Notes · Book C6Goshtasb, Zardosht, and the War with Arjasp

C6.1Ferdowsi’s Dream of Daqiqi

Ferdowsi dreams of wine like rosewater in his cup, and of Daqiqi, who praises Mahmud, wishes him long years, and asks that his own thousand couplets on Goshtasb and Arjasp be kept in the book. The poet wakes and gives them, noting that Daqiqi is dust.

A thousand couplets told, before I passed,: On Daqiqi, see I, A0.9 and A6.16. What follows is the one long passage of the Shahnameh that Ferdowsi says is not his own, taken over from the poet who began the work and was killed young. How far the borrowing runs is disputed, since he marks where it starts and never says where it stops.

For eighty-five years, sorrow shall not grow,: The dream does two jobs at once. It honors a dead poet, and it puts praise of a living patron into a dead man’s mouth, where it costs the living poet nothing. The eighty-five years are a wish and not a prophecy: Mahmud’s reign was nothing like so long.

C6.2Lohrasp Withdraws to Balkh

Lohrasp gives Goshtasb the crown and retires to the Nowbahar at Balkh, where he prays for thirty years in coarse wool. Goshtasb rules justly, and Katayun bears him Esfandiyar and Bishutan. Every king pays tribute except Arjasp of Turan, who refuses.

To Nowbahar in Balkh he made his way,: The Nawbahār of Balkh was in fact a Buddhist monastery — the name is Sanskrit nava vihāra, ‘new monastery’ — whose hereditary custodians became Muslims and, as the Barmakids, viziers to the Abbasids. Ferdowsi’s tradition remembers it as a fire-temple so venerable that Muslim writers compared the reverence paid to it with the reverence paid at Mecca, which is the comparison this passage makes.

As Jamshid’s ancient holy rite was done.: Zardosht has not come yet, so Lohrasp cannot be a Zoroastrian, and Ferdowsi is careful about it: the old king’s devotion is sun-worship of the kind the poem attributes to Jamshid, and the shrine is older than the faith that will claim it. The coarse wool he puts on, by contrast, is a Muslim ascetic’s habit — one anachronism laid over another.

And Bishutan, a valiant swordsman born,: Bishutan is Pahlavi Pēšyōtan, and Zoroastrian tradition counts him among the immortals: he does not die, but waits, as Kay Khosrow waits (II, C4.62), for the renewal of the world, when he is to restore the faith. Ferdowsi gives no hint of any of it. Here he is simply Esfandiyar’s brother, the one who gives good advice and is never listened to.

C6.3Zardosht Appears before Goshtasb

A tree rises in Goshtasb’s hall: it is Zardosht, who brings fire from Paradise and the Good Religion. Goshtasb, Zarir and Lohrasp accept it, the Mobadan are sent out, fire-temples rise, and a cypress from Paradise is planted at Kishmar.

That blessed tree was Zardosht, who had slain: The chapter begins with the prophet as a metaphor and ends with him planting a real tree. Zardosht enters as a vision of branches filling the palace, whose leaves are counsel and whose fruit gives life; a hundred lines later the figure has become the cypress of Kishmar, which a kamand cannot reach around. On Zardosht himself, see I, A0.9.

First he established Mehr Barzin’s bright flame: Ādur Burzēn-Mihr, the great fire of Khorasan, which Zoroastrian tradition tied to Goshtasb’s conversion and housed on Mount Revand — a range generally placed in the hills near Nishapur, though the identification is not certain. It is the third of the three supreme fires of the Sasanian church, alongside the fire of the warriors (on Azargashasp, see I, A7.4 and B12.8) and the fire of the priests, Farnbag.

What cypress rivals Kishmar’s sacred tree?: Kishmar, or Kashmar, lies in Khorasan, and its cypress was the most famous tree in Iran. It is said that in the ninth century the caliph al-Mutawakkil had it felled and hauled across the plateau to his new palace at Samarra, over the protests of the people of Khorasan; the story goes that he was murdered before it arrived.

C6.4Goshtasb Refuses Tribute to Arjasp

The aged Zardosht rules that the Faith forbids paying tribute to Chin, and Goshtasb cancels it. A Div carries the news to Arjasp, who sickens with rage, denounces Zardosht to his council as an old magician, and drafts a letter of threats and gifts.

