zuletzt insich selbst, wenn sie nicht durch fremde Teilnahme wieder aufgefrischt wird. Welcher Naturforscher

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erfreut sich nicht der Wunderdinge, die er durch Spiegelung hervorgebracht sieht?”); as cited byPizer, “Goethe’s ‘World Literature’ Paradigm,” 217, following Goethes sämtliche Werke, 136–7.

7. Goethe writing in 1827 in the journal Über Kunst und Altertum, as cited and translated in Pizer,“Goethe’s ‘World Literature’ Paradigm,” 215, following Goethes sämtliche Werke, Jubiläums-Ausgabe in 40 Bänden, 97: “Überall hört und liest man von dem Vorschreiten des Menschenges-chlechtes, von den weiteren Aussichten der Welt-und Menschenverhältnisse. Wie es auch imGanzen hiemit beschaffen sein mag, welches zu untersuchen und naher zu bestimmen nichtmeines Amtes ist, will ich doch von meiner Seite meine Freunde aufmerksam machen, daß ich über-zeugt sei, es bilde sich eine allgemeine Weltliteratur, worin uns Deutschen eine ehrenvolle Rolle vor-behalten ist.”

8. Arnold, “The Study of Poetry” (originally titled “General Introduction”), esp. xvii–xx; quotationfrom xix.

9. Mark Twain’s Speeches, 194. In a talk (“Disappearance of Literature”) delivered on 20 November1900 at the Nineteenth Century Club in New York, Twain attributes this observation to a ProfessorWinchester.

10. Twentieth-century efforts to compile such canons for a liberal education include Charles EliotNorton’s fifty-one volumes of The Harvard Classics (1909); John Erskine’s “Great Books” core cur-riculum of western civilization at Columbia University in the 1920s, which later migrated to the Uni-versity of Chicago with Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler in the 1930s and 1940s, whofounded the Great Books Foundation in 1947, which led to the publication of the fifty-four (andlater expanded to sixty) volumes of The Great Books of the Western World by the Encyclopaedia Brit-annica company. For an interpretation of the democratic impulses of this movement, see Lacy,Dream of a Democratic Culture. Of course, such canons have come under fire from Marxist, feminist,postcolonial and various minority studies positions for their assumptions of “dead white male” pri-vilege. For an overview of positions on the canon from the eighteenth century to the end of the twen-tieth, see Morrissey, Debating the Canon, and Levine, Opening of the American Mind. For an attemptto define and trace the concept of “the Classic,” see Kermode, The Classic.

11. Among other non-western works included alongside the Shahnameh on Lubbock’s best books list, ofwhich there were several iterations over the years, were (books well enough known not to requireitalics!): the Arabian Nights, the Koran, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, Kalidasa’s Śakuntala,the Analects of Confucius, The Sheking (Shih Ching). If they can be said to partake in a non-western ethos, we might also add western works about the “East,” like St. Hilaire’s Le Bouddha etsa religion and Voltaire’s Zadig.

12. Gottheil, Persian Literature, vol. 1: iii, iv and vii. The information about Sir John Lubbocks’ list isgiven in the Introduction by E. W. [Epiphanius Wilson] to ibid., 3.

13. Wilson, in Gottheil, Persian Literature, vol. 1: 3–4.14. The Works of Sir William Jones, vol. 2: 508 and 512.15. See the editors’ notes to Arnold, Oxford Authors: Matthew Arnold, 542.16. Atkinson, Soohrab, x–xi.17. Editors’ notes to Arnold, “Suhrab and Rustum,” in Oxford Authors: Matthew Arnold, 541.18. The partly rhyming, partly blank verse translation of Arthur G. Warner and Edmond Warner

appeared in nine volumes over a period of two decades as The Sháhnáma of Firdausí.19. Browne, Literary History of Persia, vol. 2: 142.20. Browne, Literary History of Persia, vol. 2: 142–3. While Reuben Levy’s abridged translation also

seems to imagine the battle scenes at the heart of the narrative, my own reading is that Ferdowsiis less interested in his characters’ feats of brawn on the battlefield, than with the inner life oftheir minds.

21. For a history and bibliography of English translations of the Shahnameh, see Lewis, “ClassicalPersian”; and Loloi, “Šāh-nāma Translations iii. Into English.”

