Notes · Book C5Lohrasp

C5.1Lohrasp Builds a Fire-Temple at Balkh

Crowned, Lohrasp preaches justice, renounces vengeance, and sends envoys to Rum, Hind and Chin for learned men. They settle at Balkh, where he builds a city of markets and quarters, each with its place for the Sadeh rite, and founds the fire called Barzin.

He raised a fire and gave it Barzin’s name,: Barzin is Ādur Burzēn-Mihr, one of the three great fires of Zoroastrian Iran alongside Ādur Farnbāg and Ādur Gušnasp (on Azargashasp, see I, A7.1). Tradition places it in Khorasan, makes it the fire of the farmers, and ties it to Goshtasb’s acceptance of the faith — which is why Ferdowsi has Lohrasp found it on the eve of Zardosht’s coming.

I shall do more than Kay Khosrow decreed, / And cleanse my heart of vengeance, wrath, and greed.: Lohrasp’s program is the end of the vengeance-cycle. Everything since Siavash’s murder has been done to settle a blood-debt, and the first policy of the new reign is to settle none. He is the poem’s first king who prays more than he fights, and he will end his life shut inside a shrine at II, C6.2.

C5.2Goshtasb Departs in Anger

Lohrasp’s sons Goshtasb and Zarir outshine everyone, but the Shah prefers Kay Kavus’s grandsons. Goshtasb demands to be named heir, is refused with a parable about an overfed stream, and rides for Hind by night with three hundred horsemen. Riders are sent after him in every direction.

One son was named Goshtasb, one named Zarir;: Both names are Avestan. Goshtasb is Vishtaspa (see I, A0.9); Zarir is Zairivairi, Pahlavi Zarēr, whose death in the holy war against Arjasp is the subject of the Ayādgār ī Zarērān (see I, A6.16), the oldest surviving telling of the story Ferdowsi is coming to. The brothers enter the poem as a pair, and the pair is very old.

As water feeds the stream, its strength will grow,: The father refuses his son the crown with a maxim about not letting a stream grow strong enough to ruin the garden. Goshtasb takes the crown anyway and then spends his reign proving the maxim true: the study of a king who cannot bear a rival inside his own house, and destroys his son to keep from having one, runs from here to II, C8.

C5.3Goshtasb Returns with Zarir

Zarir overtakes his brother near Kabul. A noble argues that a Shah must not submit to idolaters in Hind, and Goshtasb turns for home; Lohrasp rides out to meet him and feasts him. But the Shah still favors Kavus’s line, and Goshtasb begins planning to leave alone.

That you shall equal Kay Khosrow in fame,: The star-readers promise Goshtasb the fame of Kay Khosrow, and in the letter they are right: it is in his reign that the faith is revealed. But the reader has just watched Kay Khosrow leave the world in a state of grace, and Goshtasb will leave his son dead on a battlefield he arranged. Ferdowsi’s prophecies come true and mock the men they flatter.

Yet still Lohrasp preferred that royal race,: Lohrasp’s own birth was the thing the chiefs would not accept at II, C4.60, and he governs as though they had been right — keeping the honors for the grandsons of Kavus and leaving his own sons out of them. The king raised over the old royal line defers to it, and his sons pay for the deference.

C5.4Goshtasb Sets Off for Rum

Goshtasb saddles his father’s horse Shabdiz at night and rides for Rum alone. Lohrasp takes counsel; a Mobad tells him not to fight the turning heavens but to give his son an army and a crown. Search parties go out in every direction and find no trace.

Save Rostam, Pahlevan of deathless fame.: The Mobad’s compliment is that one living man outranks Goshtasb, and the man is Rostam — which is what Goshtasb himself said to his father two chapters earlier. Ferdowsi measures the new dynasty against the old hero from its first appearance, and the measurement ends in the duel that kills Goshtasb’s son and, soon after, Rostam (II, C8 and C9).

The blame was his: Lohrasp had caused the strain;: Ferdowsi seldom hands down a verdict in his own person, and here he does: the father was at fault, the son carried the pain. He will not take the father’s side in the next generation either, when Goshtasb sends Esfandiyar to his death to keep a crown. The pattern runs three deep — Lohrasp, Goshtasb, Esfandiyar.

C5.5Goshtasb Arrives in Rum

Hishvi the ferryman carries the disguised prince across to Rum. In Salm’s great city Goshtasb looks for work: the scribes laugh at him, the royal herdsman will not trust a stranger, the camel-master sends him to court, and the smith’s anvil splits under his hammer.

