Narrative Onomastics of Iranian Folk Tales: A Case Study of Firoozshah Nameh

The science of onomastics is a part of lexicology and a subsidiary section of general linguistics and helps us to analyze fiction characters through their names. This paper tries to analyze the characters of folk tales based on onomastics. The original text in this research is Firoozshah Nameh because it consists of more than 300 characters (human, demons and fairy) with positive and negative roles and various names. Noticing on the importance of this folk romance and few researches about it, this paper tries to introduce some literary values of it. Moreover it refers to other important Iranian folk romances like Abumoslim Nameh, Iskandar Nameh, Amir Arsalan e Namdar,… and analyses the names of their characters. Based on onomastics it tries to show the relations between the names and themes of the story. This paper is amongst the first researches in onomastics of fiction characters in Iran, so with dividing the names of characters and offering the statistical analysis it can be a pattern for other similar debates in other literary fields.