22. Modern English renderings that make Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh accessible and appealing to a broadgeneral readership, and well suited to classroom usage, include the abridged prose translation ofLevy, The Epic of the Kings, and the prose-with-verse translation (with minor abridgements) by

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Davis, Shahnameh. The Persian Book of Kings (originally published as three separate lavishly illus-trated volumes by Mage Publishers). The three stand-alone episodes are given in blank verse trans-lations by Clinton, The Tragedy of Sohráb and Rostám; Davis, The Legend of Seyavash; and Clinton,In the Dragon’s Claws.

23. These include the editions of Ferdowsi by Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh, 8 vols. (1987–2008); MostafāJeyhuni, 5 vols. (1379/2001); and the “Moscow edition” under the direction of A.E. Bertel’s in 9vols. (1960–1971), Ferdowsi, Shax-nāme: Kriticheskij Tekst.

24. Von Grunebaum begins his essay on “Firdausī’s Concept of History,” 168, with mention of the Iliadand Odyssey, the Aeneid, and Camões’ Lusiad. In situating the Shahnameh in a comparative Indo-European context, Baldick, Homer and the Indo-Europeans, draws on the works of GeorgesDumézil, Gregory Nagy, Jaan Puhvel and Scott Littleton. Numerous works in Persian also pursuecomparison to Athenian Tragedies (e.g. Kiā, Shāhnāmeh-ye Ferdowsi va Terāzhedi-ye Āteni), or toHomer (e.g. Jamāli, Ferdowsi va Humer). Points of comparison between the Iliad and the Shahnamehare meaningfully engaged in English by Banani, “Reflections on Re-Reading,” and Davis, “In theEnemy’s Camp.”

25. Omidsalar, Poetics and Politics, 11–31. In a separate monograph, Omidsalar takes the Iranian dia-spora community likewise to task for viewing Ferdowsi through the lens of modern Iranian nation-alism as an ossified icon, but continues to view the reception and appreciation of Ferdowsi asdichotomized along an Iranian-versus-western fault line; see, for example, Omidsalar, Iran’s Epicand America’s Empire, 207: “In Persian literary studies in general, and especially in Shāhnāmehstudies,Western criteria and standards are imposed upon Persian texts that can neither be understoodnor defined by them … submission to Western standards impacts the way we understand ourselvesand our national poem.”

26. See the discussion in Apter, Against World Literature, especially 1–9. While she endorses the projectof world literature for its goals of deprovincializing the canon and valorizing translation, she harborsreservations about a “reflexive endorsement of cultural equivalence and substitutability” or the “cel-ebration of nationally and ethnically branded ‘differences’” as packaged identities (ibid., 2).

27. Ferdowsi, Shāhnāmeh, ed. Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh, 1:12, line 121 (hereafter abbreviated as SN inthe notes).

28. Though Rypka, History of Iranian Literature, 163, speaks of the “intense seriousness of Firdausī’snature.”

29. On the dogged question of the pre-history of the Shāhnāmeh and the nature of Ferdowsi’s sources,primarily whether written or oral, a voluminous body of scholarship exists, inter alia: Dustkhvāh, Far-āyand-e Takvin-e Hamāseh-ye Irān; Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Hamāseh-sarā-ye Bāstān”; Davidson, Poetand Hero, 54–72, and 2nd ed., 61–82; Yamamoto, Oral Background of Persian Epics; and Omidsalar,Poetics and Politics.

30. Hanaway, “Epic Poetry,” 96. Readers unfamiliar with the poemmay consult Lewis, “Shahnama,” for aquick overview of the poem’s scope.

31. See Nöldeke, Iranian National Epic; and Safā, Hamāseh-sarāʾi dar Irān, who classifies epics inPersian as national (melli, 160–342), historical (tārikhi, 343–76), or religious (dini, 377–90), withthe Shahnameh in the national category.

32. See Hanaway, “The Iranian Epics,” in the 1978 volume by Felix Oinas that truly situates the Shah-nameh in a conversation about epic as a worldwide phenomenon.

33. See Omidsalar, Poetics and Politics, 6–7, following Jason’s classification in Ethnopoetry: Form,Content, Function.

34. Puhvel, Comparative Mythology, 117.35. See Banani, “Ferdowsi and the Art of Tragic Epic.”36. The terms come from Meisami, “Genres of Court Literature,” 251–2, who also speaks of “historical

pseudo-epics” and “religious pseudo-epics.”37. See Meisami, “Past in Service of the Present.”38. See Amanat, “Introduction: Iranian Identity Boundaries,” 3, who suggests Rostam “may be seen not

only as a guarantor of Iran’s territorial integrity,” and as a crown-bestowing pillar of the monarchy

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and “restorer of its sovereignty,” but also as “a champion of the Iranian self-asserting identity thatresists powerful personal, familial, and ethnic appeals detrimental to the very essence of a constructedSelf.”

