A Fierce Fidelity: Ferdowsi and His Archetype

Abstract

We know beyond reasonable doubt that the prose Shāhnāmeh commissioned by Abū Mansūr was set to verse by Ferdowsi. I believe that this Shāhnāmeh was Ferdowsi’s only source. However, some scholars have argued that before he obtained a copy of the prose Shāhnāmeh, Ferdowsi had already begun to versify individual epic tales that either were present in the oral tradition or existed as independent textual narratives.¹ What he did, they suggest, is retell his newly found archetype in verse, while incorporating his previously versified stories into that archetype’s narrative. The result, according to this view of the poem’s history, was an epic that wedded the narrative of Abū Mansūur’s prose Shāhnāmeh with a miscellany of other epic tales from Iran’s oral tradition and other literary sources. Others believe that the poet largely followed his prose source faithfully, and that any indications of multiple sources must have existed in his prose archetype, and entered his verse from that source alone.²