I saw Yazdan within His Paradise; / He wrote the Zand-Avesta, true and wise.: Arjasp reports Zardosht’s claim with scorn, and in doing so gives the poem’s fullest account of it: the prophet was carried up, saw the Maker, was shown Hell from a safe distance, and came back with a book God had written. Journeys to heaven and hell of just this shape were a Zoroastrian genre, the best known being the Pahlavi vision of Ardā Wīrāz.

A mighty Div, when he had heard this thing: The messenger who carries the news to Chin is a Div, and Arjasp’s own brothers will be called Ahrimans in soul (C6.8). In this book the enemy is not simply a rival dynasty but the other side of a divided creation, and the war that follows is the only one in the Shahnameh fought over a religion rather than a throne or a blood debt.

C6.5Arjasp’s Letter to Goshtasb

Arjasp chooses two sorcerers, Bidarfesh and Namkhast, as envoys and writes to Goshtasb. The letter flatters his lineage, blames an aged mage for misleading him, offers treasure and slaves if he recants, and promises fire, slaughter and slavery if he does not.

One was Bidarfesh, fierce and strong and bold, / A warrior versed in spells, a warlock old.: This whole war has an older Iranian life. Arjasp appears in the Avesta as Arəjat̰.aspa, lord of the Hyaonas and the enemy of Goshtasb, and the Pahlavi poem on the death of Zarir (see I, A6.16) tells the same story with the same cast: the two envoys Bidarafš and Nāmxwāst, Jamasp’s prophecy, Zarir killed from behind, his son avenging him. Even Namkhast’s patronymic survives, as the son of Hazaran (C6.13).

With musk I shall fill Jihun to its shore: A boast with a price tag. The finest musk reached the Islamic world from Tibet and Khotan, along the roads Arjasp controls, and it was among the costliest things a merchant could carry. He is threatening Goshtasb with his wealth as much as his armies, and Goshtasb throws the line back at him word for word (C6.8).

The aged men of Iran, worn and frail, / Would make poor slaves, of little worth for sale.: The cruelest lines in the letter are also the most businesslike. Captives were the reliable profit of frontier war, and Arjasp reckons the old men as unsellable stock and says so in the language of a market. The wives and children he expects to keep.

C6.6Arjasp Sends Envoys to Goshtasb

Arjasp drills his envoys in court etiquette and sends them to Balkh. Goshtasb reads the letter in fury and summons Jamasp, the Mobadan, Zardosht and Zarir, spreads the Zand-Avesta open, and asks his council how to answer.

He spread the Zand-Avesta out in sight: The zand is the Pahlavi interpretation that came to be transmitted with the Avesta, and the compound names the scripture together with its commentary. Through this book the poem treats it as a single physical codex: it is spread open in council here, it guarantees the safe-conduct of envoys (C6.7), it is laid beside the throne when Esfandiyar is tried (C6.24), and it is copied and sent to converted kings (C6.21).

Give him the homage Shahs have always known; / Do not yet look upon his crown and throne.: Arjasp coaches his envoys in a graded audience: prostrate first, take your seat, and only then raise your eyes to the crown. The point of the sequence is that the regalia are not to be looked at by a man still standing. That he briefs sorcerers so carefully on protocol is part of the joke; they are thrown out anyway.

C6.7Zarir Replies to Arjasp

Zarir and Esfandiyar draw their swords and swear death to anyone rejecting Zardosht. Zarir, with Esfandiyar and Jamasp, drafts the reply. Goshtasb seals it, tells the envoys that only the Avesta’s law on safe-conduct saves them, and promises war in Dey.

Our swords shall take his life; his severed head / Shall crown a lofty stake when he lies dead.: Elsewhere in the Shahnameh men fight for a throne, a frontier or a murdered kinsman. Here two princes draw on anyone who will not accept a prophet, and Esfandiyar will spend the next book carrying the Faith through Rum and Hindustan at swordpoint (C6.21). The poem never quite settles whether to admire this.

A warning to the chiefs of Khallokh’s land: Khallokh is the Qarluq, a real Turkic confederation of the eastern Islamic world, and Chigil, used for Arjasp’s people later (C6.10, C6.25), is another. Persian poets used both names loosely for Turkistan, and both carried an association with beauty as well as with war, so a reader met them in love poetry as often as in a war letter.

C6.8The Envoys Bear Goshtasb’s Answer

The envoys return in disgrace and Arjasp has the reply read aloud: Goshtasb boasts of his lineage, his lions, Zarir and Esfandiyar, and throws back the musk. Arjasp musters Turan, dividing the army among Kuhram, Andariman, Gorgsar, Bidarfesh, Khashash and Hushdiv.

