Ferdowsī
Ferdowsi: Shahnameh
(PART
I,
PART II)
also spelled Firdawsī, Firdusi, or Firdousi, pseudonym of Abū Ol-qasem
Manṣūr
born c. 935, near Ṭūs, Iran
died c. 1020, –26, Ṭūs
Persian poet, author of the Shāh-nāmeh (“Book of Kings”),
the Persian national epic, to which he gave its final and
enduring form, although he based his poem mainly on an
earlier prose version.
Ferdowsī was born in a village on the outskirts of the
ancient city of Ṭūs. In the course of the centuries many
legends have been woven around the poet’s name but very
little is known about the real facts of his life. The only
reliable source is given by Neẓāmī-ye ʿArūẓī, a 12th-century
poet who visited Ferdowsī’s tomb in 1116 or 1117 and
collected the traditions that were current in his birthplace
less than a century after his death.
According to Neẓāmī, Ferdowsī was a dehqān (“landowner”),
deriving a comfortable income from his estates. He had only
one child, a daughter, and it was to provide her with a
dowry that he set his hand to the task that was to occupy
him for 35 years. The Shāh-nāmeh of Ferdowsī, a poem of
nearly 60,000 couplets, is based mainly on a prose work of
the same name compiled in the poet’s early manhood in his
native Ṭūs. This prose Shāh-nāmeh was in turn and for the
most part the translation of a Pahlavi (Middle Persian)
work, the Khvatāy-nāmak, a history of the kings of Persia
from mythical times down to the reign of Khosrow II
(590–628), but it also contained additional material
continuing the story to the overthrow of the Sāsānians by
the Arabs in the middle of the 7th century. The first to
undertake the versification of this chronicle of pre-Islāmic
and legendary Persia was Daqīqī, a poet at the court of the
Sāmānids, who came to a violent end after completing only
1,000 verses. These verses, which deal with the rise of the
prophet Zoroaster, were afterward incorporated by Ferdowsī,
with due acknowledgements, in his own poem.
The Shāh-nāmeh, finally completed in 1010, was presented
to the celebrated sultan Maḥmūd of Ghazna, who by that time
had made himself master of Ferdowsī’s homeland, Khūrāsān.
Information on the relations between poet and patron is
largely legendary. According to Neẓāmī-ye ʿArūẓī, Ferdowsī
came to Ghazna in person and through the good offices of the
minister Aḥmad ebn Ḥasan Meymandī was able to secure the
Sultan’s acceptance of the poem. Unfortunately, Maḥmūd then
consulted certain enemies of the minister as to the poet’s
reward. They suggested that Ferdowsī should be given 50,000
dirhams, and even this, they said, was too much, in view of
his heretical Shīʿīte tenets. Maḥmūd, a bigoted Sunnite, was
influenced by their words, and in the end Ferdowsī received
only 20,000 dirhams. Bitterly disappointed, he went to the
bath and, on coming out, bought a draft of foqāʿ (a kind of
beer) and divided the whole of the money between the bath
attendant and the seller of foqāʿ.
Fearing the Sultan’s wrath, he fled first to Herāt, where
he was in hiding for six months, and then, by way of his
native Ṭūs, to Mazanderan, where he found refuge at the
court of the Sepahbād Shahreyār, whose family claimed
descent from the last of the Sāsānians. There Ferdowsī
composed a satire of 100 verses on Sultan Maḥmūd that he
inserted in the preface of the Shāh-nāmeh and read it to
Shahreyār, at the same time offering to dedicate the poem to
him, as a descendant of the ancient kings of Persia, instead
of to Maḥmūd. Shahreyār, however, persuaded him to leave the
dedication to Maḥmūd, bought the satire from him for 1,000
dirhams a verse, and had it expunged from the poem. The
whole text of this satire, bearing every mark of
authenticity, has survived to the present.
It was long supposed that in his old age the poet had
spent some time in western Persia or even in Baghdad under
the protection of the Būyids, but this assumption was based
upon his presumed authorship of Yūsof o-Zalīkhā, an epic
poem on the subject of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, which, it
later became known, was composed more than 100 years after
Ferdowsī’s death. According to the narrative of Neẓāmī-ye
ʿArūẓī, Ferdowsī died inopportunely just as Sultan Maḥmūd
had determined to make amends for his shabby treatment of
the poet by sending him 60,000 dinars’ worth of indigo.
Neẓāmī does not mention the date of Ferdowsī’s death. The
earliest date given by later authorities is 1020 and the
latest 1026; it is certain that he lived to be more than 80.
The Persians regard Ferdowsī as the greatest of their
poets. For nearly a thousand years they have continued to
read and to listen to recitations from his masterwork, the
Shāh-nāmeh, in which the Persian national epic found its
final and enduring form. Though written about 1,000 years
ago, this work is as intelligible to the average, modern
Iranian as the King James version of the Bible is to a
modern English-speaker. The language, based as the poem is
on a Pahlavi original, is pure Persian with only the
slightest admixture of Arabic. European scholars have
criticized this enormous poem for what they have regarded as
its monotonous metre, its constant repetitions, and its
stereotyped similes; but to the Iranian it is the history of
his country’s glorious past, preserved for all time in
sonorous and majestic verse.
John Andrew Boyle
