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Rustam‐i Dastan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Dick Davis
Dick Davis*
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
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Rustam's Origins are Certainly Complex, Multilayered, and it Would seem only partly Iranian. His legend itself indicates this; his mother is a foreigner living in Kabul and descended from Zahhak, so that both Sudabah and Isfandiyar are able to refer to him as demon-born, (dīv-zād). Mehrdad Bahar has concluded that much of his legend is Saka, or Scythian, and that it also has strong parallels and probable connections with that of Indra, the Vedic god of war. His integration into Iranian national history as its defender and savior betrays some strains: he is Iran's greatest champion but he enjoys very uneasy relations with some of Iran's kings (notably Kavus and Gushtasp), his sons Suhrab and Faramarz each launch independent attacks against the Iranian court, and his own last battle is against the crown prince of Iran whom he kills. Half foreigner, with a partially demonic ancestry, a man who kills the nation's heir apparent and whose sons declare war on two different Iranian royal families—these are troubling attributes for an ethnic hero, and point to some ambiguity in the evolution of his legend.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 32 , Issue 2: The Uses of Guile: Literary and Historical Moments , Spring 1999 , pp. 231 - 241
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1999

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References

1. This paper draws on the comments and expertise of a number of colleagues, whose help I am happy to acknowledge. Hearing Jerome Clinton's paper “The Uses of Guile in the Shāhnāmah,” presented at the 1998 Biennial Conference on Iranian Studies, served as a productive catalyst to some of the ideas offered here; discussions with Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak provided a number of suggestions I have utilized, and also served to clarify many of my own notions as to the nature of Rustam's legend. Numerous conversations with Margaret Mills, my colleague at Ohio State University, have been of immense help to me. The paper was read at the Harvard Firdawsi Conference (March 1999), and at a day-long session on Gender and Guile in Persian Texts held at Ohio State University on April 8, 1999. I am grateful for extensive feedback from some of those who heard the paper at these events.

2. Bahar, Mehrdad Az astūrah tā tārīkh (Tehran, 1376/1997)Google Scholar; see especially the essay, “Ta˒īr-e ḥukūmat-e kūshānhā dar tashkīl-e ḥamāsah-ye millī-ye Īrān,” 225-58.

3. Davis, Dick Epic and Sedition: The Case of Firdawsi's Shāhnāmeh (Fayettevilee: University of Arkansas Press, 1992), 155.Google Scholar

4. “Babr-e bayān,” in Motlagh, Jalal Khaleghi Gul-e ranjhā-ye kuhan (Tehran, 1372/1993), 275-336.Google Scholar

5. Kugel, James In Potiphar's House (San Francisco, 1990).Google Scholar Passim, but see especially the section “Nine Theses” (247-70), in which Kugel sets out a persuasive taxonomy of textual expansion elaborated to explain lacunae, inconsistencies, or incomprehensible moments in ancient texts.

6. Bend's, E. et al. ed., Shāhnāmah vol. 1 (Moscow: Nauka, 1966) 192, 1. 869.Google Scholar Khaleghi Motlagh's edition of the Shāhnāmah omits the line, but records its presence in a number of manuscripts, Jalal Khaleghi-Motlagh ed., Shāhnāmah, vol. 1 (New York, 1366/1987), 221.Google Scholar Whether the line is actually “by” Firdawsi or not is of course irrelevant to the fact that it, and the fear it records, was a part of the material of this particular tale during the medieval period.

7. E.g. Khaleghi-Motlagh, ed., Shāhnāmah, vol. 4, (Costa Mesa, 1994), 348, 1. 278.Google Scholar

8. Cited by Mahmoud Omidsalar, in his article “Dīv,” Encyclopedia Iranica, vol. 7 (Costa Mesa, 1996), 428-31.Google Scholar It is perhaps relevant that the epithet zar attached to Zal's name, which has been traditionally (e.g. in the Burhān-e Qāṭi˓) explained as a reference to the whiteness of his hair, would seem a more obviously appropriate description of blond hair than of white.