Not Afrasiab’s stock or Yabghu’s name: Yabghu is not an insult but a genuine steppe title, ranking below the khagan and borne by real Turkic rulers in the east, among them the lords of the Qarluq and the Oghuz. Goshtasb is naming the two things his own chiefs are not descended from: Turan’s royal house and Turan’s nobility.

Guard well the rear; if any man should stray: Hushdiv’s commission is to kill his own side. A detachment posted behind the line with orders to cut down anyone who turns is the hard arithmetic of an army that does not trust itself, and the poem gives it to Arjasp rather than to Goshtasb, whose men are held by the Faith instead (C6.15).

C6.9Goshtasb Assembles His Troops

Warned that the Turks have crossed the frontier, Goshtasb summons every frontier chief. The muster fills the plain, he reviews it and picks his best men, opens the treasury, pays the troops two years’ wages, and marches out under the royal banner.

He opened Jamshid’s treasure stores that day, / And gave the troops their wages; two years’ pay.: Two years’ pay before a shot is fired. Wages in advance are the Shahnameh’s standard sign of a king who is serious, and the hoard is always Jamshid’s, however many dynasties have spent it since; it is the poem’s way of saying that what a king disburses was never really his to begin with.

C6.10Goshtasb Hears Jamasp’s Prophecy

At the Jihun, Goshtasb makes Jamasp read the stars. Under oath of safety, the sage foretells the whole battle: Ardeshir, Shidasp, his own son Girami, Nivzar and finally Zarir will fall, Esfandiyar will kill Bidarfesh and Arjasp will flee. Goshtasb faints with grief.

Jamasp, the sage who counseled at his side: Jamasp is the Avestan Jāmāspa of the Hvōgva family, remembered as one of Zardosht’s first disciples and as his son-in-law. Later Zoroastrian tradition made him the great foreseer, and a Pahlavi book of prophecy about the world’s last days was written under his name, so the office he holds in this chapter is the one tradition always gave him.

By God, the Faith confessed, / Its bringer, with a spotless wisdom blessed: Goshtasb swears by the Religion and by the man who brought it, and then by his brother’s life and his son’s. It is an oath the poem could not have offered before this book, and it marks how fast the new Faith has become the thing a Shah’s word rests on.

What I have said will not be otherwise; / No more, no less than what the heavens devise.: Nearly two hundred lines of the battle are given away before it starts, down to which hand Girami will lose. Ferdowsi uses the device elsewhere, most memorably in Siavash’s prophecy of his own murder (I, B9.40): the reader is not made to wonder what happens but to watch it arrive. Goshtasb’s first instinct, to keep his family out of the fighting, is refused by the sage as useless.

C6.11Goshtasb and Arjasp Prepare for Battle

Scouts report the Turks encamped nearby. Goshtasb gives Zarir the standard and the center, sets Esfandiyar and another son on the wings and Nastur in the rear, then watches from a height. Arjasp arrays his hundred-thousands under Bidarfesh, Gorgsar, Namkhast and Kuhram.

Then King Arjasp, who ruled the Chin array, / Likewise disposed his forces for the day.: The two orders of battle are laid out in the same shape and almost the same words: center, two wings, a commander watching the rear. The symmetry is deliberate, and it is what makes the catalogue readable, since every name on one side has its answering name on the other and the reader knows in advance which pairs will meet.

C6.12The Opening of the Battle

The armies close under a storm of arrows. Goshtasb watches from the mountain on armored Behzad. Ardeshir rides out and is shot through the waist; Hormizd avenges him and falls; Shidasp unhorses a Turkish champion and is killed by an arrow in turn.

His father would not see his son again;: Three princes die in sixty lines, and each death closes on the same note: the father who will not see that face again. The refrain does the work that a battle narrative usually gives to variety. It also keeps Goshtasb present on his mountain throughout, since every couplet turns from the corpse on the field to the man watching it from above.

A Div replied, “I am!” His challenge rang: The champion who answers Shidasp is called a Div outright, as Arjasp’s brothers are Ahrimans in soul and Bidarfesh is a warlock. In this book the label is theological rather than descriptive: the enemy belongs to the wrong side of creation. On the Div, see I, A3.1.

