Notes · Book C1Rostam and the Div Akvan

C1.1The Prelude

The poet opens with praise of the Maker, the oneness of God and the helplessness of human knowledge. He warns against endless argument, urges self-knowledge and the study of the heavens, and defends the old tale he is about to tell.

Philosopher, for all your endless talk: Ferdowsi opens a new tale with a short sermon, as he opened the poem itself (see I, A0.1): God is One, speech adds nothing to Him, and the philosopher who would describe His nature has closed the very road the poet means to walk. The rebuke is aimed at theological system-building, not at kherad, which the Shahnameh honors above everything.

The rustic singer’s tale from times of old: Here, and again at the close of the Akvan story (C1.5), Ferdowsi defends his marvels against the literal-minded reader: the old tale is a figure, and its sense lies under the surface, to be drawn out by weighing it. It is the poem’s standing answer to anyone who asks whether a Div could really lift a sleeping man off the ground.

C1.2Rostam Is Summoned to Fight Akvan

At Kay Khosrow’s court a herdsman reports a golden Gur-e-Khar killing horses in the royal pasture. The Shah knows it for the Div Akvan, and when no champion volunteers he summons Rostam from Zabul by letter. Rostam comes and accepts the hunt.

From neck to tail one stripe runs down his back: The coloring is drawn from life: the wild ass of the Iranian plateau is sandy gold with a dark stripe down the spine (on the animal, see I, B8.2). Everything the herdsman says about the coat is true to the beast, and nothing he says about its behavior is, which is how Khosrow knows what he is listening to.

Khosrow perceived it was no common steed: Kay Khosrow’s uncanny knowledge is part of his farr: he names the creature before the herdsman has finished, as later he will find Bijan in a pit in Turan by looking into a cup (C2.13). Ferdowsi almost never lets him be surprised, which is why the warning he sends with Rostam carries weight.

And gave it into Gorgin’s hand to bear: Gorgin son of Milad is the trusted courier here; in C2, the tale that follows, the same king sends him out with Bijan and he betrays him (C2.4). Readers are being introduced, on an honest errand, to the man who does the meanest thing in this volume.

C1.3Rostam’s Quest for the Div

Rostam rides to the pasture and on the fourth day finds the golden creature. His kamand and then his arrow fall on empty ground, and he knows it is Akvan in a gur’s skin. Worn out with searching, he waters Rakhsh at a spring and lies down armed.

My kamand’s coil will seize the beast today: The kamand is the plaited hide rope every Iranian hero carries coiled at the saddle, and the mark of a man who wants his enemy alive: Rostam puts up his sword because a captive is worth more to the Shah than a carcass. Persian uses the same word for a hangman’s rope, which is what it means the next time it appears (C2.9).

He loosed the saddle-girth, and for his bed: Notice the care he takes going to sleep: war-coat still on, kamand wound round his arm, girdle fastened, bow under his head. This is a man who learned in the Seven Stages (I, B5.1) what open country does to a sleeper. None of it helps, because the danger comes from under him.

C1.4Akvan Flings Rostam into the Sea

Akvan digs out the ground beneath the sleeping Rostam, lifts him into the air, and asks whether he would rather fall on mountains or into the sea. Rostam asks for the mountains; the Div throws him into the water. He swims ashore, recovers Rakhsh, and scatters Afrasiab’s herdsmen.

Shall I cast you on mountains or the wave?: The Div’s malice is also his weakness: he will do the opposite of whatever is asked, so a wish reversed is the only weapon left. The trick of the contrary tormentor is told all over the world, and Ferdowsi lets Rostam name his own method, guile against guile. It is the one adventure the strongest man in the poem wins by thinking.

Then Rostam said: “The wise of Chin uphold: Rostam invents his doctrine on the spot and credits it to the sages of Chin to give it authority. The lie works because it has a hook of truth in it: Zoroastrian purity law holds water sacred and the fouling of it with dead matter a grave offense, so a soul lost in the sea is a believable horror. Bijan will tell a comparable lie, for a better reason (C2.8).

If valor could avert the fatal day: One of Ferdowsi’s asides on death, dropped in while his hero is fighting the sea: courage does not put off the appointed day. Rostam himself will die in a pit prepared by his own half-brother at the end of this volume (C9), and the poet keeps the thought within reach long before then.

C1.5Rostam Slays Akvan the Div

Afrasiab rides out to view his herds and finds them driven off. Rostam routs the pursuit and takes four elephants, then meets Akvan, catches him with the kamand, crushes him with the gorz and cuts off his head. Ferdowsi closes by warning who is really a Div.

Each year the herdsman let the horses graze: Royal horse-herds were wealth and policy at once: pastured in guarded meadows under a herdsman who answered for them, and ridden out to yearly by the king himself, as an inspection rather than an outing. Rostam has therefore done more than lift cattle. He has emptied the stables of Turan’s cavalry, which is why the pursuit is immediate.

Count him a Div, and count him not a man!: Ferdowsi steps out of the story to read his own monster: a Div is a man who has left the road of manhood (on javanmardi, see I, B8.20), and the word is an insult, not a zoology. He is answering the doubting reader he addressed in the prelude (C1.1): the wise man should not mock the tale, since evil men are Divs in deed, whatever their birth.

C1.6Rostam Returns to Iran

Rostam brings home the herds, the spoils and four elephants. Khosrow rides out to meet him, and over two weeks of feasting Rostam describes the Div’s true shape. He then asks leave for Zabul, is loaded with treasure, and the poet turns to Bijan.

His head was like an elephant’s; his hair: The Div’s real body is described only here: after its death, by the man who killed it, over wine. The tusks, the long hair, the white eyes and black lips are close to the way Divs are painted in Persian manuscripts, where they are commonly horned, parti-colored and boar-toothed. Painter and poet are working from the same inherited picture.

No herd of steeds can answer for the slain: Rostam marks the Akvan story as an interlude himself: a raid on horse-herds is not the vengeance owed for Siavash (see I, B9.55), and the war must still be fought. Ferdowsi often lets a character say what the shape of the poem is doing, and this short, strange tale sits between two long campaigns.