“So when the Sulṭán returned to Ghazna, the Minister reminded him; and Maḥmúd ordered that sixty thousand dínárs' worth * of indigo should be given to Firdawsí, and that this indigo should be carried to Ṭús on the King's own camels, and that apologies should be tendered to Firdawsí. For years the Minister had been working for this, and at length he had achieved his work; so now he caused the camels to be loaded, and the indigo safely reached Ṭábarán. * But even as the camels entered the Rúdbár Gate, the corpse of Firdawsí was borne forth from the Gate of Razán. * Now at that time there was in Ṭábarán a preacher, whose fanaticism was such that he declared that he would not suffer Firdawsí's body to be buried in the Musulmán Cemetery because he was a Ráfiḍí; and nothing that men could say would serve to move him. Now outside the gate there was a garden belonging to Firdawsí, * and there they buried him, and there he lies to this day. And I visited his tomb in the year A.H. 510 (A.D. 1116-17).*

“They say that Firdawsí left a very high-spirited * daughter, to whom they would have given the King's gift; but she would not accept it, declaring that she needed it not. The Postmaster wrote * to the Court and represented this to the King, who ordered this doctor * to be expelled from Ṭábarán as a punishment for his officiousness, and to be exiled from his home; and that the money should be given to the Imám Abú Bakr [ibn] Isḥáq for the repair of the rest-house of Cháha, * which stands on the road between Merv and Níshápúr at the confines of Ṭús. When this order reached Ṭús and Níshápúr, it was faithfully executed; and the restoration of the rest-house of Cháha was effected with this money.”

Such, then, is the oldest and most authentic account of Firdawsí which we possess; and we may be quite sure that,

Dawlatsháh's account. even though it be not correct in all particulars, it represents what was known and believed by edu­cated men in the poet's own town a century after his death. Its importance is therefore great, and justifies its introduction in this place. Dawlatsháh certainly made use of this account (for he mentions the Chahár Maqála as one of his sources) in compiling his own, which is embroidered with many additional and probably fictitious details. Amongst other things he states that the poet's name was Ḥasan b. Isḥáq b. Sharafsháh, and that in some of his verses he styles himself “son of Sharafsháh”; * that he was from the village of Razán, * near Ṭús, and that he took his pen-name from a garden in that dis­trict called Firdaws (Paradise), belonging to the 'Amíd of Khurásán, Súrí b. Mughíra, whose servant his father was. He is further represented as a poor man, fleeing from the oppression of the Governor of his native place to Ghazna, and there sup­porting himself by the precarious crafts of the ballad-monger, until he was able, in the manner mentioned at the beginning of our notice, to make himself acquainted with 'Unṣurí, who presents him to the Sulṭán, and appears throughout, like the Wazír al-Maymandí, as his patron and protector. The verse—

“When the lips of the babe are first dried from their food
They lisp in the cradle the name of Maḥmúd”—

is said to have definitely gained Firdawsí the favour of the Sulṭán, who is represented as lodging him in apartments in the palace and assigning him a regular salary. The King's favourite Ayáz, whom Firdawsí is said in this narrative (for in others * these two are represented as firm friends) to have annoyed by his neglect, is represented as poisoning Maḥmúd's mind against him by accusations of heresy, with which he openly charged the poet, saying, “All the great heresiarchs of this (i.e., the Carmathian or Isma'ílí) sect have come from Ṭús; but I forgive you on condition that you renounce this doctrine.” The poet is further represented as hiding in Ghazna for several months after his disappointment in order to get back into his hands from the King's librarian the manu­script of his Sháhnáma, and the name of the bookseller with whom he afterwards took refuge at Herát is changed from Isma'íl to Abu'l-Ma'álí. Other details and variations of a similar character mark the remainder of Dawlatsháh's narrative, which, however, on the whole follows that already given.