39. Jones, Poems Consisting Chiefly of Translations, 186.40. Ibid., 185.41. Omidsalar, Poetics and Politics, 55; and Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Asadī Tūsī.”42. The poem is recently published as Rabiʿ, ʿAlīnāmeh: Manzumeh-i Kohan, Sorudeh beh Sāl-e 482,

edited by Mohammad-Rezā Shafiʿi-Kadkani and Mahmoud Omidsalar, Tehran: Mirās-e Maktub,1388/2009.

43. Omidsalar, “Could al-Thaʿālibī?,” 119, in Jostār-hā-ye Shāhnāmeh-shenāsi, 508. Amin-Riāhi, Fer-dowsi, 160–65, attributes the silence about Ferdowsi and other versions of the Shāhnāmeh to anactive antipathy on the part of the ruling powers of the day.

44. See Shahbazi, Ferdowsi: A Critical Biography, 97–103; both Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Ferdowsi, Abu’l-Qāsem ii. Hajw-nāma,” and Amin-Riāhi, Ferdowsi, 142–144, have a less skeptical view of the auth-enticity of the satire.

45. Omidsalar, Poetics and Politics, 50–51 and 205–6, following the Moscow edition of the Sharafnāmehand the Servatiān edition of Haft Paykar.

46. The partial manuscript in Florence (265 folios, 48×32cm, with shelf mark Magl. III.24 in theBiblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze) has been digitized (see online at http://manoscritti.bncf.firenze.sbn.it/?p=2106%3E orhttp://teca.bncf.firenze.sbn.it/ImageViewer/servlet/ImageViewer?idr=BNCF0004147894#page/1/mode/1up (accessed September 28, 2014). While one mightsurmise that since we have no surviving manuscript witness to the text of the poem until two centuriesafter its completion, the Shahnameh could not have beenwidely popular during that period.While thisseems logical, the oldest dated manuscript of any Persian work dates only to the middle of the eleventhcentury, and few Persian manuscripts survive from prior to the thirteenth century. Two of the earlyShahnameh manuscripts, including the London manuscript dated 1274 CE (Ferdowsi, Shāhnā-meh-ye Ferdowsi: Chāp-e ʿAksi az Noskheh-ye Khatti-ye Ketābkhāneh-ye Britāniā), and the newly dis-covered manuscript NC. 43 in the Bibliotheque orientale of the Universite Saint-Joseph in Beirut,Lebanon (Ferdowsi, Shāhnāmeh: Sorudeh-ye Hakim Abu al-Qāsem Ferdowsi), have both been pub-lished in facsimile. The undated Beirut manuscript is probably from the mid-thirteenth to mid-four-teenth century, making it among the important early manuscript witnesses to the Shahnameh.

47. See Omidsalar, “Masʿud-e Saʿd-e Salmān va Shāhnāmeh-ye Ferdowsi,” in Jostār-hā-ye Shāhnāmeh-shenāsi, 214–25.

48. Following the dating of Omidsalar, “Could al-Thaʿālibī?,” 121, in Jostār-hā-ye Shāhnāmeh-shenāsi,506.

49. See Rubanovich,“Tracking the Shahnama Tradition,” who argues from the evidence of the text ofvarious popular prose romances (dastāns) that by the sixteenth century CE, Ferdowsi’s Shahna-meh—likely through oral performance rather than book-reading—had largely displaced versions ofepisodes in the Iranian epic cycle deriving from non-Ferdowsi recitations of the material.

50. There is some discrepancy over the precise dating of the translation; manyworksmention 624H/1227CE, but see Schmidt, “The Reception of Firdausi’s Shahnama,” 127, n45. Āyati, Shāhnāmeh-ye Fer-dowsi, ix, gives 620–21 H/1223–24. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, s.v. “al-Bundārī, al-Fathb. ʿAlī,” available online at http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-3/al-bunda-ri-al-fath-b-ali-COM_25422 (accessed September 28, 2014), gives no dates for the compo-sition of Bondāri’s works. See also Jeyhuni’s introduction, Ferdowsi, Shāhnāmeh-ye Ferdowsi, 0: 79–85.

