Notes · Book B8The Tragedy of Rostam & Sohrab

B8.1The Prelude

The poet opens the tragedy with a meditation on death. A wind may bring down unripe fruit, and death takes young and old alike by a justice no one can see. Mortals should keep faith and do good while they can.

A violent wind may shake a citron free: The unripe citron torn from the branch is Sohrab, announced before he is born. Ferdowsi gives the ending away in the first lines: suspense is not what he is after. The citron (toranj) comes back in Kavus’s threat against Rostam in B8.13, where a head is to fall like ‘a citron, cast away’.

And tender hearts blame Rostam for the past: This sentence frames the whole story, which closes on the same thought (B8.25): a tale of tears that turns the tender heart against Rostam. Ferdowsi never excuses his favorite hero here. Readers have argued ever since over how much of the blame belongs to Rostam, how much to Kavus and how much to fate.

Now hear the tale of Sohrab, Rostam’s son: A father killing his unknown son in single combat is one of the great shared plots of Indo-European story. The Old High German Hildebrandslied breaks off as Hildebrand faces his son Hadubrand, and in Irish legend Cú Chulainn kills his son Connla. Greek myth reverses the pattern: Odysseus is killed unknowingly by Telegonus, his son by Circe. None of them is told at such length, or with such pity, as Ferdowsi’s version.

B8.2Rostam Goes on a Chase

Rostam rides out to hunt near the Turanian border, roasts a Gur-e-Khar and falls asleep. Turanian riders capture Rakhsh, though the stallion kills three of them. Rostam wakes, finds his horse gone and follows its tracks on foot towards Samangan.

Like one bird’s feather in his hand it weighed: Rostam’s appetite is part of his legend: a whole wild ass on a tree-trunk spit, eaten down to the marrow. The same picnic opened his Seven Labors earlier in this volume, when Rakhsh fought a lion while his master slept. Twice now a nap after a Gur-e-Khar supper leads to trouble.

Who stole Tahamtan’s steed: What Rostam fears is not so much losing a horse as losing face: a champion robbed in his sleep is a joke the Turks would tell for ever.

B8.3Rostam Arrives at the City of Samangan

The king of Samangan comes out on foot to meet Rostam and promises to find Rakhsh. His anger soothed, Rostam accepts the king’s hospitality, feasts with wine and music, and is led to a perfumed bed.

When Rostam neared Samangan’s guarded gate: Samangan is a real place. The name survives in the province of Samangan in northern Afghanistan. In the poem it is a small kingdom on the Turanian side of the frontier, within Afrasiab’s reach, which helps explain why its king is so eager to please.

Dark-eyed Taraz beauties: Taraz, on the Talas river in what is now Kazakhstan, was a byword in Persian poetry for beautiful Turks. Its name alone was enough to tell a reader that the serving-girls were lovely.

B8.4Tahmineh Seeks Out Rostam

At midnight the king’s daughter Tahmineh comes to Rostam’s room. She has loved him from the tales, offers herself in hope of his son, and promises to recover Rakhsh. They marry that night. Rostam leaves her a token for their child and rides home.

She said: “Tahmineh is the name I bear: Tahmineh is one of the Shahnameh’s bold women. She chooses her man, woos him in plain words and names her terms. Rudabeh, who offered Zal her hair as a rope (earlier in this volume), did much the same. Ferdowsi admires such women, and the poem’s royal women are rarely passive.

A famous mohreh from his arm he drew: A mohreh is a bead or seal-stone, worn here on an armband. It is the recognition token that drives the plot. Tokens left with a mother for a future son are an old device: in Greek myth Aegeus hides a sword and sandals under a rock for Theseus to find. This token will be seen only when it is too late (B8.21).

B8.5The Birth of Sohrab

Sohrab is born and grows at astonishing speed. At ten he demands to know his father. Tahmineh names Rostam, shows his gifts and warns her son to hide the secret from Afrasiab. Sohrab resolves to dethrone Kavus, crown Rostam and then take Turan.

Within a month he seemed a year in height: Precocious growth marks the hero. Rostam himself was a prodigy, delivered by a Caesarean birth that the Simorgh guided (earlier in this volume), and Sohrab’s milestones at three, five and ten echo his father’s.