9. Khaleghi Motlagh's edition of the Shāhnāmah excises as spurious the stories of the White Elephant and the White Mountain but, as with the situation discussed in footnote 6 above, this does not affect the fact that these stories, as their presence in a number of mss. indicates, were a part of Rustam's legend in the medieval period, whether or not we believe that Firdawsi availed himself of them. My concern is not with Firdawsi's text as such, but with the legendary material that was available concerning Rustam.

10. Thompson, Stith The Folktale (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 319-28.Google Scholar

11. Khaleghi-Motlagh's suggestion of an Indian origin for this aspect of Rustam's legend here seems relevant: the tiger as it appears in Indian Iore (e.g. in Buddhist Jataka tales) is characterized precisely as sly, wily, and untrustworthy.

12. In Radin, Paul The Trickster (London, 1956), 173-91.Google Scholar

13. Ibid., 177.

14. Ibid., 185.

15. Ibid., 186.

16. Anjavi-Shirazi, Seyed Abol Qasem Mardum wa Firdawsi (Tehran, 2535/1976).Google Scholar

17. Ibid., 295-311.

18. Ibid., 229-30.

19. Omidsalar, Mahmoud “Żaḥḥāk pasar-e mardās ya żaḥḥāk-e ādamkhwār”, Irān Nāmāh 2, no. 2 (Winter 1362/1983-4): 329-39.Google Scholar It is very tempting to see the epithet mardush (“snake-shouldered“) as a development/rationalization of the same puzzling syllables. “Zahhak the son of Mardas” and “Zahhak the snake-shouldered” would thus record two different attempts to account for their meaning. The generation of a story to account for the epithet “snake-shouldered,” one adding circumstantial detail to the original narrative while retaining its original import (that Zahhak was a cannibal), is exactly the kind of elaboration for exegetical purposes that Kugel draws attention to in In Potiphar's House (see note 5 above).

20. We encounter a similar instance of the evolution of a laqab to the status of a patronymic in the name of Rustam's and Zal's supposed ancestor, Nariman, which as Dehkhoda points out (Lughatnāmah, vol. 13, 1986, revised and reprinted Tehran 1373/1994) was originally an epithet meaning “of a manly/heroic nature” (mard sarisht).

21. Dehkhoda (op. cit., vol. 7, 9522) records the explanation that Zal is called Dastan because of his connection with the magical Simurgh. This is germane to my argument because it adds Dehkhoda's considerable philological prestige to the notion that the word dastān is originally a laqab, a defining epithet, rather than simply a patronymic. However, I differ from Dehkhoda in ascribing the laqab initially to Rustam himself rather than to his father with whom, in Firdawsi's text, it is associated. Despite his dependence on the magical Simurgh, Zal has few if any characteristics of the trickster hero, whereas his son Rustam displays many, and I therefore think it more likely that the epithet originally belonged to the trickster son.

22. An interesting parallel to the medieval rejection of the trickster's ethos as represented by the evolving fortunes of Rustam can be found in the post-Homeric development of the Odysseus myth. In the Odyssey, the eponymous hero's trickery is seen as a wholly admirable skill, ensuring survival. But in the Aeneid the situation is more nuanced. In Book II of the Aeneid, Odysseus is condemned repeatedly by Sinon for his fraudulent and unscrupulous behavior; this is in itself a trick, but it is reported to us by a victim of the trick (Aeneas) whose behavior throughout his epic, implicitly contrasted with that of his erstwhile enemy Odysseus, is presented as admirably pius, (i.e. unambiguously “noble” / “godfearing”). By the time we reach Dante's Commedia, written in a medieval world not all that different from Firdawsi's, authorial approval is wholly withheld from Odysseus's trickery (Inferno, Bk. XXVI), and he is condemned outright for the same fraudulent deeds Sinon equivocally condemns him for in Book II of the Aeneid. In the transition from the relatively archaic world of Homer (in which successful trickster behavior is to be relished) to the medieval world of Dante (in which all trickster behavior is to be condemned as deception) we see a progressive withdrawal of approval from the trickster hero ethos, and this, I suggest, is analogous to what happened in Rustam's case, leading to the quasi “suppression” of the original meaning of dastān in the phrase “Rustam-e dastan”.