Poet and Hero in the Persian Book of Kings

However, questions of historicity and national identity, though they have dominated the scholarly discourse about the Iranian national epic for the last century, are not the main subjects of this excellent study although they are dealt with concisely and authoritatively. Instead, the author is interested in two main subjects, the poetic form of the work and its relationship to oral traditions on the one hand, and the mythological and literary motif of the hero on the other. This two-pronged analysis is reflected in the book's title.

Issues of oral and literary composition, authorship and collective memory are approached through the paradigm of the Poet. On one level the Poet is Ferdowsi, the acknowledged creator of the Shahnama who lived in the early-eleventh century A.D., Davidson shows that Ferdowsi, not only inherited the Middle Persian oral poetic traditions, he also recreated the New Persian oral tradition composing a version of the national epic that became canonical. In turn, this started a process that allowed the book to be regenerated through the input of a parallel oral tradition. The point is, not to determine to what extent the sources Ferdowsi used were oral or literary or how literary he made the oral, but that both traditions existed side-by-side, mutually enriching each other before and after the creative effort of the poet Ferdowsi. As Davidson expresses it, "the idea of the book contains, like a time capsule, not only an idealised sum total of all oral poetic traditions as they were performed before Ferdowsi and as they continue to be performed after Ferdowsi [...] as such, the book is both a concrete object and a symbol, expressing the authority and authenticity of the oral poetic traditions that are being performed." In subsequent chapters and an appendix, she uses methods developed by scholars of oral traditions to detect the workings of formulae and other stylistic devices characteristic of oral poetry in the text, which will perhaps be new to scholars of Iranian studies more accustomed to privilege literary criticism. Folklorists familiar with such methodology, but without the grasp of Persian, may find these results rather less surprising, but difficult to check.

The second main theme of this book is epitomised by the Hero Rustam. The Hero has an inherently ambivalent position in the Book of Kings which is ostensibly about an orderly succession of kings and not about an individual heroic protagonist. Rustam stands outside the legitimate royal lineage but is at the same time the guarantor of legitimacy, the defender of kingship as well as a potential threat to kings. The arguments about possibly divergent epic traditions that have been raised by previous scholars are duly discussed, and Davidson also addresses herself at some length to Dumezil's proposition about the Indo-European structure of juxtaposing narratives about kings and heroes, in which demonic heroes are king-makers as guardians of sovereignty which their position within the same structure calls into question. The ambivalent nature of the Hero, she argues, is used by the Poet to combine heterogeneous traditions about kings and hemes, and that by welding them together the theme of conflict, in the Manichaean dichotomy typical of Zoroastrian Iran, becomes a vehicle to express the essence of Old Iranian culture and society. By focusing on Rustam, Ferdowsi achieved an artistic unity that in itself became the model of perfection, grounded in tradition and able to fertilise a process of on-going tradition. Davidson pursues the comparative literary analysis of Rustam's function through reference to other works within the Indo-European myth and epic tradition. Analysing the respective role of King and Hero, she draws on the Germanic Starkadr, the Indic Sisupala and the Greek Heracles; when discussing the "concept of premature and immature fatherhood" the parallels are Middle Irish and Old High German; other chapters draw heavily on classical Greek material. These chapters are perhaps the most problematic and seem to have grown from separate essays or lectures addressing a much more specialised audience. However, there is a more fundamental problem here which is perhaps rooted in the academic convention of Iranian studies which sets Iran squarely, and I believe unfairly, within an Indo-European context which belies the geographical and historical position of Iran as a Middle Eastern country. The fact that Iran was (and remains) surrounded by Semitic- and Mongolic-speaking peoples is simply irrelevant within the Indo-Europe-centric frame of reference. This seriously weakens the argument. Surely the influence of other literate cultures, notably the Arabic and Jewish traditions, cannot be edited from the picture? This narrow focus will irritate Middle Eastern scholars, but there is plenty in this book to interest a wider readership, and folklorists will welcome the impact of their methodologies on the arcane world of Iranian studies.