If Rostam is the father, I the son, / No crowned king shall remain when this is done: Sohrab’s plan is the key to his tragedy. He means not to conquer Iran for Turan but to put his father on its throne. That is the one thing Rostam has always refused (he says so in B8.13), and it would overturn the order of the poem’s world, in which the champion serves and the king rules. The boy’s innocent dream is a political bombshell, and Kavus will remember it (B8.22).

B8.6Sohrab Chooses His Charger

Sohrab needs a horse strong enough to carry him. He tests the herds, pressing many to the ground, until a warrior offers a colt of Rakhsh’s line. Sohrab mounts it, and his grandfather equips him royally for the march on Iran.

I have a young colt of noble Rakhsh’s strain: The son rides a horse of his father’s stock, one more likeness between the two, and a clue Houman explains away in B8.20. Rostam too tested horse after horse before he found Rakhsh (earlier in this volume), pressing on their backs until they sank. Sohrab’s trial repeats his father’s.

B8.7Afrasiab Sends Envoys to Sohrab

Afrasiab hears of Sohrab’s army and sees his chance. He sends Houman and Barman with twelve thousand men and rich gifts, secretly ordering them to keep father and son from recognizing each other. Sohrab welcomes them and marches on Iran, burning as he goes.

The son must never know his father’s face: Afrasiab turns a family misfortune into a political murder in which either outcome serves Turan. From here on the reader knows what nobody on the battlefield knows, and every near-recognition in the chapters that follow plays against that knowledge.

A bijadeh crown: Bijādeh is a red gemstone, usually taken to be a kind of garnet or spinel, much prized in Persian jewelery.

B8.8Sohrab Comes to the White Fortress

Sohrab reaches the White Fortress on the frontier. Its commander Hajir rides out alone to fight him. Sohrab lifts him from the saddle with the butt of his spear, spares him when he begs for quarter, and sends him captive to Houman. The fortress mourns.

Brave Hajir held command within its wall: Hajir is one of the many sons of Gudarz, which explains his fear for his family’s honor in B8.16. He is a minor figure, but his decision to hide Rostam’s identity will be one of the hinges of the tragedy.

B8.9Sohrab Fights with Gordafarid

Gordafarid, daughter of Gazhdaham, arms herself like a man and challenges the invaders. She holds Sohrab off with arrows and spear until he tears off her helmet and ropes her. She talks him into releasing her, slips into the fortress and mocks him from the walls.

Gordafarid, peerless in warlike art: Her name is usually read as ‘created a hero’ (gord, ‘champion’, and āfarid, ‘created’). She is the best-loved woman warrior of the Shahnameh, and the moment her hair spills from the helmet is a favorite of painters and storytellers. Greek readers may think of the Amazon Penthesilea, with whom Achilles falls in love as she dies. Ferdowsi’s warrior is luckier, and cleverer.

B8.10Gazhdaham’s Letter to Kavus

The old commander Gazhdaham has a scribe write to Kavus. A Turanian champion of fourteen, as mighty as Rostam or Sahm, has captured Hajir, and the fortress cannot hold. That night he sends the letter by a trusted rider and prepares to abandon the fortress.

You would believe you saw great Rostam’s face: The old soldier sees at once what no one on the battlefield will admit: the boy looks like Rostam. From here on almost every description of Sohrab compares him with Rostam, Sahm or Nariman, and the reader is left to shout at the characters.

B8.11Sohrab Takes the White Fortress

At dawn Sohrab finds the fortress empty: its chiefs escaped in the night by a secret tunnel. He searches in vain for Gordafarid, with whom he has fallen in love. Kavus reads Gazhdaham’s letter to his chiefs, who urge him to send Giv for Rostam.

Tus and Gudarz, Keshvad’s son of fame: The council introduces the great houses of the Iranian court: Tus, son of Nohzar, of royal blood, and Gudarz, son of Keshvad, whose many sons (Giv, Bahram, Hajir and others) will fill the wars to come. The rivalry between these two houses runs through much of the rest of the poem.

B8.12Kavus Summons Rostam from Zabulistan

Kavus writes urging Rostam to come at once, and Giv rides to Zabul. Rostam cannot believe that a Turk could be so strong, and his own son by Tahmineh must still be a child. He feasts and drinks for three days before setting out.

If flowers rest within your hand, move fast; / Do not delay to smell them: A vivid way of saying ‘drop everything’: if you are holding a flower, do not stop to smell it. Rostam, of course, will stop to drink for three days.

The king of Samangan’s daughter bore my son, / But he is still a child: Perhaps the most painful lines Rostam speaks. He knows he has a son; he simply cannot imagine the boy grown so fast. His reasoning is sound, and it dooms them both.

