Most readers of the Sh?hn?ma have likely heard the anecdote about Ferdows?’s presentation of his work to Sol??n Ma?m?d of Ghazna. As the story goes, Ferdows? had been promised gold coins for every line in his poem, but other poets at the court in Ghazna spoke ill of him, and Ma?m?d gave him silver coins instead. Furious at having been shortchanged, Ferdows? took up his pen one last time and wrote a satire (hajw) of the monarch, so that all future generations would remember his injustice and aesthetic tone-deafness. The first recorded mention of Ferdows?’s encounter with Ma?m?d, however, dates to the mid-12th century CE, more than a hundred years after Ferdows? completed the final recension of his Sh?hn?ma. Most, if not all, extant manuscripts of the epic contain some version of the putative hajw, which varies in length from 32 lines to more than 100, and with numerous textual variants, including many lines taken from the Sh?hn?ma itself. Such textual issues, along with the lack of historical evidence that Ferdows? traveled to Ghazna, led to a consensus among Persian literature scholars, beginning early in the 20th century, that the satire is inauthentic. Perhaps as a result of this consensus, little research has been done on the hajw in recent decades. Mahmud Khan Shirani’s study of the text of the satire, published in Persian in 1977, remains the only substantial work to have been written on the topic. A number of modern Sh?hn?ma scholars, including Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh and Mohammad-Amin Riyahi, have recently expressed ambivalent opinions of the satire’s authenticity. In this paper, I discuss the possible origins of the satire and the implications of accepting or rejecting various accounts of what, if anything, took place between Ferdows? and Sol??n Ma?m?d. The paper also examines the differences among extant Sh?hn?ma manuscripts, in an effort to establish the original core of the hajw common to many versions. Finally, I ask: If we hold that Ferdows? did not write a satire, or that the story of his travel to Ghazna is apocryphal, then who might later have invented the tale, and for what reasons?