The Storytellers's Narration of the Story of Rostam and Sohrab

The art of “Naqqali” (public storytelling) as an important branch of folkloric literature, reflects the reconstructed experiments of national epics and chivalry. The storytellers try to simplify the concepts and reconstruct the interesting events of the story, thus, changing or supplementing the items in the story in accordance with the mentality of the audience. Thus the storytellers pad out the main story with a complex of details. The present study reviews the “Naqqali” tradition, and investigates the narrative methods of Naqqals (storytellers) in two chief dimensions: 1. symmetricalization 2. fabricating reasons.
The storytellers’ symmetricalization of the events in this story is realized in three subjects: the hero’s horse, falling in love, and the application of religious expressions and concepts. In the second part of the research, we will consider the mechanism of reason fabrication. We will comparatively show that the topics in the story such as the robbery of Rakhsh (Rostam’s horse), his marriage with Tahmineh, Sohrab’s promise to marry Afrsyab’s daughter, Rostam’s argument with Kavous and the confrontation of Rostam and Sohrab are all pretexts for Naqqals to justify and reasons for the events in the story. The results of the research will help to sociologically study the artistic taste of Naqqals and their audience as well as their narrative skills.