Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/467

 of the Prophet Zardusht and the beginning of the Zoroastrian religion Firdausi incorporated bodily into his Shah Namah, with due acknowledgments to his ill-starred predecessor, his gratitude perhaps being combined with a sense of caution, for he thus avoided the responsibility of dealing personally with the delicate subject of the older faith. ^

Filled with enthusiasm and inspired by his inborn qualifica- tions for the task, he pursued the labor of love, having already made thorough preparations for his work by a careful study of the Pahlavi prose sources from which the material of his poetic chronicle is drawn. 2 From personal passages that creep into his verse we know that Firdausi was not far from forty years of age when he made the real beginning of his monumental work ; and in the course of the epic v/e learn of his deep grief for the death of a son, whose loss is mourned in touching strains, while from other sources we know that a devoted daughter survived him.

Desirous of finding a patron for his composition as it ad- vanced, he was drawn to the court of Mahmud of Ghaznah, in Afghanistan, who ruled from 998 to 1030, and there he found a monarch so bounteous in gifts at first that Firdausi glorified his generosity in a glowing panegyric, only to be later revoked, although the poem in its final form still commemorates Mah- mud's name. The story goes that the bard from Tus won en- trance into the literary circle of poets that made up the round table at the court of Ghaznah by a clever piece of impromptu versification. Three of the minstrels nearest the throne com- posed each a verse ending in a different, though similar, word, for which no other rhyme was supposed to exist in Persian —

1 In support of the truth of Fir- Dakiki, actually show a difference in

dausi's tactful claim on this point, it style and manner from Firdausi's own

may be said that such scholars as method of composition.

Noldeke, Grundr. iran. Philol. 2. 148, 2 yot data regarding the prose

and Warner, Shdhndma, 5. 20-22, with sources in Pahlavi, see Noldeke,

others, agree that the thousand verses, Grundr. iran. Philol. 2. 143-146. purported to have been borrowed from

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