C6.13Girami and Nivzar Are Slain

Jamasp’s son Girami routs Namkhast, then charges the Turkish center. When Kaveh’s standard falls he dismounts to raise it, loses a hand, holds the banner in his teeth and is killed. Nastur rides out and returns victorious; Nivzar kills a hundred and twenty men and dies.

He seized Fereydoon’s flag between his teeth: Within a dozen lines the same banner is called Kaveh’s standard, the indigo flag and Fereydoon’s flag, because it is all three: raised by the tanner, adorned as a royal ensign by the king who used it, and carried ever after on an elephant’s back. On the Derafsh-e Kaviani, see I, A5.5. Girami’s death defends a piece of cloth older than the dynasty fighting for it.

Like Rostam, son of Zal, in might and fame: The measure of a hero in this book is always someone from an earlier one: Girami rides like Rostam, Ardeshir looks like Tus, Zarir’s gorz is Sahm’s and his arrows are Arash’s (C6.14). The borrowed comparisons quietly admit that the Kayanian court has no yardstick of its own yet, and Rostam himself is only a few chapters away (C6.25).

C6.14Zarir Is Slain by Bidarfesh

After two weeks Zarir breaks the Turkish ranks. Arjasp three times offers his daughter and treasure for the man who will face him, and is answered by silence until Bidarfesh accepts, kills Zarir from ambush with a poisoned javelin and strips him. Goshtasb offers Homahyi for vengeance; nobody moves.

Then brave Zarir advanced before the line, / The Pahlevan through whom Iran would shine.: Zarir is the Avestan Zairi.vairi, named in the hymns as Goshtasb’s brother, and the Pahlavi poem that tells this war is titled after his death rather than after the king’s victory (see I, A6.16). His killing is the oldest fixed point in the story, which is why so much of this book is arranged around it.

A third time he addressed his fearful men, / But no reply came back to him again.: Arjasp appeals three times and gets nothing; the silence of a whole army is a better tribute to Zarir than any description of him. Both kings then bid for a champion with a daughter, Arjasp with his own and Goshtasb with Homahyi, and both are met with the same stillness, which is the chapter’s neatest piece of symmetry.

C6.15Esfandiyar Hears of Zarir’s Death

Told that Zarir is dead, Esfandiyar hands over his own flag and troops, takes his uncle’s command and the royal standard, and preaches courage to the chiefs. From the mountain Goshtasb swears by the Faith that if he comes home he will give Esfandiyar the crown.

If Fortune brings me home from battle’s field, / To Esfandiyar the crown and throne I yield.: The sentence that ruins them both. Goshtasb will renew the promise and defer it again when the war is won, telling his son the time still lies ahead (C6.21), and again on the mountain at Arjasp’s siege (C6.29). Everything in the tragedy of Rostam and Esfandiyar (C8) grows from a father who keeps paying his son in vows.

I shall give Bishutan the troops: Bishutan’s first mention. He is the brother who will be at Esfandiyar’s side through the seven stages and to the end of his story, and who is left to carry home what that story costs.

C6.16Esfandiyar Marches against Arjasp

Esfandiyar charges and scatters the Turks. Nastur arms, searches the field for his father, finds Zarir stripped on the ground, laments over him and rides to demand vengeance from the Shah. Goshtasb calls for his armor; his minister tells him to send Nastur instead.

He rushed until he found his father slain, / His body cast, stripped bare, upon the plain.: The son’s lament over his stripped father stands in the Pahlavi poem on Zarir’s death too, where the boy is Bastwar (see I, A6.16 and C6.5). It is among the oldest things in this book, and the verse keeps its shape: the accusation is not against the enemy but against the dead man, for leaving.

My father lies upon the earth’s dry crust, / His black beard, sweet with musk, now in the dust.: Men of rank perfumed their beards, and a beard still scented with musk while its owner lies in the dirt measures how recently he was alive and at court. The blackness of it does the rest: Zarir died young, unlike his father Lohrasp, whose camphor-white hair astonishes his killers (C6.27).

C6.17Nastur and Esfandiyar Slay Bidarfesh

Mounted on Behzad, Nastur challenges Bidarfesh, who is riding Zarir’s horse in Zarir’s armor. As they fight Esfandiyar arrives; Bidarfesh flees, hurls his poisoned weapon, and Esfandiyar catches it in flight and drives it through him, then recovers Zarir’s arms, horse and banner.

