Shahnameh: Literary Perspectives for a New Millenium, Part I
Panel 130, 2011 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, December 3 at 8:30 am
Panel Description
Scholarly discourse on the Shâhnâma has revolved predominately around questions of folklore, Indo-Iranian mythology, philology and textual criticism, art history, and the concept of national epos. In 1934 an international commemoration of the (then presumed) millenial of Ferdowsi's birth was held in Iran, with scholarly reassessments offered of what was then known about the poet and his opus. The year 2010 marked the passage of one millenium since Ferdowsi’s completion of the final recension of his work, an event we now commemorate with a double panel that seeks to foreground the literary achievement of the Shâhnâma. Through close readings of several of its episodes, symbols and concerns, this panel aims to: set the Shâhnâma in dialogue with medieval European epic and romance and situate it in the canon of world literature; isolate and highlight Ferdowsi's influence on the subsequent Persian literary tradition through precise discrete instances of re-reading or misprision of the work; explore the moral and biological universe depicted in the text, its morphological, magical and gendered boundaries; propose new rhetorical strategies to uncover ideological concerns encoded in the text; and evaluate the extent to which Ferdowsi re-shapes his presumed sources and infuses his form of the narrative of the Persian kings with his own voice. Specifically, these papers will: explore the Jamshid legend as presented by Ferdowsi and its divergent reception and conflation with the figure of Solomon in later Persian divan poetry; compare Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale with Ferdowsi’s Rostam and Sohrab, and the ways that both poets undermine the role of the king as arbiter of justice; reconsider the famous satire (Hajvnâma) on Mahmud of Ghazna, its origins and the ideological motivations and agendas it betrays; excavate the slithery border between the human and the demonic, male and female, moral hero and trickster at various junctures of the poem; reveal Ferdowsi’s narrative construction of ideology in those episodes where he had multiple sources to draw from, such as the reigns of Ardeshir and of Alexander, as well as the Zoroastrian conversion; and propose a hermeneutic for reading seemingly conflicted narratives, in which agency – including blameworthy or virtuous action – are both bestowed and withdrawn, affirmed and denied, and in which the role of Fate seems to overturn the very possibility of ethical or moral readings.
It’s usually very hard to know whether something is in the Shahnameh because Ferdowsi has decided to give it emphasis, for whatever ideological or aesthetic purpose, or because he is simply reproducing his sources. However there are a number of pivotal moments in the poem for which we can be virtually certain that he had available to him sources that contradicted one another, and that he has chosen one version of a narrative over other versions. We see this in his treatment of the relations between the house of Sistan and the central Persian monarchy, in the way he handles the transition from pre-Zoroastrian Iran to Zoroastrian Iran, and in his presentation of Alexander, to name only the most spectacular examples. In each of these cases, and elsewhere in the poem, we can see that in dealing with any given narrative he chooses the version that emphasizes continuity rather than disruption, and a willingly accepted central authority rather than local irredentism. We can therefore posit an implicit ideology of continuous central authority, and relatively seamless transition through what otherwise might appear to be crucially disruptive events (e.g. changes of religion or dynasty). Since this ideology operates at cruxes where (because of our awareness of the existence of alternative and implicitly more disruptive versions) it momentarily becomes visible to us, we may be safe in assuming that it probably operates passim, throughout the poem, and at points where alternative versions have not come down to us.
It is generally accepted that Ferdowsi relied on a late Sasanian chronological history, known as Khwad?yn?mag, in order to construct the narrative of that dynasty’s history, which takes up the latter portion of his Shahnameh. Since no manuscript of this text has been found, it is difficult to judge the extent to which the author incorporated its contents and what revisions he made. One episode in his work can be traced to a specific, known pre-Islamic text. K?rn?mag-e Ardash?r-e P?bag?n contains a narrative which is almost identical to the life of Ardashir I in the Shahnameh. The similarities between these two works provide an opportunity to draw conclusions regarding Ferdowsi’s approach to written sources and his understanding of his own voice as an author.
This paper briefly demonstrates the relationship between these works, focusing on the rhetorical strategy and ideology implicit in each narrative. The rhetoric of legitimation of Ardashir’s rule in various texts of the Sasanian era, such as the “Letter of Tansar” and D?nkard, will be examined and compared with Ferdowsi's narrative of Ardashir. Arguments borrowed into this work from the earlier text include bloodline connections to past dynasties, affirmation of the Zoroastrian faith, and royal marriages. In this way, the paper will respond to important questions on the nature of Ferdowsi’s sources, such as those made by Dick Davis, Mahmoud Omidsalar, and Olga Davidson. The paper examines the rhetorical motivations of the anonymous Sasanian-era author of the K?rn?mag by considering theories regarding the dynasty’s political and social structures in the works of Arthur Christensen and Parvaneh Pourshariati.
Ultimately, the paper demonstrates the unique motivations of each author; while the earlier work sought to reconcile powerful factions in pre-Islamic society to the ruling order and defend its claims to power, Ferdowsi intended to portray a thread of perpetual continuity in Iranian kingship from the beginning of time. To achieve his goal, Ferdowsi borrows heavily from the the K?rn?mag because its arguments support his purpose.
Retelling the Shahnameh: Fourteenth-century Poetic Reconfigurations of Jamshid
In Firdawsi’s Shahnameh (completed circa 1010), Jamshid enjoys farr as bestowed by Ahura Mazda, and rules the world for many hundreds of years until he grows proud and loses both divine farr and his kingship. Jamshid is credited with a wide range of inventions and innovations, including the cultivation of the grapevine, the production of wine, and the establishment of the festival of Nawruz. This paper will examine the extent to which allusions to Jamshid in ghazals composed in fourteenth-century Shiraz differ in content from the version of the Jamshid legend recorded by Firdawsi over three and a half centuries earlier. The paper will also explore how allusions to Jamshid in these ghazals differ in function from allusions to the king as incorporated into qasidas from the Ghaznavid and Saljuq periods. In Hafiz’s ghazals, Jamshid is commonly conflated or confused with Solomon; allusions to these models of pre-Islamic kingship reminding the audience of life’s transience, and linking contemporary Shiraz with a glorious, ancient past. This paper will argue that, in the context of the ghazals of Hafiz and his contemporaries, allusions to Jamshid/Solomon carry a real, contemporary subtext since in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries local rulers (namely the Salghurid Atabaks, Injuids, and Muzaffarids) promoted the image of Fars as the Dominion of Solomon (Mulk-i Sulayman), and took a keen interest in ancient sites such as Pasargadae and Persepolis/Istakhr, which, in the popular medieval Islamic imagination, were associated with Solomon and Jamshid respectively. Through their active interaction with these physical memorials to pre-Islamic kingship, local rulers in this period sought to appropriate a measure of the glory associated with them and, in turn, helped to bolster the idea of Firdawsi’s Shahnameh as a history, and Jamshid as a historical, rather than legendary, figure.
