The Myth of Killing of the Dragon and its Portrayal in Shahnameh

Shahnameh is an epic combined of historical and mythological elements forming the narrative. The mixture of history and myth in Shahnameh, and the transformation of its source stories during the course of time before Ferdowsi's attempt at versifying them have made the structure of the stories complicating; therefore, the reader feels that he is reading a bunch of dissimilar and distinct stories. However, the deep structure underlying all these varieties is the same. The universal myth of ‘killing of the dragons’ is one of the few deep structures of Shahnameh. In this study, seventeen stories in which killing of the dragon serves as the deep structure have been investigated. This study shows that "the myth of killing of the dragon" underlies other stories as well—the stories which are apparently irrelevant to this myth—since the fundamental structure of all stories lies in the binary opposition of fertility and sterility of nature.