Notes · Book B5The Seven Labors of Rostam

B5.1Rakhsh Fights a Lion

Riding hard for Mazandaran, Rostam catches and roasts a Gur-e-Khar, then sleeps in a reed-bed while Rakhsh grazes. A lion attacks, and Rakhsh kills it. Rostam wakes and scolds his horse for fighting alone.

Then Rostam, world-illuming, left his sire: The Seven Stages (haft khān) begin: Rostam takes the short and deadly road to rescue Kavus, and meets one trial at each stage. The sequence is often compared with the labors of Heracles. Later in the poem the prince Esfandiyar passes through seven stages of his own (II, C7), closely modeled on these, and the two heroes will one day meet (II, C8).

He struck his arrowhead till sparks took fire: Rostam makes his fire as Hushang first found it (A2.2), by striking sparks from stone. It is a small reminder that the gifts of the first kings are now the ordinary kit of a hero on the road.

My jowshan, Babr-e Bayan, if you fail: The babr-e bayān is Rostam’s famous war-coat, worn over his armor and his mark in every painting of him. The name is obscure: babr is usually a tiger or leopard, and bayān has been read in several ways. Later tradition made the coat proof against fire and water, and told stories of how Rostam won it that Ferdowsi does not include.

Tahamtan woke when sweetest sleep was done: Tahamtan, ‘mighty-bodied’, is Rostam’s standing epithet, used so often that it works almost as a second name. The Seven Stages show why: food, sleep and fighting are all on a giant’s scale.

B5.2Rostam Finds a Spring

Crossing a burning desert, Rostam collapses with thirst and prays. A ram appears and leads him to a spring. He blesses the animal, bathes Rakhsh, hunts and eats, and before sleeping tells Rakhsh never again to fight without waking him.

A blessed ram moved lightly on the ground: The ram is no ordinary guide. In Iranian tradition it is closely tied to divine favor: the Avesta lists a ram among the shapes of Verethraghna (Bahram), god of victory, and in the Pahlavi romance of Ardashir the royal farr runs after the future king in the form of a ram. Rostam rightly takes it as a sign of God’s grace.

He spoke to Rakhsh: “If danger should draw near: Rostam’s order sets up the next stage. Rakhsh is told to wake his master but not to fight, and in the dark he will do exactly that, three times, to his master’s fury.

B5.3Rostam Fights a Dragon

An unseen dragon twice approaches in the night. Twice Rakhsh wakes Rostam, who sees nothing and threatens to kill the horse. The third time God reveals the beast; Rostam demands its name and, with Rakhsh biting its shoulder, cuts off its head.

Declare your name! Your death is drawing near: Heroes in the Shahnameh ask a foe’s name before they fight and give their own lineage in return; to kill a nameless enemy brings no glory. The custom becomes tragic later in this volume, when Rostam and Sohrab fight without either knowing who the other is.

The World-Creator willed the truth revealed: Dragon-slaying is the Iranian hero’s signature feat. In the Avesta, Keresaspa kills the horned dragon Srvara, and earlier in the poem Rostam’s grandfather Sahm boasts of killing the dragon of the Kashaf river. This dragon can make itself invisible, so the victory needs God’s help as well as Rostam’s sword.

B5.4Rostam Slays a Witch

In a green meadow Rostam finds a feast laid out by sorcerers, and sings to a tanbur about his hard life. A witch comes to him disguised as a beauty. When he names God her true face appears, and he binds her and cuts her in two.

And found a fine tanbur upon the sand: The tanbūr is a long-necked lute. Rostam’s song is a rare moment of self-portrait: the professional hero complains that his only garden is the battlefield and his only company dragons and Divs. The scene of the singing warrior and the painted witch has been a favorite of manuscript painters.

At Yazdan’s name her features blackened quite: The name of God undoes sorcery, a belief shared by Zoroastrian and Muslim tradition alike. Later in the poem (II, C7.5) Esfandiyar meets a witch at the same point in his own seven stages, and exposes her with a holy chain instead of a prayer.

B5.5Rostam Takes Ulad Captive

Rostam crosses a land of total darkness and lets Rakhsh graze in a planted field. He tears off the ears of the angry watchman, routs the local lord Ulad and his men, catches Ulad with his kamand and forces him to guide him to Kavus and the White Div.

He journeyed on and reached a realm of night: The land of darkness at the world’s edge is an old motif. Later in the poem (II, D5.29) Alexander crosses a similar darkness in search of the Water of Life, with the prophet Khezr as his guide.

My name is Cloud in fight: Having demanded the dragon’s name, Rostam now refuses to give his own, answering with a boast instead. Ferdowsi’s hero is often cagey about his identity. It is a habit that will cost him dearly when he meets Sohrab.

Where even Homa will not cross by day: The homā (huma) is the Persian bird of fortune. It was said to live on bones and harm no living thing, and a man on whom its shadow fell would become a king. If even the homa avoids the road, it is a bad road indeed.

B5.6Rostam Fights the Div Arzhang

Rostam storms Arzhang Div’s camp, tears off his head and scatters the Divs. Guided by Ulad, he reaches the blinded, captive Kavus, who tells him the way to the White Div’s cave and that only that Div’s blood can cure their blindness.

I knew that call in Kay Qobad’s old day: Kavus recognizes Rakhsh’s neigh from Rostam’s first campaign, in Kay Qobad’s reign, when the young hero seized Afrasiab by the belt. The captives take it for the raving of a broken man, and are wrong.