The third dawn found the wine-cup raised instead: Rostam’s three days of drinking are the delay the tragedy needs. They give Kavus time to work himself into a rage and set up the quarrel of the next chapter. Ferdowsi does not moralize; he simply counts the mornings.

B8.13Kavus’s Anger at Rostam

Kavus, furious at the delay, orders Rostam and Giv hanged. Rostam strikes Tus, declares that his strength comes from God alone and rides away. Gudarz talks Kavus into repentance, then shames Rostam into returning with a rumor that he fears Sohrab. King and champion are reconciled.

I slay the lion; I bestow the crown: ‘Crown-giver’ (tājbakhsh) sums up Rostam’s place in the poem: he makes kings but will not be one. The boast that follows (Rakhsh his throne, his helmet his crown, his sword his signet) is one of the much-quoted speeches of the Shahnameh, and one of its sharpest statements of the tension between the hero and the king.

I raised Kay Qobad up to royal height: This was Rostam’s first service to the crown, told earlier in this volume. As a young man he rode to Alborz and brought Kay Qobad down to be king, founding the Kayanian line. Kavus is Qobad’s son, so Rostam is reminding him that his throne is, in a sense, Rostam’s gift.

You know that Kavus has no brain: The chiefs say aloud what the poem shows throughout: Kay Kavus is rash, vain and easily led. He has already been captured in Mazandaran and in Hamavaran, and has tried to fly to heaven on a throne drawn by eagles. Yet he remains the king. The poem questions his wisdom, never his right to rule.

B8.14Kavus and Rostam Take the Field

Kavus pays and arms a hundred thousand men and marches on the White Fortress under a sky black with dust. From the walls Sohrab shows the vast army to a frightened Houman, declares that no champion in it can match him, and calls for wine.

For two full mil the tents and pavilions spread: The mil is a mile. The word reached Persian through Arabic and goes back ultimately to the Roman mile, the Latin milia passuum, ‘a thousand paces’. In Persian it can also mean a pillar or milestone.

B8.15Rostam Slays Zhendeh Razm

At night Rostam slips into the Turanian camp disguised as a Turk and studies Sohrab at his feast. Zhendeh Razm, Tahmineh’s brother, sent along to point out Rostam to Sohrab, challenges the stranger and is killed by one blow. Rostam reports back to Kavus.

Show him his father before lots are sealed: The irony is savage. The one man in Sohrab’s camp who has seen Rostam and could name him is killed by Rostam himself, in the dark, unrecognised. After this only Hajir, a prisoner with reasons to lie, can tell Sohrab who his opponent is.

In Turk-like guise, concealed from watchful eyes: Rostam in disguise behind enemy lines is a favorite turn of the poem. Later he will enter Turan dressed as a merchant to rescue Bijan. The champion is cunning as well as strong, as he shows again in B8.20.

B8.16Sohrab Questions Hajir on Iran’s Chiefs

From a hilltop Sohrab makes the captive Hajir name the Iranian chiefs by their tents and banners. Hajir names Kavus, Tus, Gudarz, Giv, Fariborz and Guraza, but calls the giant under the dragon banner an unknown ally from Chin, and resolves to die rather than betray Rostam.

Tell me the chiefs, the Shah, the troops arrayed: Naming the enemy’s champions from a height is an old epic device. In the third book of the Iliad, Helen names the Greek heroes for Priam from the walls of Troy. Ferdowsi turns the scene into a test of truth, and the one name Sohrab most needs is the one Hajir hides.

A dragon marks the banner at his side: Heroes in the Shahnameh are known by their banners, much as medieval European warriors were by their heraldry: Tus by the elephant, Gudarz by the lion, Giv by the wolf. Rostam’s dragon, with a golden lion at the spear-point, is the one Tahmineh would have described. For Kaveh’s banner, see A5.5.

Rostam’s own son-in-law, in war he shines: Giv is married to Rostam’s daughter, Banu-gashasp (B10.15). Giv’s son Bijan is thus Rostam’s grandson, a family tie that matters when Rostam rides to Bijan’s rescue (II, C2.24).

Hajir stood firm and would not shift his ground: Hajir’s reasoning is patriotic and sound: if Rostam falls, Iran has no one left. Yet the lie meant to save the father is what kills the son. Dying, Sohrab will ask that Hajir be spared (B8.21), a mercy Rostam very nearly fails to grant.

