The Shahnameh of Ferdowsi As World Literature

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The Shahnameh of Ferdowsi as World Literature
Article in Iranian Studies · January 2015

DOI: 10.1080/00210862.2015.1023063
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Iranian Studies, 2015
Vol. 48, No. 3, 313–336, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00210862.2015.1023063
Franklin Lewis
Guest Editor’s Introduction
This special issue of the journal of Iranian Studies takes its theme from Ferdowsi’s
Shahnameh1 seen as a work of world literature—a term (Weltliteratur) which,
though it has earlier exponents,2 has generally been attributed to Goethe, who
began formulating the concept in the 1820s. Despite his earlier fusion of a Persianate
Orient with a Germanic Occident in the West-Östlicher Divan of 1819, Goethe seems
to 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 which
would be ancient Greek.5 To be sure, he welcomed the reinvigoration of each national
literature that the cross-fertilization and refraction of other literatures and languages
might bring.6 Ultimately, however, Goethe hoped that German national literature
would occupy an important place in this new world literature:
Everywhere one hears and reads about the progress of the human race, about the
further prospects for world and human relationships. However that may be on
the whole, which it is not my office to investigate and more closely determine, I
nevertheless would personally like to make my friends aware that I am convinced
a 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 actual

paper and ink instantiations of “world literature,” what particular factors qualify
works for inclusion in the pantheon? Despite the quip attributed to Mark van Doren
that 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 (presumably
including titles like the Iliad and Odyssey, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, the Aeneid,
etc.) are thought of as exemplary of something—of the national genius, or of the genre
they represent—and likely to reward lifelong attention because they grapple in a
complex, 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 Near
Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.
© 2015 The International Society for Iranian Studies
314 Lewis
ness and high purpose, as literature, especially poetry, began to take the place of religion
and philosophy in the modern world. The job of the critic, therefore, is to identify the
best in poetry, the timeless and universal, and to weed out from that pantheon works
that claim our attention merely because of their historical importance or their personal
appeal. “The best poetry is what we want; the best poetry will be found to have a power
of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.”8 Arnold would eliminate
Chaucer from the category of “best poetry” because his purpose is not serious enough.
Such attitudes are perhaps what led Mark Twain to quip that a classic is “something that
everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”9
At first blush, it may sound quaint or retrograde to situate the Shahnameh within a
pantheon of what were sometimes called “The Harvard Classics,” “The Classics of
Western Civilization,” or “The Great Books,” that proposed culturally specific
liberal visions of a body of works that might somewhat prescriptively demand our
attention, as the best representatives of literary achievement in a particular language
or cultural context.10 It might be imagined that such curricula of western civilization
were informed by Eurocentric assumptions, and would not readily have found room
for Ferdowsi on their shelves. And yet when Sir John Lubbock proposed his list of
the best hundred books in 1886, the Shahnameh was already there.11 As Professor
Richard Gottheil (a Columbia University colleague of A. V. W. Jackson, a scholar
of Iran and translator of Ferdowsi) noted in 1900 in his introduction to the two
Persian volumes of the Oriental Literature series:
A certain amount of romantic interest has always attached to Persia …. The “Sháh
Námeh,” or Book of Kings, may take its place most worthily by the side of the
Indian Nala, the Homeric Iliad, the German Niebelungen …. In his descriptive
parts, in his scenes of battle and encounters, he is not often led into the delirium
of extravagance. Sober-minded and free from all fanaticism, he leans not too much
to Zoroaster nor to Mohammed, though his desire to idealize his Iránian heroes
leads him to excuse their faith to his readers. And so these fifty or more thousand
verses, written in the Arabic heroic Mutakarib metre, have remained the delight of
the Persians down to this very day—when the glories of the land have almost
altogether departed and Mahmud himself is all forgotten of his descendants.12
Despite such welcoming gestures, some critics still stood their ground in the center of
the western canon, arms folded against too easy an embrace of the alien. Epiphanius
Wilson, in an otherwise informative introduction to Atkinson’s translation of
Ferdowsi, finds that the “grotesque fancies” of the Shahnameh compare so unfavorably
to 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 the
mind is enlarged and stimulated by new scenes, new ideas and unprecedented
situations, we feel grateful that the battle of Salamis stopped the Persian invasion
of Europe, which would doubtless have resulted in changing the current of litera-
Guest Editor’s Introduction 315
ture from that orderly and stately course which it had taken from its fountain in a
Greek Parnassus, and diverted it into the thousand brawding rills of Persian fancy
and exaggeration.13
This was already something of an old trope: Ferdowsi is called the Homer of Persia in
The 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 de
son Pays.”15 James Atkinson, the translator of “Soohrab,” avers that “the author of the
Sháh Námeh has usually been called the Homer of the East, but certainly not from any
consideration 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 the
kind which Oriental nations can boast,” precisely because it “combines a great
portion of the energy and grace of western poetry.”16 No wonder, then, that in his
1853 “Sohrab and Rustum: An Episode,” Matthew Arnold, conditioned from the
outset to the supposed inferiority of Ferdowsi’s poetics, tried to recast the poem in
a 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 voice
of its own.17
A half-century later, at about the same time that the first complete line-by-line
translation of the entire Shahnameh began to appear in English,18 the leading
western authority on Persian literature, Cambridge scholar Edward G. Browne, was