Nastur am I, Zarir’s own heir: Nastur is the Bastwar of the Pahlavi poem, and a name of the same shape, Bastavairi, has its fravashi praised in the Avesta a line or two from Zairi.vairi’s own, though the Avesta does not there call him Zarir’s son. The boy has been his father’s avenger a very long time. Ferdowsi’s source divides the deed: Nastur brings the enemy to battle, Esfandiyar makes the kill.

The slayer slain: thus custom claimed its own.: What is carried back to the throne is precise: the dead man’s horse, his armor, his banner and the killer’s head. Vengeance in the Shahnameh is a restitution as much as a killing, and until the stripped gear comes home the debt is open.

C6.18Arjasp Flees from the Battle

Esfandiyar forms three Kayanian lines under himself, Nastur and his brother. Nastur and Nush Azar swear not to leave the field alive. Esfandiyar’s lance breaks the Turkish ranks; Arjasp holds his ground until dusk, then flees into the wilderness with Iran in pursuit.

He held his post until the evening shade, / Then fled into the wilderness, dismayed.: Arjasp is allowed to hold out until dark and then get away, because the poem is not finished with him. He will come back while Esfandiyar is in irons, kill Lohrasp and carry off Goshtasb’s daughters (C6.25 onward), and the second war is the one that matters to the plot. A defeated enemy who escapes intact is usually a promise.

C6.19The Turks Ask Mercy of Esfandiyar

The Turkish chiefs strip their armor and beg for their lives, offering to accept the Faith. Esfandiyar calls off the slaughter and forbids chaining captives. Goshtasb weeps over the field, coffins Zarir and his kin, and has the dead of both armies counted.

Esfandiyar, on hearing what they said, / Gave quarter: none should wound or strike them dead.: The chiefs ask for their lives and offer conversion in the same breath, and Esfandiyar takes the offer and stops his own army mid-slaughter. It is the most attractive thing he does in the poem, and worth remembering against the man who later cannot be talked out of a fight he knows is wrong (C8).

Of Iran’s soldiers, thirty thousand died, / And seven hundred chiefs fell at their side.: The chapter closes on a ledger: dead and wounded, chiefs and rank and file, both armies, down to eleven hundred sixty-three Turkish officers. The habit of exact tallies belongs to the chronicle tradition the poem drew on rather than to heroic verse, and here it takes the place of any summing up.

C6.20Goshtasb Returns to Balkh

The army carries its wounded home to Balkh. Goshtasb marries Homahyi to his eldest son, gives Nastur a hundred thousand men to avenge his father in Khallokh, distributes cities and honors, founds a hall and fire, and receives tribute from Rum, Hind and Sind.

He gave Homahyi, his daughter fair of face, / To his own eldest son of royal race.: The eldest son is not named, and if he is Esfandiyar the marriage is brother to sister, which fulfills Goshtasb’s oath to the man who avenged Zarir (C6.14). Marriage within the nearest kin was praised as an act of piety in Sasanian Zoroastrian writing, and the poem passes over it in a single couplet without comment, as something needing none.

To keepers of the Fire your tribute yield: Victory is billed to the provinces as a tithe, payable not to the treasury but to the fires. Endowments settled on a fire-temple for the upkeep of its flame and its priests were a real and substantial institution, and this is the moment the new Faith acquires an income.

C6.21Esfandiyar Spreads the Faith of Zardosht

Goshtasb gives Esfandiyar a gold crown, treasure and the command of Iran, and sends him to bring the world to the Faith. He converts Rum and Hindustan, kings write asking for copies of the Zand-Avesta, and he reports that the world is won and at peace.

Mount now your steed and ride through every land; / Bring all its peoples to the Faith’s command.: The commission is missionary and military at once, and the inducements are practical: the converted kings report that they bound the cincture and that their taxes were cut. Goshtasb answers by having copies of the Zand-Avesta made and sent out. The crown, which he promised his son in C6.15, is not part of the package; the time for it still lies ahead.

Through Rum and Hindustan his banners passed, / Through sea and darkness, over regions vast.: Sea and darkness are the furniture of a later book: Iskandar will cross the same wilderness of water and dark on the same kind of errand, and the Land of Darkness is his most famous stage (D5). Esfandiyar’s world tour is the first of the poem’s two, and the shorter.

C6.22Gurazm Slanders Esfandiyar

Gurazm, a kinsman of Goshtasb who hates the heir, waits for the prince’s name to come up at court and then tells the Shah privately that Esfandiyar means to chain him and take the throne. Goshtasb sickens with suspicion and sends Jamasp to fetch his son.