B8.17Sohrab Attacks Kavus’s Army

Sohrab strikes Hajir down, arms and charges the Iranian camp, tears down part of Kavus’s pavilion and demands a champion. Kavus sends for Rostam, who arms and rides out. Rostam offers to spare the youth; Sohrab asks whether he is Rostam, and Rostam denies it.

I am not he, nor born of Zal’s great name: The fatal denial. Rostam probably lies from a champion’s caution: you do not hand your name to an unknown enemy. It is the second lie that seals Sohrab’s fate, and this time the liar is the father.

Tus brought the bargostvan for Rakhsh to wear: The bargostvān is horse armor, a covering for the war-horse. Heavily armored cavalry was the pride of Parthian and Sasanian Iran, and the Romans had names for such riders: cataphracts and clibanarii.

B8.18Rostam and Sohrab Meet in Combat

Rostam and Sohrab fight with short spears, swords, gorz and arrows, then grapple, but neither can unseat the other. Sohrab strikes Rostam’s shoulder and mocks his age. Each then ravages the other’s army, and they part at nightfall to fight again at dawn.

The Gur-e-Khars, the fish beneath the foam, / Know their own young: Ferdowsi’s most direct comment on the tragedy. Animals know their young by instinct; man, blinded by toil and desire, does not. The narrator breaks into the battle at the very moment father and son stand closest.

Compared with this, the White Div’s fight was light: The White Div was the last and hardest of Rostam’s Seven Labors in Mazandaran, earlier in this volume. That a boy should prove harder is the measure of Sohrab.

B8.19Rostam and Sohrab Leave the Field

Each hero returns to his camp. Sohrab boasts to Houman, and Giv tells Rostam how Sohrab routed Tus. Rostam tells Kavus he could not unseat the youth, and Kavus prays for him. Rostam tells Zavareh that if he dies the army must go home.

We kept the ancient custom of the field: The custom is that a challenger is met by single champions, not by the whole army. Ferdowsi’s battles are largely chains of single combats governed by this rule, and when it breaks down, as when each hero turns on the other’s ranks in B8.18, things are going badly wrong.

Remember lofty Jamshid’s royal height, / And Tahmuras, who bound the Divs in might: Facing death, Rostam reaches for the oldest examples of mortality in the poem: Tahmuras the Div-binder (A3.1) and Jamshid, whose golden age ended in pride and a saw (A4.1, A4.4). His message to Zal is a soldier’s testament: stay loyal to the king, whatever the king is like.

B8.20Sohrab Casts Rostam Down

Sohrab senses that his opponent is Rostam, but Houman denies it. At dawn Sohrab offers peace and asks his name; Rostam refuses. Sohrab throws him, but Rostam invents a rule of two falls and is let go. Rostam prays for his old strength.

One fall alone gives no man leave to kill: Rostam invents the rule on the spot. Wrestling (koshti) is Iran’s ancient sport, still practiced in the traditional zurkhaneh, the ‘house of strength’, where Shahnameh verses are chanted to the beat of a drum. The trick is an odd one for so great a champion, and Ferdowsi records it without excuse.

The third his javanmardi at its prime: Javānmardi, literally ‘young-manliness’, is the Persian code of chivalry: generosity, loyalty and mercy to a fallen foe. Ferdowsi gives three reasons for Sohrab’s mercy (courage, the hour and chivalry), and foolishness is not among them, whatever Houman thinks. The boy’s virtue is his death.

His feet sank deep in stone beneath his weight: A famous little legend. Rostam was once so strong that his feet sank into rock, and he prayed to God to take some of his strength away. Now he prays to have it back. The story explains how a boy could throw him, and makes Rostam’s victory God’s gift rather than his own.

B8.21The Tragedy of Sohrab

Rostam throws Sohrab and stabs him. Dying, Sohrab warns that his father will avenge him, and the token on his arm reveals the truth. Sohrab asks mercy for his army and for Hajir. Rostam nearly kills Hajir and then himself, and Gudarz restrains him.

Undo my jowshan, bare my arm and see: The recognition comes through the token of B8.4. Aristotle judged the finest recognition to be the one that arrives together with a reversal of fortune. World literature has few better examples than this, where the sign is found at the moment it becomes useless.

When brick becomes the pillow for my head: The dead were laid in the grave with a brick under the head, so ‘when brick is my pillow’ is a Persian way of saying ‘when I am buried’.