dismissing Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh in the pages of his influential Literary History of
Persian—not through unfavorable comparison to the Greek classics, but because he
thought it inferior to other classic works from Persian or Arabic:
In their high estimate of the literary value of this gigantic poem Eastern and
Western 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 Sháhnáma
cannot, in my opinion, for one moment be placed on the same level as the Arabian
Mu‘allaqát; and though it is the prototype and model of all epic poetry in the lands
of Islám, it cannot, as I think, compare for beauty, feeling, and grace with the work
of 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 the
beauty in it, in part because of a “constitutional disability to appreciate epic poetry
in general,” and partly because he found it full of “unnecessarily monotonous”
similes, mostly about battle scenes. Though he could admire the majestic sonority
of 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 Shahnameh
in the canon of world literature was not due solely to the dismissive attitude of critics
who found it wanting in comparison to Greek and Roman classics, or who found epic
316 Lewis
as a genre inferior to other kinds of Persian poetry. At least in English, the lack of an
accessible, accurate and aesthetically compelling translation may have been the largest
barrier 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 various
translations, had both become quite central to the English canon by the later nine-
teenth century. In English, a partial translation of the Shahnameh appeared already
in the eighteenth century (Champion, 1785), with many others following in the
first half of the nineteenth century (Atkinson, 1814; Weston, 1815; Robinson,
1819; Robertson, 1829; Costello, 1845),21 all before Matthew Arnold’s version of
the Rostam and Sohrāb episode brought Ferdowsi to the general attention of the
Anglophone poetry-reading public. These translations, as well as the later adaptation
by Helen Zimmern, and the full verse translation by the brothers Arthur George and
Edmond Warner, failed to a greater or lesser degree in bringing Ferdowsi to life in
English, 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 appearance
of the abridged prose translation of Reuben Levy, and the stand-alone blank verse
translations 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 readers
with 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 text
critical editions of the original Persian text,23 have laid the groundwork for a new
appreciation and critical engagement with Ferdowsi’s epic, as it enters its second mil-
lennium. Meanwhile, though the tradition of comparison with Homer or other epics
remains strong,24 Mahmoud Omidsalar has launched a salvo across its bow, arguing
that the literary-scholarly tradition of presumptively measuring the Shahnameh by
the aesthetics of Homer, or the assumptions of medieval European romances,
smacks of Eurocentrism and Orientalism.25 Meanwhile, recent developments in
theory grounded in a European perspective have tended to reconfigure world literature
as 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 Shahnameh
within a “world literature” framework, not to claim special privilege for a Persian epic
among other world epics, nor necessarily in hopes of creating greater parity on the
literary stage between European and non-western classics, but rather out of a critical
sensibility 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 authorial
persona, and its centrality to the Persian literary tradition. Like Homer, Ferdowsi
may occasionally nod, and there are major text-critical and interpretive questions
that can make the Shahnameh a hard nut to crack. While Ferdowsi’s purpose is
indeed serious—to find out how the kings of the world at first governed the world, and
why it has come down to us in such sorry shape (keh giti be āghāz chun dāshtand / keh
idun be mā khvār bogzāshtand)27—it is definitely not the sort of classic that, per
Twain, everyone thinks should be read, but no one actually wants to read.28 On
the contrary, the experience of reading Ferdowsi with students in the classroom in
the past two decades (whether in the Persian or in English translation) has taught
me that most younger readers engage fully and profoundly with the Shahnameh,
read it with a sense of excitement, curiosity and suspense, experiencing a psychological
depth in the characters, and grappling to pin down a unitary meaning for the multiple
and conflicting voices that speak to us with conviction and verisimilitude through the
text. 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 a
good translation) find that the Shahnameh repays reading and re-reading.
Of course, the Shāhnāmeh, as both a cycle of traditional tales handed down through
the generations, and as a unified prose book, predates Ferdowsi.29 Hanaway calls
Ferdowsi’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 “cohesive
force in ethnic or national consciousness.”30 It certainly functions as a foundational
text, and the martial mode (razm, hamāseh) does play a dominant—though not
relentless—role in the narrative. To the extent that the poem sings of arms and the
men (gordān, pahlavānān, the heroes and mighty men), we may overlook the shifting
variety of genres found in different episodes of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh—including
mythical, legendary and historical narratives, as well as non-epic romances—and
class it as an epic, specifically a national epic.31 While this may encourage cross-cultural
comparison 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 distinguish
the Shahnameh (1010) from other epics in the Persian tradition, such as the religious
epic 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, as
national 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 the
Shahnameh as individual episodes.36 A distinction has also been argued between
the 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 that
the individualism and political independence of a character like Rostam encodes a sub-
versive undermining of the foundational narrative (the epic national narrative), that
would too heroically and unconflictedly embrace the subordination of all difference
of 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 from
national epic of Iran to a representative work of “world literature”—I would
318 Lewis
suggest, as early as 1772 in the “Essay on the Poetry of Eastern Nations” by Sir William
Jones. Jones, perhaps as part and parcel of his larger program to put Persian language
and literature in conversation with its Indo-European cousins, describes Ferdowsi in
tandem with Homer. Jones does indeed bow the knee before the notion that equal