Know this, great Shah: your son prepares to fight: The poem has run this course before. A prince too successful for his father’s comfort, a courtier’s whisper, a king who believes it, and a son who walks into it knowing better: Siavash’s ruin follows the same line (I, B9), and Esfandiyar will be as careful as Siavash was to give his father no pretext, and as little helped by it.

What lay between them I cannot declare: The narrator admits he does not know what began the quarrel, and gives what he has heard, that Gurazm was a relative, as hearsay. If the borrowed verses run as far as C6.26, this candid ‘I’ is not Ferdowsi’s but his predecessor’s, and the shrug is a reminder that the man who began this book was working from a source he could not always read either.

C6.23Jamasp Comes to Esfandiyar

Hunting when the summons comes, Esfandiyar laughs bitterly and tells his son Bahman that his father has turned against him. Jamasp arrives with the letter and says a Div has clouded the Shah’s mind, but advises obedience. Esfandiyar leaves his troops to Bahman and rides to court.

Bahman and Mehr-e-Nush, both bold in fight; / Azar Afruz, the third, whose mind was bright.: Esfandiyar’s four sons are introduced together, and the poem will use three of them. Bahman inherits the throne and founds the line that runs to Darab (D1, D2); Mehr-e-Nush dies in the long quarrel with Rostam’s house; and Nush Azar, who built a dome to shelter a fire, keeps watch on the walls of his father’s prison (C6.30).

He started at the news, his heart distressed; / Then laughed aloud, though trouble filled his breast.: A laugh with nothing in it, and it is his son who notices and says so. Esfandiyar has read the summons before he has read the letter, and in a poem where princes make long speeches about fate, a man laughing at his own bad news is a sharper piece of characterization than any of them.

C6.24Goshtasb Imprisons Esfandiyar

With the Mobadan assembled and the Zand-Avesta beside him, Goshtasb puts the case of a rebellious son to the court in the abstract, gets the answer he wants, and has Esfandiyar chained despite his protest of innocence and sent on a black elephant to the fortress of Gombadan.

Has anyone among you heard it said / A son would seek to take his father’s head,: Goshtasb never puts the charge to his son. He describes an unnamed heir to a room full of priests, collects their agreement that such a man deserves anything, and only then names Esfandiyar. The scripture laid beside the throne is part of the staging: a verdict is being manufactured, with the law present as a prop.

Within that mountain stronghold he was tied; / Four iron columns held him there inside.: The bindings are described with care, four iron columns, a yoke, a neck-chain, because they will have to be broken by hand (C6.30), and the poem wants the reader to know what that costs. Gombadan is one of the mountain keeps of the eastern marches, and its name will be enough on its own for the rest of this book.

C6.25Arjasp Prepares the Second War

Goshtasb takes the Faith to Sistan, where Rostam and Zal welcome him and accept it, and stays two years feasting. Kings fall away from a Shah who chained his son. Bahman visits his father’s prison. Arjasp, informed by the spy Situh that Balkh is defenseless, musters again.

Nimruz’s ruler, Rostam, famed in fight, / A seasoned rider, Sahm’s equal in might,: The two houses meet, with minstrels out and two years of feasting, and it is the only time they meet in good will. Esfandiyar will come to Sistan next on his father’s errand, and Rostam will be asked to put on chains in his own hall. The hospitality here is what makes that demand unforgivable (C8).

They learned the Zand and tied the kusti tight, / Then set the sacred fire itself alight.: Zal’s house takes the cincture and lights a fire of its own, which is how Sistan is brought inside the new order without being conquered. On the kusti, see I, B1.10. It also gives Goshtasb the opening he later needs: once Rostam is a subject in religion, a Shah can pretend he is a subject in everything.

C6.26Ferdowsi Takes Up the Tale Again

Ferdowsi breaks off the story to speak for himself: he found the old prose book unversified, a predecessor had begun it and left weak verses that Ferdowsi copied out anyway for comparison, he waited twenty years for a patron, and at last Mahmud came.

He was my pioneer, and he had shown: The seam. Ferdowsi is saying that the verses just read are not his: another poet had begun turning the old prose book into verse, had covered a fraction of it, and had died, and Ferdowsi set that fragment into his own poem rather than redo it. The poet is not named here, but he is the Daqiqi introduced at I, A0.9, and the block generally assigned to him is the one that closes at this chapter, the coming of Zardosht and the first war with Arjasp, of roughly a thousand verses. All the text says of his end is that his own bad temper kept his grief aflame.

