Ferdowsi's Approach to Mythological Systems

Ferdowsi has encountered an important issue during the narration of Shāhnāmeh, and that is the dominant viewpoint of his era about myths. It seems that the age in which Ferdowsi lives is one of the flourishing periods of rationality in Iranian history. Accordingly, how could Ferdowsi’s attitude towards myths be configured? Due to the fact that some myths are completely free of the principles of ration, and Ferdowsi has to reconcile the external world of his intellectual age (the fourth century AH) and the internal irrational world of myths, intermingling such different worlds is possibly a huge task for Ferdowsi to perform. This article aims to explore through what methods and techniques Shāhnāmeh faces the mythological systems. Thus, after dividing the forms of myth interpretation to allegorical, nominal, Euhemeristic, and physical ones, and finding cases of these forms in Shāhnāmeh by using imperfect induction, we try to provide an optimal answer for this question.