status 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; and
both possessed, in an eminent degree, that rich and creative invention, which is the
very 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 of
Ferdowsi during his lifetime, or indeed for about a century after his death, outside of
his immediate circle. The first to mention him was his townsman, Asadi of Tus,
writing in the Garshāspnāmeh, composed in Nakhjavān in 455–58 H/1063–66
CE, which speaks of the Shāhnāmeh qua national narrative and prose book, but
also mentions the verse version of it by Ferdowsi, which had apparently inspired
Asadi’s foray into epic verse.41 The ʿAlināmeh of Rabiʿ, composed in 482 H/1089
CE, probably also has Ferdowsi in mind as a model of emulation, while nevertheless
rueing the fact that his earlier fellow-in-faith-and-in-verse had not spent his massive
talents on telling the even more heroic story of the Shiʿite Imams, like ʿAli.42 None
of the Ghaznavid historians or poets speak of him, though lines of his poem are
quoted 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 551
H/1156 CE in his Chahār Maqāleh, just under a century and a half after the
Shahnameh’s completion. By that time, a satire (hajvnāmeh) against Sultan
Mahmud was circulating, along with a legend about how he had failed to properly
recognize and reward Ferdowsi; whether authentic or not, the legend and the satire
testify to an audience of readers anxious to defend the poet’s stature in the canon
of Persian letters against a patron perceived to have slighted him.44 Nezāmi of
Ganjeh, at the end of the twelfth century, appears to allude to Ferdowsi in his Haft
Paykar and his Sharafnāmeh, suggesting that another poet from Tus had already
told the tale of the kings of Iran in one book, but promising himself to fill the gap
where the other poet had treated only half of the tale (presumably, such as the
stories of Bahrām-e Gur and of Alexander).45 The earliest surviving manuscript of
the Shahnameh, a partial copy discovered only in recent decades in Florence, dates
to 614 H/1217 CE, almost two centuries after Ferdowsi’s death, though a huge
number of manuscripts survive from the following centuries.46 In the thirteenth
century, ʿOwfi’s survey of early Persian poetry, Lobāb al-albāb (w. 618 H/1221
CE) 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 called
into 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. 599
H/1202 CE) and Shams-e Qays Rāzi’s al-Moʿjam (c. 630 H/1232 CE);48 allusions to
the 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 the
Persian literary canon. If at first the appreciation of Ferdowsi had been limited to
courtly and literate circles, by the Safavid period, the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi had
also 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 by
Bondāri, an Iranian from Isfahan working for an Ayyubid prince in Damascus,50
suggesting that, above and beyond the Iranian audience, there must have been a
certain curiosity at Levantine Arab courts about the contents of this great poem of
the Persian past, from which the Saljuq rulers in Anatolia had begun to adopt their
regnal names.51 In the Il-Khanid period, Hamdollāh Mostowfi was able to gather
enough manuscripts of the Shahnameh in the years 714–20 H/1314–20 CE to
make a critical edition of the text; at the Timurid court, in 829–33 H/1426–30
CE, 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 the
Shahnameh 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, by
the fourteenth century a partial verse translation of the poem into Turkish
(in hezec meter) had appeared, followed by a full prose translation in the fifteenth
century, 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 916
H/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 begun
on tiles and other objects even before our first surviving manuscript copies of the
poem, illustrated or not.55 By the 1430s, illustrated copies were also being made
beyond Persia and Iraq, in the Delhi Sultanate in India.56 A royal Safavid copy of
the Shahnameh commissioned for Shah Tahmāsp and produced in Tabriz over a
period of years, probably between 1522 and 1540 (the truncated 759-folio manuscript
lacks a colophon), is considered the most exquisite example of the genre.57 Tahmāsp
gifted it to the Ottoman Sultan Selim II in 1568, and it stayed in Istanbul until
Edmond de Rothschild brought it to Europe sometime before 1903, where it was pur-
chased in 1959 by an American, Arthur Houghton, who dismembered the manuscript
to sell off individual pages. It is possibly the world’s most expensive book.58
European awareness of Ferdowsi begins in the seventeenth century, with brief
notices by Adam Olearius and Barthélemy d’Herbelot.59 As noted above, translations
320 Lewis
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 western
public.60 Also in the nineteenth century, major projects began to put the study of
the Persian text on firm philological grounds.61 The body of research produced on
Abu 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 Iraj
Afshar dates the modern academic study of Ferdowsi in Iran to a number of articles
by Sayyed Hasan Taqizādeh, and notes by Mohammad Qazvini, that came out after
the First World War.63 The commemoration of what was then presumed to be the
millennium of Ferdowsi’s birth was held internationally, but especially in Iran, in
1934 (we now know the poet was actually born in 940),64 inspiring the construction
of a monument to Ferdowsi and a plethora of scholarly assessments and reassessments
of the poet and his opus, including Fritz Wolff’s still useful glossary of the Shahnameh
lexicon, 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, including
articles, books, manuscripts, editions and translations in various languages of either
the entire poem or of excerpted episodes. He points out how quixotic the project
to compile a bibliography of all this actually is, since every month a new study
comes out or a new manuscript comes to light.66 Afshar had initiated his monumental
bibliography in connection with the occasion of the 1968 restoration of Ferdowsi’s
mausoleum in Tus by the late Houshang Seyhoun, noting that though the literature
on Ferdowsi was at that time already voluminous, it was far from resolving many of the
more meaningful questions that might be posed of the Shahnameh.67 Not long after
that, 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 Iranian
Ministry of Culture and Art.68 By the time that Afshar finished compiling new
items for the second edition of his Ferdowsi bibliography in the middle of the
autumn of 1975, it had almost doubled in size.69
Millennial celebrations and Shahnameh studies. Since then, a series of conferences