I scanned his verses; many lines were weak; / Their language lacked the polish I would seek.: Ferdowsi’s verdict on his predecessor is famously cool, and he gives it while keeping the man’s work: he transcribed the verses, he says, so that kings could hear how rough they sound beside his own. It is preservation and advertisement in the same gesture, and it is the reason a dead poet’s thousand lines survive at all.

Two jewelers bring their gems before the throne; / The Shah must judge the light of every stone.: The image is generous and merciless at once. Both poets are jewelers with stock to show, the patron is the assayer, and Ferdowsi has arranged the display so that his own stones come second. He follows it with advice to anyone who cannot do better: say nothing, and spare yourself.

Abul-Qasim, who gives the crown new light: Abul-Qasim is the kunya of Mahmud of Ghazna, the patron the passage has been building toward for forty lines. The praise sits in a strange place, wedged between a dead rival’s verses and the sack of Balkh, and the reader who knows how Ferdowsi writes about Mahmud elsewhere will hear it differently at the end of the poem than here.

C6.27Lohrasp Falls at Balkh

Arjasp sends Kuhram to burn Balkh and kill Esfandiyar in his chains. Lohrasp, old and with only market men to help, arms and fights until the Turks surround and kill him. They sack Balkh, burn the Zand-Avesta and slaughter eighty priests at the fire.

Our tale of Arjasp’s war we now restore, / And clear the garden’s weeds from root to core.: The resumption picks up the garden of the previous chapter, where Ferdowsi saw an orchard with no gate and needed a king’s name to make one. Here the same garden has weeds to pull. Having spent a chapter on his predecessor’s rough verses, he returns to the story as a gardener rather than a jeweler.

They burned the Zand-Avesta in the fire, / And took the richest spoils they could desire.: The book that has been spread open in council, sworn on and copied out to foreign kings through this whole section is now thrown on the flame it was meant to sanctify, and the priests’ blood puts the fire out. Zoroastrian tradition remembered its scripture as something that had been destroyed and painfully reassembled; the poem gives that loss a first rehearsal here, at Turkish hands.

I do not know by whom that priest was killed.: Zardosht dies in half a line, offstage, and the poet declines to say who killed him. Later Zoroastrian tradition did name a killer, a Turanian who cut the prophet down at the fire in this very attack. Ferdowsi will not repeat it, and the refusal is the more striking for coming immediately after he has taken the narration back into his own hands.

C6.28News of Lohrasp’s Death Reaches Goshtasb

Goshtasb’s wife rides to Sistan in Turkish disguise with the news: Lohrasp killed, Balkh sacked, the fire quenched, Homahyi and Bih Afrid led away in chains. Goshtasb summons his Pahlevans and marches to Balkh, where three days of battle kill thirty-eight of his sons.

She dressed herself in Turkish garb, a ruse, / And took the swiftest steed that she could choose.: Turkish dress is what gets an Iranian through Turkish-held country, and this book uses the trick twice: the queen rides to Sistan in it, and Jamasp crosses Arjasp’s siege lines in a Turanian robe and cap, which nearly gets him killed by his own side (C6.29, C6.30). The disguises are the only stratagems in an otherwise headlong stretch of the poem.

Once hidden from the very breath of air: The formula for a cloistered princess, one the wind has never touched, recurs when Jamasp pleads with Esfandiyar and says the sisters’ faces knew no breath of wind before they were driven on foot (C6.30). The point of the hyperbole is the contrast it sets up: the whole measure of the disaster is that such women are now walking.

C6.29Goshtasb Flees before Arjasp

Beaten, Goshtasb retreats up a mountain by its one path and is besieged, his men burning brushwood and killing their horses. Jamasp reads the stars: only Esfandiyar can save him. Goshtasb confesses he was deceived by Gurazm and sends Jamasp through the enemy lines.

The man who wronged you now has breathed his last; / With sorrow in his heart, his life has passed.: Gurazm is disposed of inside a message, in a clause, without a scene. The slanderer whose few sentences cost Iran a king, a capital and thirty-eight princes gets no death of his own, and the reader learns of it only because Goshtasb needs it as a bargaining point. The poem is often generous to its villains; this one it simply drops.