Great Salm had built that city long before,: Rum belongs to Fereydoon’s eldest son. In the division of the world Salm took the west, Tur the north and east, and Iraj Iran, so the Caesars of this story are the Iranian royal house’s senior cousins. It explains much of what follows: a village headman in Rum who claims descent from Fereydoon (II, C5.6), and the sword of Salm that kills the wolf (II, C5.9).

A steel pen would shed tears for such a man;: The disguised prince turned away from trade after trade is a folktale pattern, and Ferdowsi makes each refusal a compliment: the pen would weep, the page would scorch, what the man wants is a horse, a bow and a kamand. The office he applies to belongs to a bishop, one of the Christian touches that make Ferdowsi’s Rum the Byzantium of his own century (compare I, B14.20).

C5.6The Village-Chief’s Hospitality

Penniless under a tree outside the city, Goshtasb curses his star. The chief of a nearby village finds him weeping and offers him a home; Goshtasb asks his lineage first, and learns he descends from Fereydoon. He stays on as a guest, month after month.

I spring from Fereydoon, the warrior king;: Neither man knows who the other is, and both descend from Fereydoon — the headman through Salm, his guest through Iraj (see II, C5.5). Goshtasb asks for the pedigree before he accepts the roof, which is the prince showing through the beggar: he will take bread from a stranger, but not from a nobody.

C5.7Katayun, Daughter of Caesar

Caesar’s custom lets his daughters choose husbands from an assembly of nobles. Katayun dreams of a sorrowful stranger and gives him her flowers; next day she finds him in a corner of the hall and crowns him. Caesar orders both beheaded, and the bishop talks him out of it.

The eldest was the princess Katayun,: Avestan tradition gives Vishtaspa a queen named Hutaosa. Ferdowsi’s queen is a Caesar’s daughter called Nahid, renamed Katayun (II, C6.2), and she will be the mother of Esfandiyar. Nothing in the older material prepares for her, and this whole Roman episode reads as a romance grafted onto the king’s youth rather than anything the Avesta knew.

To choose a spouse among the princes all.: The bride’s own choice from a hall of assembled suitors is presented as an ancestral law of Rum, and the bishop defends it against the king’s rage. It has a close Indian parallel in the svayaṃvara, the self-choice of a husband at a gathering of princes. The dream that comes first makes the choice safe: the girl is not choosing a stranger, she is recognizing one.

C5.8Goshtasb Weds Katayun

Caesar marries the pair and sends them off with nothing. Katayun refuses to regret her choice; they shelter with the village-chief and live on one of her rubies, sold for six thousand dinars. Goshtasb hunts daily, sharing his game with Hishvi and with his host.

If I am pleased with you and with my fate,: Katayun chooses once and never reconsiders, and her nerve is the making of Goshtasb. It is worth remembering later in Volume II, when she kneels to her son and begs him not to ride to Sistan (II, C8.4): the woman who told a king’s son to stop blaming the sky has no argument left that can hold her own son back.

He paid six thousand dinars for the stone,: The couple live on the wife’s jewels, which were hers to sell — a woman’s ornaments were her own property, not her husband’s — and the poem takes it for granted that a princess turned out of doors with nothing still has her gems sewn about her. On the dinar, see I, B11.3.

C5.9Murin’s Suit for Caesar’s Daughter

Murin of Rum asks for a daughter and is told to kill the wolf of Faskun’s forest. His horoscope says an Iranian will do three great deeds, so he goes to Hishvi, who brings him to Goshtasb. Goshtasb agrees, and asks for Salm’s sword and a horse.

Whoever tears that wolf’s great hide apart: Caesar turns a marriage into a monster-hunt, and the story becomes a folktale: the champion kills the beast, another man carries home the proof, and the truth waits its turn. Ferdowsi runs the pattern twice, once for each suitor, so that a single scene at II, C5.13 can undo both claims at once.

There he will see a wolf, all indigo,: The poem keeps calling it a wolf and keeps describing something else: an indigo hide, boar-like tusks, two horns, the bulk of an elephant. Goshtasb says flatly that it is a dragon. Horned dragons are old in Iranian myth — the Avesta’s aži sruvara, the horned serpent killed by Keresaspa (see I, A6.23) — and the beast of Faskun has more of that ancestry in it than of any wolf.