have commemorated thousand-year anniversaries, such as the 1990 millennium of
the poet’s death (calibrated to the Islamic lunar calendar, assuming a death date of
411 Hijri, the millennial year of 1411 Hijri corresponded with July 1990 to July
1991 CE),70 or the 1994 millennium of Ferdowsi’s presentation of the first
working 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 us
1994 CE).71 The latest date mentioned in the poem itself, thought to correspond with
the author’s final redaction of the poem, comes in Ferdowsi’s verse colophon following
the story of the fiftieth and last king of pre-Islamic Iran, Yazdegerd III.72 The date he
gives there, in the last two lines of the poem, is 25 Esfand 400 H, corresponding with 8
March 1010 CE:73
‫ﺑﻪ ﻣﺎﻩ ﺳﭙﻨﺪﺍﺭﻣﺬ ﺭﻭﺯ ﺍﺭﺩ‬ ‫ﺳﺮ ﺁﻣﺪ ﮐﻨﻮﻥ ﻗﺼﮥ ﯾﺰﺩﮔﺮﺩ‬
‫ﺑﻪ ﻧﺎﻡ ﺟﻬﺎﻥ ﺩﺍﻭﺭ ﮐﺮﺩﮔﺎﺭ‬ ‫ﺯ ﻫﺠﺮﺕ ﺷﺪﻩ ﭘﻨﺞ ﻫﺸﺘﺎﺩ ﺑﺎﺭ‬
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 commemorations