If I behold him here, I shall step down, / And yield my throne, my royal cap and crown.: The crown is promised for the third time (C6.15, C6.21), now as the price of a rescue, and this promise is the one Esfandiyar will hold his father to. Goshtasb’s answer, when the time comes, will be to send him to Sistan for Rostam in chains; the throne is always one errand further off.

C6.30Jamasp Visits Esfandiyar

Nush Azar nearly kills Jamasp for his Turanian cap. Esfandiyar refuses his father’s message, and Lohrasp, his sisters, his father’s plight and his dead brothers all leave him unmoved; only Farshidvard’s name breaks him. He snaps his own fetters, faints, then calls for arms.

What of Farshidvard, loyal, brave, and kind?: Jamasp argues in ascending order and fails at every step: the murdered Lohrasp, the captive sisters, the besieged father, the thirty-eight dead brothers. Esfandiyar has an answer to each, and each answer is about the chains. What finally moves him is the one brother who cursed Gurazm on his behalf, because it is the only argument that is not about duty but about somebody having been on his side.

What did this horse do, wasting thus away?: Freed, washed and armed, the first thing Esfandiyar does is notice that his horse has been starving with him, and say that whatever his own sins the animal had none. It is a small piece of characterization Ferdowsi gives to very few of his heroes, and it comes in the same chapter as the display of brute strength that breaks the fetters.

These gifts of Gurazm serve in feast and fight: He has the broken irons set out in front of him and calls them Gurazm’s gifts, fit for feast and battle. The jest is the reverse of the khal‘at, the robe of honor a king bestows: these are what his own father sent him instead, and he keeps them where he can look at them.

C6.31Farshidvard Comes before Esfandiyar

Esfandiyar rides out by night with Bahman, Nush Azar and Jamasp, vowing fire-temples and wells if he is granted vengeance. He finds his brother Farshidvard dying, shrouds him under a tree, curses the dead Gurazm, and cuts through Turkish scouts to reach his father.

A hundred fire-temples I will raise: The vow is a program rather than a boast. Founding fires, digging wells in waterless country and planting trees around their mouths are works of merit in Zoroastrian practice, where making dead ground yield water and shade counts as an act of religion. Esfandiyar offers the coming war as a service of that kind, and throws in a pardon for the chains his father put on him.

His headcloth and his shirt a shroud became: Esfandiyar has no gold, no masons and no water, so his brother is left under a tree in the prince’s own shirt. Chiefs of this rank are normally carried home and laid in a tomb or an astōdān (see I, B1.9); the makeshift burial on the field measures how completely the war has gone against Iran.

C6.32Esfandiyar Reaches Goshtasb

Goshtasb welcomes his son and promises him the crown. At dawn the armies close; Esfandiyar cuts down hundreds, takes the boastful Gorgsar with his kamand, and Arjasp flees by camel toward Khallokh. Spared, Gorgsar offers to guide the prince to the Ruyin Dezh.

The wolf-marked banner vanished from the air: Gorgsar means ‘wolf-head’, and the banner matches the name: Ferdowsi gives the one Turk who volunteers to face Esfandiyar a wolf for a device. For the wolf-headed and vulture-headed peoples at the edges of the poem’s world, see I, A7.6.

Bind him, but do not have this captive slain: The order is practical. Esfandiyar feigns a wound to draw Gorgsar within reach of the kamand, and he wants him alive because no Iranian knows the road to the Ruyin Dezh. From here the story is built on that captive: each of the Seven Stages opens with Gorgsar unchained, given three cups of wine, and asked what comes next.

C6.33Esfandiyar Is Sent Again to Fight Arjasp

In the royal tent Goshtasb grieves that his daughters are slaves in Turan and swears to give up crown and throne if his son frees them. Esfandiyar accepts, disclaiming any wish to reign, and rides out with twelve thousand chosen horsemen.

The crown and empire to your rule shall go: The oath that drives the rest of this volume. It is the second such promise in two chapters, and Esfandiyar answers both by refusing the crown he is offered. He will nevertheless recite this one back to his father almost word for word (C8.1, C8.2). Ferdowsi builds the tragedy on a bargain that both men remember exactly and neither honors.

They bore the tents and homa banner high: The homā, the bird whose shadow is said to make a king, is Esfandiyar’s standard; on the bird itself see I, B5.5. It goes before the army of a prince who wins the crown three times over in this book and never wears it.