Abstract
Although the word “Shāhnāmeh” has come to mean Ferdowsi’s epic exclusively, we know that Ferdowsi did not create the Shāhnāmeh’s stories. As we have seen, the word “Shāhnāmeh” originally referred to the genre of literary narrative about ancient Persian kings and heroes that existed in prose and poetry long before Ferdowsi. The factual background of Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāmeh is so generally misunderstood that it is probably worthwhile to describe the pre-Ferdowsi Shāhnāmehs in some detail here.
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Notes
For instance, Qazvini, Taqizaeh, Noldeke, Zotenberg, Foruzanfar, Bahar, Riyahi, Khaleghi-Motlagh, Mahdavi Damghani, and the present author to name but a few. See: Theodor Noldeke, The Iranian National Epic or the Shahnamah, translated by L. Th. Bogdanov. Bombay: K. B. Cama Oriental Institute, 1930, § 15; Abu Mansur cAbd al-Malik b. Muhammad b. Ismacil al-Thacalibi, Histoire des Rois de Perses, ed. H. Zotenberg (Paris: Imprimerie National, 1900) pp. xiii-xli; and see the following Persian sources:
See for instance, Olga M. Davidson, “The Crown-Bestower and the Iranian Book of Kings,”, Acta Iranica: Papers in Honour of Professor Mary Boyce. 10 (1985): 117, 123–26, and her Poet and Hero in the Persian Book of Kings (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) pp. 42–53; and also her Comparative Literature and Classical Persian Poetics (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2000) almost all of which argue for an oral poetic tradition behind the Shāhnāmeh.
See also Dick Davis, “The Problem of Ferdowsi’s Sources,”, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 116(1996):48–57.
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© 2011 Mahmoud Omidsalar
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Omidsalar, M. (2011). At Home: The Shāhnāmeh in New Persian. 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_4
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