The Shahnama of the Firdausi

The year A.D. 1010 saw the completion of the Shahnama, the great Persian epic. Its author, the poet Firdausi, spent over thirty laborious years in its composition, only to experience, when the task had been achieved, a heart-breaking disappointment well worthy of inclusion in any record of the calamities of authors. His work has survived the test of time, and by general consent is accounted to be one of the few great epics of the world. Geographically, and in some other respects, it may be said to stand half-way between the epics of Europe and those of India. In its own land it has no peer, while in construction and subject-matter it is unique. Other epics centre round some heroic character or incident to which all else is subservient.
In the Shahnama there is no lack either of heroes or of incidents, but its real hero is the ancient Persian people and its theme their whole surviving legendary history from the days of the First Man to the death of the last Sasanian Shah in the middle of the seventh century of our era. It is the glory of the Persian race that they alone among all nations possess such a record, based as it is on their own traditions and set forth in the words of their greatest poet. In another sense, too, the Shahnama is unique. The authors of the other great epics tell us little or nothing of their own personalities or of their sources of information. Their works are fairy palaces suspended in mid air; we see the result, but know not how it was achieved. The author of the Shahnama takes us into his confidence from the first, so that in reading it we are let into the secret of epic-making, and can apply the know-ledge thus gained to solve the problem of the construction of its great congeners. To the student of comparative mythology and folk-lore, to the lover of historic romance or romantic history, and to all that are fond of tales of high achievements and the gests of heroes, the Shahnama is a storehouse of rich and abundant material.
To set forth a complete presentment of it with the needful notes and elucidations is the object of the present translation, made from two of the best printed texts of the original that of Vullers and Landauer, and that of Turner Macan.