He struck and opened wide the fallen breast: After so much fighting, the death-blow takes two plain lines. Matthew Arnold’s ‘Sohrab and Rustum’ (1853), which made the story famous in English, drew on a French account of the Shahnameh. It ends not with the funeral but with the Oxus (the poem’s Jihun) flowing on towards the sea.

B8.22Rostam Seeks the Elixir

Rostam sends Gudarz to beg Kavus for the nush-daru, the healing elixir kept in the royal treasury. Kavus refuses: Sohrab alive at Rostam’s side would threaten his throne, and he has not forgotten Rostam’s insults. Gudarz returns and urges Rostam to plead in person.

The nush-daru that heals the deepest sore: Nushdāru, an antidote or ‘drink of immortality’, gave Persian one of its best-known proverbs: nushdāru pas az marg-e Sohrāb, ‘the elixir after Sohrab’s death’, said of help that comes too late.

Together they would strike my fortunes down: Kavus’s refusal is the political heart of the tragedy, and it is not mere spite. He has heard Sohrab threaten to hang him and Rostam boast that he could have been king. United, a father and son of such strength really would outweigh the throne, just as Sohrab planned (B8.5).

The Shah’s ill nature like colocynth grows: Colocynth, the ‘bitter apple’ of the desert (hanzal), is the Persian emblem of incurable bitterness: however you water it, its fruit stays bitter. Persian moralists use it for a bad nature that no upbringing can sweeten.

B8.23Rostam’s Lament for Sohrab

As Rostam goes to plead with Kavus, word comes that Sohrab is dead. Rostam laments, dreading the grief of Tahmineh and the reproach of Zal and Rudabeh, and burns his own pavilion. The poet reflects on heaven’s blindness. Kavus consoles Rostam and renounces vengeance on the Turanians.

They set the royal pavilion aflame: Rostam burns his tent, throne and saddle, destroying his own splendor in mourning. This is not a cremation: Zoroastrian practice forbade defiling fire with the dead, and the body is carried home for burial (B8.24).

If heaven knows the ruin that it makes, / Its brain is empty in the course it takes: One of Ferdowsi’s boldest asides: if the turning sky knows what it does, it is mindless, so it is better to believe that it does not know. The heavens in the poem are an impersonal machine of fate, not God, and the poet can reproach them as he never reproaches the Creator.

I uprooted the garden’s cypress, fully grown: The cypress torn from the garden, first seen in the prelude (A0.11), is now Sohrab, and the man who tore it up is his father.

B8.24Rostam Returns to Zabulistan

Rostam brings Sohrab’s coffin home to Zabulistan amid public mourning. Zal and Rudabeh weep over the youth, who looks like Sahm come again. Rostam builds a hoof-shaped tomb and an aloeswood coffin, and the story spreads. Houman reports to Afrasiab.

And cut the horses’ tails: Cutting horses’ tails and manes was a mourning custom of the Iranian world. Herodotus tells how the Persians shaved their horses’ manes in grief for their cavalry commander Masistius. Tahmineh does the same to Sohrab’s horse (B8.25), and the war-drums are smashed because their master is dead.

Look; Sahm the rider lies / Within this narrow coffin: Rostam shows Zal his own father’s likeness in the dead boy. Three generations of the house of Sahm meet over the coffin, and the fourth lies inside it.

B8.25Tahmineh Hears of Sohrab’s Death

News of Sohrab’s death reaches Samangan. Tahmineh tears and burns her hair and embraces her son’s horse, arms and robe. She gives his wealth to the poor, mourns for a year and dies. Bahram the eloquent warns against loving what death takes.

She put a blue robe on: On dark blue as the color of mourning, see A1.2. Tahmineh’s grief is among the most violent in the poem: hair torn and burned, arms bitten, her son’s kamand looped round her own neck. Ferdowsi gives the mother the story’s last great speech.

Then eloquent Bahram said: Who ‘eloquent Bahram’ was is uncertain; he may have been one of the learned informants behind Ferdowsi’s sources. His advice not to set one’s heart on the dead is the poem’s usual consolation, and after this story it sounds thin.

A tale of tears, that in the tender heart / Breeds anger against Rostam for his part: The story ends where it began (B8.1), with the same tears and the same anger at Rostam. In the next tale Rostam becomes foster-father to another doomed young prince, Siavash, and the poem’s grief for its young men deepens.