The internal evidence afforded by Firdawsí's own works is, of course, so far as the text of them (which is in many places Internal evidence. very uncertain and unsatisfactory) can be trusted, the most authoritative source of information con­cerning his life. This, as already observed, has been exhaustively examined, with admirable patience and acumen, by Professor Nöldeke and Dr. Ethé. It is impossible for me in the scanty space at my disposal to recapitulate here all their conclusions, neither is it necessary, since every serious student of the Sháhnáma must needs read the Iranisches Nationalepos of the former scholar, and the already-mentioned articles on this subject published by the latter, together with his edition of Firdawsí's Yúsuf and Zulaykhá, and the chapters germane to this topic contained in his Neupersische Litteratur in vol. ii of the Grundriss der Iranischen Philologie. Briefly, however, we appear to be justified in assuming that Firdawsí was a dihqán or squire of Ṭús, of respectable position and com­fortable means; that he was born about A.D. 920, or a little later; that a taste for antiquarian research and folk-lore, fostered by the perusal of the prose “Book of Kings” compiled in Persian from older sources by Abú Manṣúr al-Ma'marí for Abú Manṣur b. 'Abdu'r-Razzáq, the then Governor of Ṭús, in A.D. 957-8, * led him, about A.D. 974, definitely to undertake the versification of the National Epic; that he completed what we may call “the first edition” in A.D. 999, after twenty-five years' labour, and dedicated it to Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. Abí Bakr of Khálanján; that the “second edition,” dedicated to Sulṭán Maḥmúd, was completed in or shortly before A.D. 1010; that his quarrel with the Sulṭán and flight from Ghazna almost immediately succeeded this; and that, having lived for a short time under the protection of one of the Princes of the House of Buwayh (Bahá'u'd-Dawla or his son Sulṭánu'd-Dawla, who succeeded him in A.D. 1012, as Nöldeke thinks; Majdu'd-Dawla Abú Ṭálib Rustam, as Ethé seems to believe), for whom he composed his other great poem, the Yúsuf and Zulaykhá, he returned, an old man of ninety or more, to his native town of Ṭús, and there died about A.D. 1020 or 1025.

We must now pass to the brief consideration of Firdawsí's work, which, so far as it is preserved to us, consists of (1) the Firdawsí's work: (1) the Sháhnáma. Sháhnáma; (2) the romance of Yúsuf and Zulaykha; and (3) a considerable number of lyrical fragments, preserved by various biographers and anthology-makers, and diligently collected, edited, and translated by Dr. Ethé in his articles Firdausí als Lyriker already mentioned.

It is on the Sháhnáma, of course, that Firdawsí's great reputation as a poet rests. In their high estimate of the literary value of this gigantic poem Eastern and Western critics are almost unanimous, and I therefore feel great diffidence in confessing that I have never been able entirely to share this enthusiasm. The Sháhnáma cannot, in my opinion, for one moment be placed on the same level as the Arabian Mu'allaqát; and though it is the prototype and model of all epic poetry in the lands of Islám, it cannot, as I think, compare for beauty, feeling, and grace with the work of the best didactic, romantic, and lyric poetry of the Persians. It is, of course, almost impossible to argue about matters of taste, especially in literature; and my failure to appreciate the Sháhnáma very likely arises partly from a constitutional disability to appreciate epic poetry in general. With such disabilities we are all familiar, most notably in the case of music, where a Wagner will entrance some, while leaving others indifferent or even uncomfortable. Yet, allowing for this, I cannot help feeling that the Sháhnáma has certain definite and positive defects. Its inordinate length is, of course, necessitated by the scope of its subject, which is nothing less than the legendary history of Persia from the beginning of time until the Arab Conquest in the seventh century of our era; and the monotony of its metre it shares with most, if not all, other epics. But the similes employed are also, as it seems to me, unnecessarily monotonous: every hero appears as “a fierce, war-seeking lion,” a “crocodile,” “a raging elephant,” and the like; and when he moves swiftly, he moves “like smoke,” “like dust,” or “like the wind.” The beauty of form in any literary work is necessarily lost in translation, though it may be to some extent replaced or imitated in a clever rendering; but beauty and boldness of ideas there should be less difficulty in preserving, so that, for instance, the beauty of 'Umar Khayyám's quatrains may be said to have been wholly rendered by the genius of FitzGerald. But the Sháhnáma, as it seems to me, defies satisfactory translation, for the sonorous majesty of the original (and this at least no one who has heard it declaimed by the professional rhapsodists of Persia, known as Sháhnáma-khwáns, will deny) is lost, and the nakedness of the underlying ideas stands revealed. I do not profess to be a skilful versifier, but at least many Persian and Arabic poets have suffered equally at my hands in these pages; and I venture to think that few English readers of this book and its Prolegomena (which contained numerous translations from the Sháhnáma experimentally rendered in various different ways) will put my renderings of the Sháhnáma even on a level with my renderings from other poets, though the coefficient of loss is in all cases about the same.