were organized in 2010, which in turn led to a number of new publications, including
a previous special issue on Ferdowsi in the pages of the present journal.74 To this spate
of new publications, and with great gratitude to Homa Katouzian as editor-in-chief of
the 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 inspired
by 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 the
sources, 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, social
history and Indo-Iranian mythology and religion;77 the biography of the poet, the
chronology 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 the
Shāhnāmeh have proven particularly captivating—just as certain Shakespeare plays
are staged repeatedly, while others remain little read. The popularity of these particular
episodes has generated monographs devoted to their close reading and analysis.80
While there is no dearth of studies, there remains room for further close readings
and 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 new
understandings of the Shahnameh, both on its own terms, and in dialogue with
other 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, the
lines we understand the poet to have composed for us, which most often has meant
the erasure of interpolated lines, now thought to be scribal emendations, that had
tended to push our interpretations in particular directions. This naturally necessitates
reworking old readings and interpretations with fresh eyes, and thus opens up fresh
critical vistas.
The post-millennial Shahnameh as world literature. The papers gathered here explore
the moral and biological universe depicted in the Shahnameh; probe the morphologi-
cal, magical and gendered boundaries it creates; propose new rhetorical strategies to
322 Lewis
uncover ideological concerns encoded in the text; set the Shahnameh in dialogue with
medieval European epic and romance; and evaluate the extent to which Ferdowsi
reshapes his presumed sources and infuses them with his own voice. Reading the
text mostly through the new Khaleghi-Motlagh critical edition, some of the papers
nevertheless step away from the meanings embedded by Ferdowsi, to try to understand
how later poets reconceive or misprise certain images or ideas, and how the enactment
of Ferdowsi’s presumed text in the performance by professional reciters (or scribes) in
a particular textual community or politico-cultural context can itself illuminate and
engender 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 its
worldview. 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 interest
in 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 from
Daqiqi the thousand lines of the poem that describe the advent of Zoroaster, rather
than rewriting the section afresh, since, as Ferdowsi explicitly tells us, he found
Daqiqi’s verse of inferior quality. In describing the creation of the world in the
Shahnameh’s prologue, and beginning its history at the court of the first primeval
king, Ferdowsi portrays a rather deist God, incorporating neither a noticeably
Qur’anic view of creation and human origins, nor a particularly Zoroastrian theology
(though the tales of the first mythic kings do preserve structural and linguistic
elements of the old Indo-Iranian gods and myths). Against this backdrop, Davis
explores the larger role of religion in the work, and especially the seeming absence
of a theodicy.
Laurie Pierce, in “Serpents and Sorcery: Humanity, Gender, and the Demonic in
Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh,” explores the world depicted by Ferdowsi for what dis-
tinguishes human from demon and man from monster. This taxonomy of natural
and 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 of
Zahhāk and Eblis) or animals (as in the case of Zāl and the Simorgh), they do they
thereby become less human, even demonic, or superhuman? Though evil need not
always be embodied in supernatural or monstrous form—and indeed Ferdowsi some-
times explicitly reduces demons to symbolic or abstract representations of psychic
forces and impulses—evil nevertheless often manifests in biologically demonic or ser-
pentine shape, though the connection between evil and the supernatural is not
straightforward. After the initial binding of the demons, the binary categories of
human versus non-human, natural versus magic, become increasingly blurred, and,
as Pierce shows, when demons and humans intermingle, serpents and sorcery are
often implicated, but in a gendered way that differentiates between white magic as
a masculine and black magic as a feminine domain.
If evil morphs and fluctuates in the Shahnameh such that human and demonic
identities are blurred, we may rightly expect a cultural-ethnic fuzziness as well, in
which not all of Iran’s enemies will be evil, nor all Iranians virtuous. Readers may
well find that, although the Shahnameh for the most part confidently assumes the
Iranian identity of the legitimate rulers of Iran, the notion of Iranianness and the
very 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 the
royal line, or by the formative experience of numerous Iranian nobles, princes and
kings in foreign lands or in a form of internal exile (e.g. Zāl in the nest of the
Simorgh, Fereydun in the grasslands of Barmāyeh the cow, Key Kāvus in “Māzan-
darān,” Sohrāb in Samangān, Seyāvash and Key Khosrow in Turān, Goshtāsp in
India and Rum, Dārāb on the banks of a river at the home of a fuller, Sekandar in
Rum, Sāsān son of Dārā—and four generations after him—as shepherds and camel
drivers in India, Shāpur Zu al-Aktāf in Rum, Bahrām-e Gur in “Yemen,” Khosrow
Parviz in Azerbaijan). Because modern scholarly reception of the Shahnameh
emerged in the era of nationalism, and because it was vigorously promoted in that
context during the Pahlavi era in Iran, we have become conditioned to think of the
work as a “national epic.” However, as Edmund Hayes argues in his contribution
to this special issue, “The Death of Kings: Group Identity and the Tragedy of
Nezhād in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh,” Ferdowsi’s concern as a member of the dehqān
class whose project it was to collect and preserve the Shāhnāmeh narratives, was to
understand the place occupied in the social hierarchy by the remnants of the old
Iranian 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) in
the story of the death of Yazdegerd and the coming of the Muslim Arab army at the
end 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 the
social rupture of the end of the Iranian monarchy back to the heroic lineages of
the pre-Islamic past. While Ferdowsi might have taken some comfort in Shi‘i
beliefs about legitimacy and continuity, as Hayes proposes, his Shahnameh reflects
an essentially ambivalent predicament for Muslim Iranian dehqāns of Ferdowsi’s
era, who cannot satisfactorily explain their attenuated situation either by theological
speculation 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 tragedy
and the injustice of heroic characters driven to death by a relentless, malevolently
indifferent 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 and
Rostam, and so it is fitting that two of the articles in this issue frame their discussions
around this episode, and Ferdowsi’s strategies to control the narrative in the absence of
324 Lewis
a theodicy or other redeeming explanatory mechanism to invest the horror of what