From White Div’s heart and from his monstrous brain: The cure lies in the source of the harm: blindness caused by the Div’s sorcery can be healed only by his blood. In the next chapter Rostam brings back the Div’s liver. The two accounts are less at odds than they look, since the Persian jigar can mean both liver and, more loosely, the heart.

B5.7Rostam Slays the White Div

At noon, while the Divs sleep, Rostam enters the White Div’s cave, wakes him and, after a long and bloody wrestle, hurls him down and tears out his liver. The blood restores the Iranians’ sight. They sack Mazandaran, and Kavus decides to send its king a letter.

And like a lion’s mane hung down its hair: The Persian can be read with a pun: shīr means both ‘lion’ and ‘milk’, so the hair may be ‘as white as milk’, which would explain how the black-faced monster earns his name, the White Div.

If I survive today, / I shall live forever after this affray: Ferdowsi lets both wrestlers think aloud, in matching couplets: the hero sure that surviving this fight will make him immortal, the monster knowing his life is over. Giving the enemy an inner voice is a mark of the poet’s fairness, even to a Div.

The White Div slain within his cave that day: The killing of the White Div is the climax of the Seven Stages and among the most often painted scenes in the Shahnameh. In later painting and popular tradition Rostam’s helmet is sometimes said to be made from the White Div’s head, a detail Ferdowsi does not give.

B5.8Kavus’s Letter to Mazandaran

Kavus sends Farhad with a letter calling on the king of Mazandaran to submit. The king’s champions try to crush the envoy’s hand, but Farhad does not flinch. The king refuses in fury, and Kavus decides to send Rostam with a second letter.

Where steel-chewers on leathern feet would roam: These are the people of Narmpai, the ‘soft-feet’ (the Narm-Pawyawn, whom Iskandar meets in Volume II), one of the fabulous peoples at the edge of Ferdowsi’s world, like the Buzgush, ‘goat-ears’, whom Ulad named in B5.5. They belong with the monstrous races of Greek geography and the Alexander Romance, such as the Panotii, whose ears were large enough to sleep in.

One seized his hand and crushed with savage force: The handshake as a trial of strength sets up a pattern. Farhad, an ordinary envoy, only endures it; in the next chapter Rostam will turn it back on his testers.

B5.9Rostam’s Embassy to Mazandaran

Rostam rides as envoy, uproots a tree and flings it at the welcoming party, and crushes the hands of the champion Kalahur. Posing as Rostam’s servant, he refuses the king’s bribes, tears the headsman in two and returns to urge Kavus to war.

He tore it root and all from earth below: A hero who uproots a tree and uses it as a weapon has a close cousin in Bhima, the giant among the brothers of the Indian Mahabharata, who fights in just this way.

Are you that Rostam: Rostam plays his own envoy and praises ‘Rostam’ in the third person. The disguise makes the embassy a comedy for the reader, who knows what the king of Mazandaran does not.

B5.10Kavus Wars with Mazandaran

The armies meet, and Rostam spears the boasting champion Juya out of the saddle. After a week of battle Kavus prays; Rostam then spears the sorcerer-king, who turns himself into a rock. Rostam carries it to camp, the king emerges and is killed, and Ulad receives Mazandaran.

Then Rostam drove toward Mazandaran’s king: The Avesta already speaks of the ‘Mazanian daevas’ (māzainya daēva), and the Mazandaran of legend is a land of Divs and sorcerers. Many scholars think it was not originally the Caspian province that now bears the name, although the poem later places events near Amol (B6.9).

Guraza charged, a boar, his banner high: Guraza’s name is the Persian gorāz, ‘boar’, and his banner bears his emblem. The boar is also one of the forms of Verethraghna, god of victory. The bāz is a fathom, the span of outstretched arms. Later in this volume the Iranian champions are recognized one by one by their banners in the story of Forood.

At once by sorcery his body changed: The shape-shifting king, turned to rock and then coaxed out, is the last trick of Mazandaran’s magic. Rostam defeats it not by counter-spell but by brute strength, carrying the rock to camp.

B5.11Kavus Returns to Iran

Kavus returns in triumph and opens his treasuries. He loads Rostam with gifts and grants him Nimruz by charter before Rostam rides home to Zal. He then makes Tus commander of the army, gives Isfahan to Gudarz, and rules in feasting and justice.

He granted all Nimruz as royal right: Nimruz, ‘midday’, that is, the south, is an old name for Sistan. The charter explains the special, almost royal standing of Rostam’s house, which rules its own province under the Kayanian kings. That arrangement will be tested later in the poem (II, C8.3), when a king demands that Rostam come to court in chains.

The city shone; daray, koust, karnay rang: The band of a Persian army: the karnāy, a long brass trumpet still played in Central Asia; the kūs, a great kettledrum carried on elephant or camel; the darāy, a bell or gong; and the tabīra, a drum. The noise of these instruments is a constant presence in the poem’s battles and celebrations.

He gave Gudarz Isfahan as his seat: Gudarz and his family (Giv, Bijan and many more) are one of the great houses of the poem. Many scholars see in them a memory of the Parthian nobility; a Parthian king called Gotarzes left his name at Bisotun.

Like Iram’s fields in bloom and beauty blessed: Iram ‘of the pillars’ is the lost city of the people of Ad in the Qur’an. Legend said that its king, Shaddad, built there a garden to rival Paradise, and was destroyed for his presumption. A comparison with a slight shadow for a king about to overreach himself.