51. Beginning with Key Khosrow I in the last decade of the twelfth century CE, all but two of the Saljuqrulers of thirteenth-century Anatolia (Qelech Arslan and Masʿud II) adopted Keyānid regnal namesfrom the Shahnameh: Key Kāvus I, Key Qobād I, Key Khosrow II, Key Kāvus II, Key Qobād II, KeyKhosrow III, Key Qobād II. Indeed, if we can credit the report of Joveyni, an affinity for the legend-ary section of the Shahnameh within the Saljuq house can be traced back to Toghrol III (r. 571–90H/1176–94), said to have recited verses from the Shahnameh as he wielded his mace in battle (citedby Özgüdenli, “Šāh-nāma Translations i. Into Turkish”).

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52. See Jeyhuni’s edition of Ferdowsi, Shāhnāmeh-ye Ferdowsi, 0: 89–94; and on Bāysonghor’s commis-sion, see Lentz and Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Bāysongorī Šāh-nāma.”

53. Schmidt, “The Reception of Firdausi’s Shahnama,” 122–6, enumerates over sixty manuscripts of thepoem dating from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, still extant in Turkish libraries,though many of these were produced outside Anatolia. See also Özgüdenli, “Šāh-nāma Translationsi. Into Turkish.”

54. Schmidt, “The Reception of Firdausi’s Shahnama,” 128–31; and Özgüdenli, “Šāh-nāma Translationsi. Into Turkish.” See Schmidt and Özgüdenli for details about other subsequent Turkish translations.

55. There is a long illustration history of the text, which has been the subject of extensive scholarship. Foran overview, see Hillenbrand, Shahnama: The Visual Language; and Shreve Simpson, “Šāh-nāma iv.Illustrations.”

56. See Shreve Simpson, “Šāh-nāma iv. Illustrations.” A searchable online collection of pre-modern illus-trations of the Shahnameh at the Cambridge Shahnama Project (http://shahnama.caret.cam.ac.uk/new/jnama/page/), and the FitzwilliamMuseum’s online Ferdowsi exhibit (http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/gallery/shahnameh/index.html), give us unprecedented access to the illustration history ofthe work, including coverage of the early illustration history (http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/gallery/shahnameh/patronage.html), and of the illustrations from India (http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/gallery/shahnameh/vgallery/section5.html). As lithographed or printed Persian worksbecame common in nineteenth-century India and Iran, Shahnameh illustrations no longer dependedon royal patronage, and underwent radical evolution, on which, see the works of Marzolph, “Illus-trated Persian Lithographic Editions of the Shahnameh”; Narrative Illustration in Persian Litho-graphed Books; and “The Shahnameh in Print.”

57. See Canby, Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp; Dickson and Welch, The Houghton Shahnameh; andWelch, A King’s Book of Kings.

58. For the story of Arthur Houghton and the repatriation of the Shah Tahmāsp Shahnameh to theMuseum of Contemporary Art in Tehran, see Souren Melikian, “Destroying a Treasure: The SadStory of a Manuscript,” New York Times, April 27, 1996; and Geraldine Norman, “How ArtDealer Did a Pounds 13m Swap with Rulers of Iran,” Independent, October 17, 1994. Other pressreports indicate that auctions at Sotheby’s fetched prices of $1.7 million in 2006 and $12.3 millionin April 2011 for single-page illustrations cut from the Houghton, or Shah Tahmāsp, Shahnameh.Of the 258 illustrations originally in the Shah Tahmāsp manuscript, many were sold by Houghtonthroughout the 1970s and 1980s (he died in 1990), or given to the Metropolitan Museum of Artas a tax write-off. In 1994, the remaining 118 illustrations along with the pages of text and thebinding were repatriated to Iran in exchange for Willem de Kooning’s “Woman III,” a paintingthen valued at either $12 or $20 million, but which resold in 2006 for $137 million (to hedge-fundbillionaire Steven Cohen). By way of comparison, the 1477 first printing of Ptolemy’s Cosmographia,sold at auction for $4 million, and Shakespeare’s first folio edition went for $5.2 million, both in 2006;the St. Cuthbert Gospel sold for $14 million in 2012, and in December 2007 a copy of the MagnaCarta sold for $21.3 million. In 1983, the Henry the Lion Gospel now at the Helmarshausen mon-astery in Braunschweig, Germany, fetched £8.14 million at auction. Not to be outdone, “the mostexpensive book ever sold” was acquired by Bill Gates for $30.8 million in 1994—the unique notebookof Leonardo da Vinci, the Codex Leicester. But wemay conclude that if just two of the individual pagesof Shah Tahmāsp’s Shahnameh sold for a combined $14million, if we factor the fewmillion generatedfrom earlier sales of other pages of themanuscript, and the value of the remaining 118 pages of text andof illustrations of this manuscript, may well qualify it as the most expensive book ever.