happens with meaning.
The contribution of Cameron Cross, “‘If Death is Just, What is Injustice?’ Illicit
Rage in ‘Rostam and Sohrab’ and the ‘Knight’s Tale’,” situates the Shahnameh’s
concern for justice as against tyranny in the wider discourse of medieval literature
and 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 both
tales invested in denying the right—to their characters as well as to their readers—of a
sense of moral outrage or poetic justice, yet shows that the emotional pressures caused
by the tragic sequence of events eventually stress both narratives to the breaking point,
allowing resistant counter-narratives to well up through the cracks. Neither Chaucer
nor Ferdowsi intervene decisively to adjudicate between these conflicting frameworks
for 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 is
everywhere, perhaps nowhere.
Meanwhile, Richard Gabri, in “Framing the Unframable in Ferdowsi’s Shahna-
meh,” allows that the conundrum presented in the thought experiment about
justice that frames the tale of Sohrāb is a paradox produced in part by the juxtaposition
of two different cosmologies: a monotheistic, Abrahamic one in which meaning and
redemption 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 another
equally 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. Gabri
argues that in the prologues and epilogues to many episodes, Ferdowsi is keen to
stake 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 in
the world outside the text inhabited by the poet and his readers. Gabri also points out
a tone of dark humor, a subtle irony and playfulness in the poet’s language, that
mirrors 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 narrates
ultimately remains, at the end of the poem, enigmatic and equivocal, not susceptible
of 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 moment
in 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. For
example, study of the scribal and performance traditions of the Shahnameh can
show us how new plot twists or narrative arcs have been introduced to certain episodes
for ideological or practical reasons; elements of the narrative can thus be restructured
and re-contoured to produce new or altered meanings. Likewise, we may trace in the
work of later poets ways in which the semiotic horizons of certain salient tropes or
scenes appearing in the Shahnameh have shifted, morphed or been repackaged over
time. As we see in these concluding articles, despite the repetition of conventional