He has the sword that Salm was known to wield,: The blade is the heirloom of Fereydoon’s eldest son, kept in Rum, and Goshtasb asks for it before he asks for a horse. Quenching a sword in blood and poison is the poem’s standing boast of good steel. Fereydoon met his own monster with the ox-headed gorz (see I, A5.2); his heir’s sword now serves a descendant of his youngest son.

C5.10Goshtasb Slays the Wolf

Goshtasb rides into the forest alone, prays, empties his quiver into the beast, loses his horse to its horn, and splits its head with Salm’s sword on foot. He takes the tusks. Murin reports the kill as his own, and Caesar gives him the princess.

Let old Lohrasp be sheltered still in peace.: The runaway prays for the father he ran from. He asks not to be killed, because the news would destroy Lohrasp, and not to be frightened off, because the men on the shore would see it. Ferdowsi keeps the family quarrel running underneath the monster-fight, and it is the quarrel, not the wolf, that the episode is really about.

I split it from the head to middle through;: Murin repeats the true account of the fight and puts himself into it — the exact stroke, head to middle, that Goshtasb made on foot after losing his horse. The poem lets the lie stand for three chapters, with a proclamation, a feast and a wedding all built on it, and then lets Hishvi lay two tusks on the floor (II, C5.13).

C5.11Ahran’s Suit for Caesar’s Daughter

Ahran asks for the youngest daughter and is set against the dragon of Mount Sakila. He goes to Murin, who swears him to secrecy and sends him to Hishvi with a letter. Goshtasb agrees, and orders a toothed blade five arm-lengths long, quenched in blood and poison.

Set serpent’s teeth along each edge to bite,: A sword made to be bitten: teeth along both edges, a thorn-like point, a poisoned quench. Esfandiyar kills his own dragon the same way in the Seven Stages, giving it blades to close its jaws on (II, C7). It is how the poem kills dragons, because a beast that swallows its prey cannot be fought from outside — the son will repeat his father’s trick without knowing it.

And swore the oath by which his tongue was closed.: The second suit doubles the first, and the doubling is what wrecks it. Murin’s secret now belongs to two men, a letter and a ferryman, and the first lie needs a second to prop it up. Ahran swears not to tell, and both men will be standing at Caesar’s side when the truth walks in carrying teeth.

C5.12Goshtasb Slays the Dragon

Alone on Sakila, Goshtasb is drawn in by the dragon’s breath, feeds it the toothed blade, and strikes off its head. He takes two teeth, prays in the dust, and speaks of his father. Ahran carts the body to court, and Rum credits him with the kill.

The dragon saw him, drew a sucking breath,: Dragons in the Shahnameh do not chase; they inhale. The beast draws the rider in toward its jaws, and the hero’s answer is to give it something it cannot swallow. That is why these fights are won by preparation rather than horsemanship: Goshtasb shoots his arrows first, and when the arrows only enrage it, hands over the blade.

I have seen many dragons fierce as this,: He has seen exactly one, an hour ago, and it nearly had him. Ferdowsi lets the brag stand without comment a few lines after the prayer the same young man made rolling in the dust. The two together are the whole of Goshtasb: real courage, and a vanity that never lets him be quite admirable.

C5.13Goshtasb’s Prowess before Caesar

On the riding-ground Goshtasb outplays every Roman at polo and archery. Caesar asks who he is; Goshtasb tells him about the wolf and the dragon, Hishvi produces the teeth, and Caesar begs his daughter’s pardon, crowns the stranger, and orders Rum to obey Farrokhzad.

Obey Farrokhzad, all of you; take heed: Farrokh-zād means ‘born to good fortune’, so the alias tells the truth. A man concealing that he is a king’s son with the farr on him picks a name that says precisely that, and Katayun, who has already worked out what he is, is given nothing else to go on.

The Caesar watched his grip, his shoulders’ span,: He is recognized by his body before he is recognized by his story, and it is Caesar himself who does it: the grip, the set of the shoulders, the long stirrup-leathers, and the question whether the rider is a man at all. Rum’s scribes saw the same thing and used it to get rid of him (II, C5.5). On polo, see I, B9.33.

C5.14Caesar Demands Tribute from Ilyas

Caesar demands tribute from Ilyas of Khazar, threatening him with Farrokhzad, and Ilyas answers with contempt. Murin and Ahran predict that Goshtasb will be beaten. Goshtasb promises to bring Ilyas in by his belt, and warns Caesar not to trust his two sons-in-law in a battle.