59. See Geizer, “The First Biographical Data about Firdowsi in Europe.”Geizer notes, ibid., 282, that thefirst scholarly article in Russian about Ferdowsi was published in 1826 in Aziatsky Vestnik by Botya-nov, on “Ferdowsi, the Persian Homer.”

60. The French translation by Jules Mohl accompanied his critical edition of the text (see next note), andthen appeared separately (1871–78); Italo Pizzi’s beautiful Italian translation, Il Libro dei Rei,appeared in 8 volumes in Turin (1886–88); in German, A.F. von Schack, Heldensagen von Firdousi,2nd ed. (1865) and Friedrich Rückert, Firdosi’s Königsbuch (1890–95).

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61. We may mention in particular three critical editions of the Persian text: Macan, The Shah nameh;Mohl, Le livre des rois; and Vullers, Firdusii.

62. Theodor Nöldeke, “Das iranische Nationalepos” (in Grundriß der iranischen Philologie, vol. 2., editedby Wilhelm Geiger and Ernst Kuhn. Strassburg, 1986–1904; with a 2nd ed., Berlin and Leipzig,1920), translated to English by Leonid Bodganov as The Iranian National Epic or Shahnamah(Bombay, 1930).

63. Afshār, Ketābshenāsi-ye Ferdowsi, 28, referring to Taqizādeh’s articles collected and republished byHabib Yaghmāʾi as Ferdowsi va Shāhnāmeh-ye U; and Qazvini’s notes as edited by Afshār(Qazvini, Yāddāsht-hā, especially vol. 10).

64. On the celebration of the various millennial milestones related to Ferdowsi from 1934 onward, andscholarly publications associated with them, see Abdullaeva and Melville, “Shahnama: the Millen-nium of an Epic Masterpiece”; and Shahbazi, “Ferdowsī, Abu’l-Qāsem iv. Millenary Celebration.”The political significance of the construction and the dedication ceremonies of Ferdowsi’s Mauso-leum in 1934 are discussed at length in Zahiremāmi, “Hezāre-ye Ferdowsi.”

65. Fritz Wolff, a German Jew who perished eight years later in a concentration camp, contributed as abirth millennial gift, the Glossar zu Firdosis Schahname. Saʿid Nafisi led the editorial committee thatproduced the Shāhnāmeh-ye Ferdowsi (Tehran: Beroukhim, 1313–15/1934–36), improving on theearlier editions by Vullers, Macan and Mohl by taking additional manuscripts into consideration.This Beroukhim edition of the Shahnameh remained the standard edition of the Persian text atleast until the publication in Tehran of the edition by Mohammad Dabir-Siāqi (1335/1956), orthe Moscow edition under the direction of A.E. Bertels (1960–71).

66. Afshār, Ketābshenāsi-ye Ferdowsi, 19.67. Ibid., 27–8. On the history of the mausoleum (ārāmgāh) of Ferdowsi, see Shahbazi, “Ferdowsī, Abu’l-

Qāsem iii. Mausoleum.” For Houshang Seyhoun (1920–2014), see the obituary notice at the Ency-clopaedia Iranica, available online at http://www.iranicaonline.org/pages/houshang-seyhoun(accessed September 24, 2014).

68. See Tafazzoli, “Bonyād-e Šāh-nāma-ye Ferdowsi.”69. Afshār, Ketābshenāsi-ye Ferdowsi, 25–6.70. For example, a Shahnameh millennial conference was held in Tehran in 1369/1990, the proceedings

of which were published by Sotudeh, Namiram az in Pas keh Man Zendeh-am. Another conferencewas held in Paris in 1991, leading to the publication of a collection of articles edited by Meskub,Tan-e Pahlavān va Ravān-e Kheradmand. The Foundation for Iranian Studies in Maryland pub-lished a tenth-anniversary special issue of its journal, likewise dedicated to the Shahnameh, guest-edited by Shāhrokh Meskub: Irānnāmeh (Vizhehnāmeh-ye Shāhnāmeh-ye Ferdowsi) 10, no. 1(Winter 1370/1992).

