Abstract
In the previous chapter, I explained that neither Ferdowsi nor his poem may be considered medieval. I also provided a glimpse of the intellectual environment in which Iran’s national poet and his contemporaries worked. Let us now turn to the poem’s background; we will address the Shāhnāmeh’s history, and attempt to disentangle what can be known with reasonable certainty from speculative flights of fancy.
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Notes
Ilya Gershevitch, “Old Iranian Literature,”, Handbuch der Orientalistik. Vierter Band Iranistik. Zweiter Abschnitt Literature, ed. Bertold Spuler (Leiden: Brill, 1968) p. 21.
The frequency of such references to the heroic personages of ancient Iranian lore has led one scholar to refer to Yt 19 as a “short history of Iranian monarchy, an abridged Shāhnāmeh.” See James Darmesteter, “The Zend-Avesta. Part I: The Vendidad,”, The Sacred Books of the East, ed. Max Müller, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1965, vol. 2, p. 286. See also his Le Zend-Avesta, 3 volumes, Paris: Librairie d’Ameriqueet d’Orient, 1960, vol. 2, p. 363.
Theodor Nöldeke, The Iranian National Epic or the Shahnamah, translated by 7. See Robert Drews, The Greek Accounts of Eastern History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973) p. 111 and p. 198, n. 66. Drews takes issue with Christensen and others who have interpreted Ctesias’s Records of Kings as the precursor of the Shahnameh.
A. Christensen, Les Gestes des rois dans les traditions del Tran antique, Paris: Librarie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1963, pp. 116–22. However, his rejection of these scholars’ arguments that connect the ancient “records” is a bit forced. There is no doubt that Christensen and others may have overstated their positions; but Drews too overstates his. One need not establish the existence of specific stories common to Ctesias’s so-called royal records and the Shahnameh in order to establish that there was a written tradition of kings.
The term oicotype was borrowed from botany by Carl Wilhelm von Sydow, who used it to mean the local forms of a tale-type or other item of narrative folklore. Unlike the “tale-type” the oicotypeis closely tied to a locality. See Carl W. von Sydow, “Folk-Tale Studies and Philology: Some Points of View,” in C. W. von Sydow, Selected Papers on Folklore, New York: Arno Press, 1977, pp. 189–220.
Muhammad b. Ishaq al-Nadim, The Fihrist of al-Nadim: A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture 1, 2 volumes, edited and translated by Bayard Dodge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970) (Records of Civilization: Sources and studies, no. 83), vol. 2, p. 713. Since Dodge’s Arabic translation is a bit rocky and since a better edition of the text–not what the Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature terms a mere Persian translation–is available now, I will also provide the Arabic text here:
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© 2011 Mahmoud Omidsalar
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Omidsalar, M. (2011). An Epic’s Journey: A Brief History of the Shāhnāmeh’s Transmission. In: Poetics and Politics of Iran’s National Epic, the Shāhnāmeh. Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137001283_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137001283_3
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