(ca. 935-1020 or 1026) poet
FirdawsI is considered the national poet of Persia. As author of the great epic the shahnameh (Book of Kings), he has been an enduring source of pride and entertainment to Iranians for more than 1,000 years.
FirdawsI was born in Tus, near present-day Mashhad, in the Khorasan region of Iran, and was apparently a modest landowner. To earn money for his daughter’s dowry, he decided to write an epic poem devoted to Persian history. He planned to present it to the local governor, Abu Mansur, a descendant of the old Sassanian royal dynasty and a generous patron of the arts.
Several of Firdawsl’s immediate literary predecessors had been engaged in an attempt to free Persian literary language of the many Arabic words that had entered the language in the centuries following the Arab conquest in the seventh century. At the same time, a tradition of prose epics had emerged, celebrating the ancient glories of the Persian Empire. FirdawsI based his Shahnameh on one such prose epic. Like its predecessor, his poem was written in pure Pahlavi, a Middle Persian dialect. This has kept the work readable to the present day.
FirdawsI admitted that he built the poem’s 60,000 couplets around an original core of 1,000 lines written by an earlier poet. This may have been a ruse to protect the poet from charges of pagan heresy, since the poem extols Zoroastrianism, the official religion of Persia before Islam.
The Shahnameh begins with the creation of the universe and ends with the defeat of Yazdigard, the last Sassanian king. The mass of material in the 50 intervening episodes is less a systematic history than a collection of legendary tales, historical exposition, lyrical interludes, and love stories. The heroes, all men, are larger than life and live and rule for hundreds of years. The chief hero is the fierce Rustam: “On the day of battle that worthy hero with sword, dagger, mace and lasso / Cut, tore, broke and bound, the heads, breasts, legs and hands of his foes.” Rustam’s many battles were won astride his horse Rakhsh. The horse’s eyesight was so keen he could see an ant crawling on a piece of black felt two miles away on a dark night. The pair are often depicted in Persian miniatures.
Despite the storybook tone of the poem, FirdawsI includes many interesting details about ordinary life and material culture, especially in the Sassanian period, information which might otherwise have been lost to history.
More than 30 years after he began, FirdawsI completed the epic in 1010. By this time, a Turkish sultan, Mahmud of Ghazna, ruled Khurasan. Mahmud accepted the work but paid a paltry sum of 20,000 dirhams. He may have believed the charges that FirdawsI was a Shi’ite heretic, and he may have been unsympathetic to Persian national feeling. In a rage, FirdawsI gave the money away to a bath attendant and a beer seller. He then penned a 1,000-line satirical attack on Mahmud, which is still read with enjoyment today as a model of the genre. He then had to flee until the sultan’s anger subsided. Some years later the sultan repented, but the 60,000-dirham prize came too late; the 90-year-old poet had died shortly before.
FirdawsI is revered by Iranians as one of the heroes of Persian culture. He is also recognized by Muslims in general as one of the greatest figures in Islamic cultural history, even though he never hesitated to honor pre-Islamic national and religious traditions.
Anthologies Containing English Translations of Works by Firdawsi
Hasan, Hadi. A Golden Treasury of Persian Poetry. Delhi, India: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1986.
Arberry, A. J. Persian Poetry: An Anthology of Verse Translations. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1954.
Works about Firdawsi
Arberry, A. J. “II. From the Beginnings to Firdawsi” in Classical Persian Literature. London: Taylor & Francis, 1994, 42-52. Thackston, Wheeler M. A Millennium of Classical Persian Poetry. Bethesda, Md.: Iranbooks, 1994.