tropes over a period of centuries, classical Persian literature remains a dynamic cultural
field, responding to socio-political developments which can set in motion a refashion-
ing and revalorizing of earlier tropes, metaphors and plots, even (or especially) those
appearing in central canonical texts, like the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi.
Asghar Seyed-Gohrab’s contribution, “Corrections and Elaborations: A One-Night
Stand in Narrations of Ferdowsi’s Rostam and Sohrāb,” also takes as its focus the
Sohrāb episode, but not the question of justice set up in the framing of the story
and considered here in the articles by Cross and Gabri, but rather the scene of
Tahmineh 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 in
modern times in performances of this episode by professional shāhnāmeh story-
tellers. After describing the modern practice of naqqāli, Seyed-Gohrab walks us
through the account of this scene as given in the text of the Haft Lashgar, a tumār
or story-teller’s prompt-book for reciting the Shahnameh, dating to 1913. He also
describes a performance of the scene by a particular twentieth-century naqqāl,
Morshed ‘Abbās Zariri. Here we find audience considerations, and a sense of
decorum, modifying the plot of the love tryst to make it more modest and Islamic
than one finds in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, or indeed in other Persian narrative verse
that depicts heterosexual love-making. “Censorship, not by means of excision, but
by interpolation of new text,” is thus a phenomenon of both the scribal tradition
and the performance tradition, Seyed-Gohrab concludes, and helps adapt older cano-
nical works like the Shahnameh, just as modern stage productions of Shakespeare
adapt his plays to the considerations of modern audiences.
Finally, Dominic Brookshaw’s “Mytho-Political Remakings of Ferdowsi’s Jamshid
in the Lyric Poetry of Injuid and Mozaffarid Shiraz” traces a major shift in the
Jamshid legend as presented by Ferdowsi, in which Solomon and Jamshid are conflated
from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries CE onward, a conflation accomplished by
poets 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, Brookshaw
traces 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 argues
that poets, in knowingly ahistorical ways, mapped elements of the Judeo-Islamic
accounts 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 to
make the pre-Islamic past relevant to the post-Ilkhanid present. We may imagine
that Ferdowsi himself, by some process and dynamic similar to what Seyed-Gohrab
and Brookshaw describe, has in places, similarly introduced new wrinkles into the
version(s) of the Shahnameh which came down to him (the ideological impetus that
might 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
326 Lewis
refashion enduring elements of the poem that focus communal memory and embed
cultural and human values. It would be foolish to predict that we will still be
reading the Shahnameh with equal attentiveness when its second millennium rolls
around; by that time, some 900 years of as yet unwritten works will be jostling for
a place in the global, or galactic, canon, and our current idea of what constitutes
world literature will doubtless be radically reconfigured. But for the moment, as for
the past many centuries, Ferdowsi’s literary monument continues to inspire poets,
scribes, critics, politicians, historians, etc., and to claim our attention on the page
and 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 per
the 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 diverse
forms 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 knowledge
revolution” precipitated by the “‘discovery’ of the classical languages of the East, the invention of
the linguistic family tree whose basic form is still with us today, the translation and absorption
into 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 elbowed
their way into “the international literary space that had emerged in early modern times in Europe as a
structure 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 exempla
that became increasingly available to European reading publics in large numbers for the first time
from 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 drawn
throughout his whole career (beginning as early as 1774 with his “Mahomets-Gesang”) to “Oriental
subjects” (encompassing for him both the Far and the Near East), he also “expressed a marked dislike
for 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 1827
to his young friend Eckermann (who helped popularize Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur with the
1835 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. National
literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone
must strive to hasten its approach … But, while we thus value what is foreign, we must not bind
ourselves to some particular thing, and regard it as a model. We must not give this value to the
Chinese, or the Serbian, or Calderon, or the Nibelungen; but, if we really want a pattern, we must
always 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 it
goes.”
6. In 1828, Goethe remarked: “Every literature dissipates within itself when it is not reinvigorated
through foreign participation. What researcher into nature doesn’t rejoice at the marvelous things
which he sees brought forth through refraction?” (“Eine jede Literatur ennuyiert sich zuletzt in
sich selbst, wenn sie nicht durch fremde Teilnahme wieder aufgefrischt wird. Welcher Naturforscher
erfreut sich nicht der Wunderdinge, die er durch Spiegelung hervorgebracht sieht?”); as cited by
Pizer, “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 im
Ganzen hiemit beschaffen sein mag, welches zu untersuchen und naher zu bestimmen nicht
meines 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; quotation
from xix.
9. Mark Twain’s Speeches, 194. In a talk (“Disappearance of Literature”) delivered on 20 November
1900 at the Nineteenth Century Club in New York, Twain attributes this observation to a Professor
Winchester.
10. Twentieth-century efforts to compile such canons for a liberal education include Charles Eliot
Norton’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, who
founded the Great Books Foundation in 1947, which led to the publication of the fifty-four (and
later 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 attempt
to 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, of
which there were several iterations over the years, were (books well enough known not to require
italics!): 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 et
sa religion and Voltaire’s Zadig.
12. Gottheil, Persian Literature, vol. 1: iii, iv and vii. The information about Sir John Lubbocks’ list is
given 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 Ferdowsi
is less interested in his characters’ feats of brawn on the battlefield, than with the inner life of
their minds.
21. For a history and bibliography of English translations of the Shahnameh, see Lewis, “Classical
Persian”; and Loloi, “Šāh-nāma Translations iii. Into English.”
22. Modern English renderings that make Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh accessible and appealing to a broad
general readership, and well suited to classroom usage, include the abridged prose translation of
Levy, The Epic of the Kings, and the prose-with-verse translation (with minor abridgements) by
328 Lewis
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); Mostafā
Jeyhuni, 5 vols. (1379/2001); and the “Moscow edition” under the direction of A.E. Bertel’s in 9
vols. (1960–1971), Ferdowsi, Shax-nāme: Kriticheskij Tekst.
24. Von Grunebaum begins his essay on “Firdausī’s Concept of History,” 168, with mention of the Iliad
and 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 Georges
Dumézil, Gregory Nagy, Jaan Puhvel and Scott Littleton. Numerous works in Persian also pursue
comparison to Athenian Tragedies (e.g. Kiā, Shāhnāmeh-ye Ferdowsi va Terāzhedi-ye Āteni), or to
Homer (e.g. Jamāli, Ferdowsi va Humer). Points of comparison between the Iliad and the Shahnameh
are meaningfully engaged in English by Banani, “Reflections on Re-Reading,” and Davis, “In the
Enemy’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 as
dichotomized along an Iranian-versus-western fault line; see, for example, Omidsalar, Iran’s Epic
and America’s Empire, 207: “In Persian literary studies in general, and especially in Shāhnāmeh