71. In 1994, for the millennial anniversary of the first presentation copy of Ferdowsi, the Supreme Sovietof Tajikistan and the Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan, in partnership with three foundations and aprivate firm, sponsored publication of Bashiri, Firdowsi’s Shahname: 1000 Years After.

72. On the three recensions of the poem which Ferdowsi released during his lifetime, see Shahbazi,Ferdowsi: A Critical Biography, 71–94; and Khaleghi-Motlagh, ““Ferdowsi, Abu’l-Qāsemi. Life.”

73. SN, 8:488, lines 893–894. Jeyhuni, in the introductory volume (vol. 0 [sic]) to his edition of Shāh-nāmeh-ye Ferdowsi, 0: 68–78, gives a lengthy treatment of Ferdowsi’s colophon. In the Jeyhuniedition, this final section of the poem is entitled “ākhar-e Shāhnāmeh,” whereas Khaleghi-Motlagh’stitle gives “goftār andar tārikh-e goftan-e Shāhnāmeh.”

74. “Millenium of the Shahnama of Firdausi,” edited by Firuza Abdullaeva and Charles Melville, IranianStudies 43, no. 1 (February 2010). For specifics on the numerous millennial exhibitions and confer-ences, see the article in that issue by Abdullaeva and Melville, “Shahnama: the Millennium of an EpicMasterpiece”; see also the end of the bibliography of Shreve Simpson, “Šāh-nāma iv. Illustrations,”which mentions many additional commemorative occasions or events.

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75. See, for example, Khaleghi-Motlagh’s collection, Gol-e Ranj-hā-ye Kohan, and also his Shāhnāmeh azDastnevīs tā Matn; Khatibi, Darbāreh-ye Shāhnāmeh; Omidsalar, Jostār-hā-ye Shāhnāmeh-shenāsi;and Rastegār-e Fasā’i, Matn-shenāsi-e Shāhnāmeh-ye Ferdowsi.

76. For example, Hillenbrand, Shahnama: The Visual Language; and Shreve Simpson, “Šāh-nāma iv.Illustrations”; and several articles in the two collections, Shahnama Studies I, ed. by Melville, andII, ed. by Melville and van den Berg.

77. Studies such as this are scattered in numerous books and articles in various journals and collections.See, for example, Bahār, Az Ostureh tā Tārikh; and also Pazhuheshi dar Asātir-e Irān; Dustkhvāh,Hamāseh-ye Irān; Omidsalar, Jostār-hā-ye Shāhnāmeh-shenāsi; and Puhvel, Comparative Mythology.

78. For example, Amin-Riāhi, Ferdowsi; and Shahbazi, Ferdowsi: A Critical Biography.79. Studies focused on the large-question themes of the Shahnameh include: Davis, Epic and Sedition;

Davidson, Poet and Hero; Eslāmi-Nodushan, Zendegi va Marg-e Pahlavānān; Hariri, ed. Margdar Shāhnāmeh; Khaleghi-Motlagh, Women in the Shāhnāmeh; Meskub, Armaghān-e Mur; Omid-salar, Poetics and Politics; Rahimi, Terāzhedi-ye Qodrat dar Shāhnāmeh; Ravānshir,Hamāseh-ye Dād;Ringgren, Fatalism in Persian Epics. Mention can also be made of Bāstāni Pārizi’s wide-ranging Shāh-nāmeh: Ākhar-ash Khvosh Ast, and the set of 16 CD recordings of Mohammad-Jaʿfar Mahjub’s lec-tures on the Shahnameh, Dāstān-hā-ye Shāhnāmeh-ye Ferdowsi (Mahoor Institute of Culture andArt, 2006).

80. Examples might include studies on the stories of Rostam and Sohrāb, and on Rostam and Esfandyār,respectively: Kazzāzi, Tondbādi az Konj; Sheʿār and Anvari, Ghamnāmeh-ye Rostam va Sohrāb; andYāhaqqi, Sugnāmeh-ye Sohrāb; and then Meskub,Moqaddamehʾi bar Rostam va Esfandyār; Shamisā,Dāstān-e Rostam va Esfandyār; Sheʿār and Anvari, Razmnāmeh-ye Rostam va Esfandyār; and Sirjāni,Bichāreh Esfandyār.

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