Firdaws¯ı 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.
Firdaws¯ı 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, Ab¯u Mans¯ur, a
descendant of the old Sassanian royal dynasty and
a generous patron of the arts.
Several of Firdaws¯ı’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. Firdaws¯ı 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.
Firdaws¯ı 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, Firdaws
¯ı 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, Firdaws¯ı
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 Firdaws¯ı was a Shi’ite heretic,
and he may have been unsympathetic to Persian
national feeling. In a rage, Firdaws¯ı 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.
Firdaws¯ı 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 Firdaws¯ı
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.
106 Far¯ıd od-D¯ın
Works about Firdaws¯ı
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.