Khazar lay nearest Caesar’s realm; for long: The Khazars were a real power north of the Caucasus and a genuine neighbor and rival of Byzantium in the centuries before Ferdowsi wrote, so a Caesar demanding tribute from Khazar is an anachronism of the right shape: the poet’s own map laid over the Kayanian age. On Khazar, see I, B9.41.

Yet trust not Murin and Ahran in fight;: The two exposed claimants have been kept at court, and their first move is to talk their father-in-law into sending Goshtasb against a man they expect to kill him. He knows it, names them, and asks instead for Caesar and one of his sons as guarantors at his back. The romance plot keeps working underneath the war.

C5.15Goshtasb Battles Ilyas

The armies meet. Goshtasb rides out, takes an arrow through the hand, then drives his lance through Ilyas’s jowshan, hauls him from the saddle and hands him to Caesar alive. He breaks the Khazars, and returns to a crown and a city scattering treasure.

Rose from the Archer to its royal state.: The sun comes up out of Sagittarius, which puts the battle in late autumn. Ferdowsi keeps his calendar by the zodiac rather than by counting days, and the habit lies close enough to the surface for a reader to date a campaign by it — as with the sunrise in Aries that opened the last Turanian war at II, C4.4.

Then reached and seized his hand and gripped it tight.: He does exactly what he promised at II, C5.14: takes the enemy king by the body and lifts him out of his saddle. The one change is that he delivers him alive. A captured king is worth more than a dead one to anybody who wants a settlement afterward, and Goshtasb is already thinking like a Shah rather than a champion.

C5.16Caesar Demands Iran’s Tribute

Caesar sends the sage Kalus to demand tribute from Iran. Lohrasp receives him with honor and feasts him, then asks what has made Rum so bold. Kalus describes the rider who broke Khazar; Lohrasp hears Zarir’s face in the description, and sends back a promise of war.

Could pass for brave Zarir’s beside you now.: Lohrasp finds his lost son in a stranger’s description of a face. The recognition works by family likeness rather than a token or a scar, and it works because the poem has kept the two brothers side by side since their first line (II, C5.2). The Shah’s face brightens, and his answer to Rum is still war.

But you have treated me with such regard: An envoy is safe and must be entertained whatever his message. Lohrasp entertains this one so well that he gets the truth out of him: Kalus says outright that after such hospitality a falsehood would spoil his answer. The threatening letter told the Shah nothing he wanted; the banquet told him where his son was.

C5.17Zarir Bears Word to Caesar

Lohrasp sends Zarir to Rum with the crown, the throne and Kaveh’s banner, secretly meaning to abdicate but instructed to speak only of war. Zarir musters the sons and grandsons of the old houses, camps at Halab, and delivers a defiance that leaves Caesar promising battle.

Go now to Halab; speak of war alone,: Halab is Aleppo, in Ferdowsi’s own day a frontier city between the Byzantine empire and the Islamic east, and so the natural place for an Iranian army to gather before entering Rum. The geography of this embassy is the poet’s contemporary map, like the bishops and patricians who fill Caesar’s court.

Two grandsons of brave Giv joined in the ride:: The generation buried at II, C4.63 is replaced out of the same families: Giv’s grandsons, who are Bijan’s sons, and a Bahram of Zarasp’s house, with the lines of Kavus, Gudarz and Keshvad all sending men. Ferdowsi restocks the army without changing its names, which is how the house of Gudarz stays in the poem for two books after its ruin.

C5.18Goshtasb Receives the Kingship

Goshtasb rides to his brother’s camp and is given the crown; Iran’s chiefs hail him Shah. Caesar comes to make peace, learns who his son-in-law is, and sends Katayun a treasure train. Goshtasb remits the tribute, rides home, and Lohrasp crowns him.

He sent to Katayun abundant gold,: The daughter sent away in the clothes she stood in (II, C5.8) leaves with slaves, crowns, rubies, Chinese brocade, robes from Hind and Arab horses in bargostvan — the poem’s fixed inventory of wealth, gathered from all four quarters of the world (see I, B6.6). Caesar’s apology is itemized, and the extortion he started the war with ends with him doing the paying.

And finish in the finest words I know: Ferdowsi asks for enough life to finish the book, a prayer he makes more than once in the later reigns and one the poem itself proves was granted. He places it here, at the joint between the heroic age and Goshtasb’s reign, because what comes next is the one long stretch of the story he did not write.