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  • The Oral Background of Persian Epics: Storytelling and Poetry, and: Sunset of Empire: Stories from the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi
  • David Elton Gay
The Oral Background of Persian Epics: Storytelling and Poetry. By Kumiko Yamamoto. (Brill Studies in Middle Eastern Literatures 26. Leiden: Brill, 2003. Pp. xxiv+191. Appendices, bibliography, index.)
Sunset of Empire: Stories from the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi. Vol. 3. Trans. Dick Davis. (Washington, D.C.: Mage Publishers, 2004. Pp. 549. Glossary of names, guide to illustrations.)

Around the year 1000 the Persian poet Ferdowsi wrote what is one of the world's great epics, Shahnameh (The Book of the Kings), using pre-Islamic Persian historical and mythological traditions. Shahnameh is a telling of Persian history through the history of Persia's kings, from the first kings through to the last king before the Islamic conquest of Persia. Because so much pre-Islamic mythological and heroic tradition is preserved in the epic, it is an invaluable resource for studying early Persian mythological, historical, and heroic traditions. But, in addition to its importance for the study of pre-Islamic traditions, because Ferdowsi's epic was so thoroughly accepted by the Persians that it has influenced virtually all later Persian literary, folk epic, and romance traditions, it is an essential source for understanding later Persian tradition as well. As often happens when an epic is so influential in the literature and culture of a people, Ferdowsi's Shahnameh is usually spoken of as the Iranian national epic. Unfortunately, translations and studies of Shahnameh are rare in English, and thus the new translation of the epic by Dick Davis and the recent monograph by Kumiko Yamamoto are welcome for extending the accessibility of the epic to scholars beyond those working in Iranian studies. As these two works show, Shahnameh has an important place in any consideration of comparative epic or theories of epic composition, as well as in studies of comparative mythology and the interaction of oral and literate cultures.

Yamamoto shows in The Oral Background of Persian Epics that Shahnameh is another important text with which to test our theories of epic composition and the interaction of folklore and literature. Her monograph is an original work, as well as a critique of earlier approaches to the epic, in particular recent efforts at applying the oral formulaic theory to Ferdowsi's great epic, especially those of Olga Davidson in her two books Poet and Hero in the Persian Book of Kings (Cornell University Press, 1994) and Comparative Literature and Classical Persian Literature (Mazda, 2000). Indeed, Davidson has made the most concerted effort to apply the theory to [End Page 243] Ferdowsi's work, imagining him as a more oral poet than, as Yamamoto points out, the texts really support. As Yamamoto shows, Davidson's analysis of Ferdowsi as an oral poet rests on a series of assumptions about orality, stylistic usages, and limited references to the epic itself. She notes, for instance, that Davidson highlights passages mentioning performance in the epic whereas "she disregarded those concerned with books" (66). Because the latter are more common, Davidson's approach is "methodologically objectionable. It indicates that Davidson's theory was built on a small proportion of the available data" (67).

Yamamoto's book is constructive, in addition to being critical, and proposes an alternative approach to Shahnameh, one she calls the "Oral Performance Model," which "seeks to examine the general or overall influence of pre-existing oral tradition on written story texts." (xxiii). To discover what such characteristics might be she turns to the naqqali tradition, the professional storytelling tradition of Iran. Though the naqqali tradition was the subject of a dissertation, little else has been written on it in English, so Yamamoto's analysis and description of these storytellers are particularly useful and significant. But here Yamamoto's book has its own problems: in particular, the argument from the naqqali tradition is circular. Although it is true that it is in the naqqali tradition that we find out what Shahnameh stories are like in popular and oral versions, the naqqali tradition versions are derived from those of the manuscript tradition of Shahnameh: they are not pre-Ferdowsi traditions. In fact, we...

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