studies,Western criteria and standards are imposed upon Persian texts that can neither be understood
nor defined by them … submission to Western standards impacts the way we understand ourselves
and our national poem.”
26. See the discussion in Apter, Against World Literature, especially 1–9. While she endorses the project
of world literature for its goals of deprovincializing the canon and valorizing translation, she harbors
reservations 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 in
the notes).
28. Though Rypka, History of Iranian Literature, 163, speaks of the “intense seriousness of Firdausī’s
nature.”
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, Poet
and 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 poem may consult Lewis, “Shahnama,” for a
quick overview of the poem’s scope.
31. See Nöldeke, Iranian National Epic; and Safā, Hamāseh-sarāʾi dar Irān, who classifies epics in
Persian as national (melli, 160–342), historical (tārikhi, 343–76), or religious (dini, 377–90), with
the 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
and “restorer of its sovereignty,” but also as “a champion of the Iranian self-asserting identity that
resists powerful personal, familial, and ethnic appeals detrimental to the very essence of a constructed
Self.”
39. Jones, Poems Consisting Chiefly of Translations, 186.
40. Ibid., 185.
41. Omidsalar, Poetics and Politics, 55; and Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Asadī Ṭ ūsī.”
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 an
active 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 Sharafnāmeh
and the Servatiān edition of Haft Paykar.
46. The partial manuscript in Florence (265 folios, 48×32cm, with shelf mark Magl. III.24 in the
Biblioteca 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 might
surmise that since we have no surviving manuscript witness to the text of the poem until two centuries
after its completion, the Shahnameh could not have been widely popular during that period. While this
seems logical, the oldest dated manuscript of any Persian work dates only to the middle of the eleventh
century, and few Persian manuscripts survive from prior to the thirteenth century. Two of the early
Shahnameh 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 Bibliothèque orientale of the Université 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 of
various 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 of
episodes 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; many works mention 624 H/1227
CE, 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-Fatḥ
b. 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 Saljuq
rulers of thirteenth-century Anatolia (Qelech Arslan and Masʿud II) adopted Keyānid regnal names
from the Shahnameh: Key Kāvus I, Key Qobād I, Key Khosrow II, Key Kāvus II, Key Qobād II, Key
Khosrow 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. 571–90
H/1176–94), said to have recited verses from the Shahnameh as he wielded his mace in battle (cited
by Özgüdenli, “Šāh-nāma Translations i. Into Turkish”).
330 Lewis
52. See Jeyhuni’s edition of Ferdowsi, Shāhnāmeh-ye Ferdowsi, 0: 89–94; and on Bāysonghor’s commis-
sion, see Lentz and Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Bāysonḡorī Šāh-nāma.”
53. Schmidt, “The Reception of Firdausi’s Shahnama,” 122–6, enumerates over sixty manuscripts of the
poem 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 Translations
i. Into Turkish.”
54. Schmidt, “The Reception of Firdausi’s Shahnama,” 128–31; and Özgüdenli, “Šāh-nāma Translations
i. 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. For
an 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 Fitzwilliam Museum’s online Ferdowsi exhibit (http://www.fitzmuseum.
cam.ac.uk/gallery/shahnameh/index.html), give us unprecedented access to the illustration history of
the 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 works
became common in nineteenth-century India and Iran, Shahnameh illustrations no longer depended
on 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; and
Welch, A King’s Book of Kings.
58. For the story of Arthur Houghton and the repatriation of the Shah Tahmāsp Shahnameh to the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran, see Souren Melikian, “Destroying a Treasure: The Sad
Story of a Manuscript,” New York Times, April 27, 1996; and Geraldine Norman, “How Art
Dealer Did a Pounds 13m Swap with Rulers of Iran,” Independent, October 17, 1994. Other press
reports indicate that auctions at Sotheby’s fetched prices of $1.7 million in 2006 and $12.3 million
in 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 Houghton
throughout the 1970s and 1980s (he died in 1990), or given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art
as a tax write-off. In 1994, the remaining 118 illustrations along with the pages of text and the
binding were repatriated to Iran in exchange for Willem de Kooning’s “Woman III,” a painting
then valued at either $12 or $20 million, but which resold in 2006 for $137 million (to hedge-fund
billionaire 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 Magna
Carta 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 most
expensive book ever sold” was acquired by Bill Gates for $30.8 million in 1994—the unique notebook
of Leonardo da Vinci, the Codex Leicester. But we may conclude that if just two of the individual pages
of Shah Tahmāsp’s Shahnameh sold for a combined $14 million, if we factor the few million generated
from earlier sales of other pages of the manuscript, and the value of the remaining 118 pages of text and
of 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 the
first 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), and
then 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).
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., edited
by 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 by
Habib 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, and
scholarly 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 a
birth millennial gift, the Glossar zu Firdosis Schahname. Saʿid Nafisi led the editorial committee that
produced the Shāhnāmeh-ye Ferdowsi (Tehran: Beroukhim, 1313–15/1934–36), improving on the
earlier 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 at
least until the publication in Tehran of the edition by Mohammad Dabir-Siāqi (1335/1956), or
the 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 conference
was 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 Soviet
of Tajikistan and the Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan, in partnership with three foundations and a
private 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-Qāsem
i. 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 Jeyhuni
edition, this final section of the poem is entitled “ākhar-e Shāhnāmeh,” whereas Khaleghi-Motlagh’s
title gives “goftār andar tārikh-e goftan-e Shāhnāmeh.”
74. “Millenium of the Shahnama of Firdausi,” edited by Firuza Abdullaeva and Charles Melville, Iranian
Studies 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 Epic
Masterpiece”; see also the end of the bibliography of Shreve Simpson, “Šāh-nāma iv. Illustrations,”
which mentions many additional commemorative occasions or events.
332 Lewis
75. See, for example, Khaleghi-Motlagh’s collection, Gol-e Ranj-hā-ye Kohan, and also his Shāhnāmeh az
Dastnevīs 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, and
II, 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. Marg
dar 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 and
Art, 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; and
Yāhaqqi, 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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The Shahnameh of Ferdowsi as World Literature

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Franklin Dean Lewis

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Guest Editor’s Introduction

The Shahnameh of Ferdowsi as World Literature

If we descend from the abstract empyrean of “world literature” as a system, to actual

Frameworks for Reading

From Neglect to Critical Acclaim and Scholarly Attention

Millennial celebrations and Shahnameh studies. Since then, a series of conferences

Thus, a number of international exhibitions and conferences and commemorations

a theodicy or other redeeming explanatory mechanism to invest the horror of what

time. As we see in these concluding articles, despite the repetition of conventional

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