Notes · Book E11The Epilogue

E11The Epilogue

Ferdowsi accounts for thirty-five years of work: copies taken without payment, a few men who helped him, a ruler whose hand stayed shut. He ends the tale of Yazdegard on the day of Ard in the year four hundred, dedicates the book to Mahmud, and declares he will not die.

Beneath my verse I brought the vaulted sky: Ferdowsi keeps accounts for himself as he has kept them for the kings: sixty-five when the longing took him, seventy-one when he brought the vaulted sky beneath his verse, thirty-five years of labor, nearly eighty now, sixty thousand couplets declared. The figures are the chief evidence for when the poem was written and they do not tally smoothly; modern editions print rather fewer lines than sixty thousand.

In Sapandarmad, on the day of Ard: The same month and the same day as the crowning of Yazdegard (E10.1), and the couplet says so in the next breath: on this day I finish the tale of Yazdegard. The poet dates the end of his book to the anniversary of the last Shah’s accession.

In year four hundred since Mohammad’s Flight: The year 400 of the Hijra falls in AD 1009–10. Rostam’s letter had allowed Iran four hundred years in which nothing of its own would count for anything (E10.2), and the book is sealed in that year. Ferdowsi does not point at it; the prophecy of four centuries and the date of the poem that outlasted them sit a few pages apart.

Abu Nasr Warraq, through this book of mine: The epilogue names the men of the book trade who stood around the work. A warrāq is a copyist and dealer in paper, a kātib a scribe or secretary, and Husain Kutib is the one man thanked for money, food, clothes and freedom from the tax collector. The complaint just above concerns the same trade: well-read Iranians took copies of the poem and paid nothing for them.

I shall not die; alive in words I stand: The best-known couplet of the epilogue and its last claim: the poet will not die, having scattered the seed of speech through the land. It comes after the dedication to Mahmud, in a chapter that has already said that only a tight-fisted ruler keeps him off a throne of his own. Later tradition made a story of that grievance, most famously in Nezami Aruzi’s Chahar Maqala, where the reward arrives in silver instead of gold and the poet gives it away.