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A tone of exaggeration, an imagination exuberant and unrestrained, a preference for glitter over solid excellence, a love of far-fetched conceits, characterize the Shahnameh; and, though we may fairly ascribe something of this to the idiosyncrasy of the poet, still, after we have made all due allowance upon this score, the conviction presses upon us that there was a childish and grotesque character in the great mass of the old Persian poetry, which marks it as the creation of moderate rather than of high intellectual power, and prevents us from regarding it with the respect with which we view the labors of the Greeks and Romans, or, again, of the Hebrews, in this department.
Now the Shahnameh of the great poet Firdausi, a national epic of the kind which no other people possess, while it on one hand, apart from the poetic license indulged in by Firdausi, contains much that is either not found at all or is essentially differently related in Arab writers; on the other, considerably accords with those Arab annalists in the order, in the whole structure, and in the details of the narrative.
In the great body of literature and legend that it has left to humanity, history’s hand can be seen at work shaping much of the course of civilization—in the legends that have inspired the ideals of every people since the dawn of recorded time, as well as in the epics of the Ramayana, in the exploits celebrated in the Odyssey and the Aeneid, in the Nordic sagas, in the Shahnameh, and in much of the Bible and the Qur’án.
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