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In the Enemy's Camp: Homer's Helen and Ferdowsi's Hojir

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Dick Davis
Dick Davis*
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
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Extract

This paper will attempt to compare a famous scene in Ferdowsi's Shāhnāmeh with an equally well-known one in Homer's Iliad. There are broadly three ways in which such a comparison can be made. Similarities and differences can be ascribed to reasons of genre, or to the nature of the underlying mythical material and sources utilized by the poets in question, or to a consciousness of, and use by, the later poet of the earlier poet's work, at whatever stage of remoteness. Elsewhere I have touched on genre as a cause for apparent similarities between the two superficially quite different epic traditions of Greece and Iran, indicating that the king/champion conflict described by W. T. H. Jackson as typical of the European epic is also a characteristic of the Iranian Shāhnāmeh.

Type
Research Article
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 3-4 , 1992 , pp. 17 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1992

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References

1. See Davis, Dick, Epic and Sedition: The Case of Ferdowsi's Shāhnāmeh (Arkansas, 1992), 36-8Google Scholar; W. T. H. Jackson, The Hero and the King: An Epic Theme (Columbia, 1982), passim.

2. Kraemer, Jorg, “Arabische Homerverse,” Zeitschrift die deutsche morgenlandische Gessellschaft 106 (1956): 261Google Scholar.

3. Murray, A. T. (ed.), Iliad (London, 1924)Google Scholar, reprinted 1937; Bartel et al (eds.), Shahnameh-ye Ferdowsi, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1966).

4. Khaleghi-Motlagh, J., “Pāyramūn-e vazn-e Shāhnāmeh,” Irānshenāsī 2, no. 1: 48-63, especially 51-3Google Scholar.

5. The resemblances between these Indo-European tales of filicide are brought out in Khaleghi-Motlagh's article, “Yekī dāstān ast por az āb-e chashm (dar bāreh-ye mawzū'-e nabard-e pedar o pesar),” Iran Nameh 1, no. 2: 164-205. Khaleghi-Motlagh draws attention to the stories of Hildebrand (in Germany), Cuchulain (in Ireland) and Ilya Muromec (in Russia) as parallels to Rostam's inadvertent slaying of his son. He suggests that the story was originally of Saka origin, and that it was incorporated into the Iranian cultural tradition during the Parthian period.

6. Minovi, Mojtaba (ed.), Dāstān-e Rostam’ o Sohrāb az Shāhnāmeh (Tehran, 1974)Google Scholar, footnote to lines 89-92; Clinton, Jerome, The Tragedy of Sohrab and Rostam (Washington, 1987), 181-2, n. 8Google Scholar.