پژوهشنامه ادب حماسی
سال نوزدهم شماره 1 (پیاپی 35، بهار و تابستان 1402)

The tale of Eskandar in Shahnameh is one of the most dramatic tales regarding the life of Eskandar.  It is very significant in terms of two qualitative elements in drama namely conflicts and dramatic scenes which are quite exceptional in contrast with other elements.  The purpose of this article is to answer the main question that what potential and variety these two elements offer for adaptation using descriptive analytic method as well as referring to the classification in the book of recognizing elements of drama.  The results obtained demonstrate that conflicts in the tale are highly varied that is based on the nature of opposing elements such as conflicts in an antisocial society, man versus man, man versus nature, man versus society, man versus his own self, and also based on the nature of conflict is of a kind associated with dynamism.  The battle scenes with the Persians, marriage with Roshanak, the death of Dara, and his burial rites are regarded as dramatic scenes of this narrative which makes it an ideal case for adaptation.

 Halliday emphasizes on ideational, interpersonal and textural metafunctions in systematic functional linguistics, which can be useful for analyzing sentences of literary texts and understanding special styles of poets or writers. Shahnameh has the potential of being studied in different fields like linguistics, thus the writer analyzes styles of the stories of Iraj and Rostam and Shaghad, based on Halliday’s theory. This paper is an attempt to study the problem of different processes, interpersonal metafunctions, and textural cohesion in stories of Iraj and Rostam and Shaghad. The results of this study show that among all the used processes, material process has the highest frequency in both stories, which indicate concrete events and actions used in the scenes.  In non-structural part of textual metafunction, grammatical and lexical cohesions cause text connections and coordination. In grammatical cohesion, conjunctions and in lexical cohesion reiteration, repetition element has the highest frequency in both stories. Past form of the verbs are used and subjects are often obvious and indicative mood which emphasizes on truthfulness of propositions and certainty of the text has the most frequency in these stories. Investigating and adapting all three semantic layers of Halliday’s theory in the stories of Iraj and Rostam and Shaghad emphasizes on the unified, integrated, coherent structure of both texts.

Modernity emerged after the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries andinfluenced the life of contemporary man to a large extent. Man today seeks his happiness outside of himself and is oblivious to the world within. The epic within or the soul finds a special meaning in the domain of philosophy and religion. Philosophically, soul refers to the body whereas in essence it is independent of the body.Soul is the same thing as the inside, sometimes it belongs to the body and sometimes it has a spiritual sense. From the point of view of religion, soul is the light emanating from the divine light which descends to the human body. The soul can be interpreted as the psyche and the inside, which has put modern man at the crossroads of tradition and modernity causing his bewilderment. Industry instead of providing his comfort, creates more obstacles.   This descriptive-analytical study is an attempt to find common grounds related to the human psyche in the epic Poem of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and the mystical poem of Rumi's Masnavi to express how contemporary man confronts his long tradition and background with the modern world. In mystical epic texts inside is referred to as the heart, soul, psyche and inner soul. Ferdowsi uses   psyche instead of the inside. According to Rumi, contemporary man can create an epic through battle with his self and open a new horizon by traveling from the material world to the spiritual world to find meaning. Ferdowsi, on the other hand, considers the human psyche as a means of man’s wisdom and happiness.

In his work on gemology known as "Mathnavi-e Javahir-ul-Asrar", Rashid Tabrizi has introduced types of jewels and named a worthless and yellow coloured jewel (garnet) referred to as "La'al-e-Sohrabaki". He has stated the reason of such naming which is related to Sohrab's armlet. He hold that this jewel’s infelicity is the cause of Sohrab's death and the reason of its reputation.This librarian study has two parts. The first part tries to review reliable texts and, in this way investigates characteristics of beads and armlets, particularly those of Rostam's family. The second part is about features of garnet (La'al) and La'al-e-Sohrabaki and tries to state Rashid Tabrizi's opinion about this jewel. According to findings, it is likely that Sohrab's armlet has been adorned with a garnet. However, there is no mention of its colour and price. It seems that tragedy of son killing by the Iranian superhero, Rostam, is never removed from the Iranian minds and this is the reason for this jewel's infelicity in the opinion of Rashid Tabrizi or the people of 10th and 11th century. Thus, the accusation of infelicity attributed to Sohrab's bead of armlet is a popular justification for the exculpation of the hero.

Shahanshahnameh is an epic poem written by Fath-Ali Khan Saba who has made use of the history of Iran during the reign of Fath-Ali Shah of Qajar dynasty as the basis for creating a literary work. The historical narration of the work covers the fall of Isfahan to the end of the first period of the Iran-Russia wars. Despite its significance, this epic poem has not yet been properly studied. Critiques written on Shahanshahnameh are not thorough works and it seems most of their authors did not read the entire text of the poem. These critiques are mostly written based on excerpts from the Poem and as a result, they have glaring flaws in terms of content and as far as history is concerned. This article seeks to analyze over twenty researches done on Shahanshahnameh in the last century and tries to criticize their approaches by examining the flaws and errors of their texts. The result of this research indicates that most of the critics, regardless of the whole work and the historical points related to it, have made mistakes and these errors have found their way through the critiques of each era to the next period.

Researches conducted on Shahnameh in the 1380s in comparison with the earlier years had proliferated and numerous articles employing novel approaches had been published in the journals of this period.  Recognizing the shortcomings of certain articles in terms of structure and content are quite important in view of the abundance of materials found in the domain of Shahnameh studies from 1380 to 1385, hence the criticism and pathology of such works is an essential task.  The purpose of this article is to criticize and evaluate a number of such articles using the pathological approach.  The research method is descriptive analytic one and the data collection method is library based. Defects such as incompatibility of title with the content, reference to inauthentic Shahnameh editions, inattention to main sources and prior researches, shallow interpretation and concentration on description, repetition of themes, unsystematic and unscientific manner of writing critical essays, employing inappropriate language, imposing meaning to the text, and structural flaws are examined in this study.

The characterization of Iranian women in stories, poems, and plays is only everlasting when it is taken from the Iranian-Islamic culture. In this regard, this research seeks to answer the question of what themes and elements have been used in the characterization of women in the stories of the Holy Quran and the stories of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh. So, by applying the comparative approach and the descriptive-analytical method, it has been concluded that the personality of women is divided into two categories of benevolent and malevolent women. A  benevolent woman is spiritual and insists on following customs and traditions, and she emphasizes on the importance of the family institution, especially the role of the husband and father in the family whereas, a malevolent woman is only concentrated on the materialistic aspects and thereby is not committed to the institution of family, rites and traditions. Finally, the characterization of women in the aforementioned texts are discussed based on the dual themes of materialism and spirituality.

One of the achievements of cognitive linguistics is the discovery of the fact that languages ​​use conceptual metaphors to make abstract concepts tangible. According to Lakoff and Johnson (2003), conceptual metaphor uses the domain of origin, which is a tangible domain, to explain the domain of destination, which is an abstract and intangible concept; In fact, the basis of conceptual metaphor is the existence of a category of origin and a category of destination and the creation of a correspondence between them. In this view, conceptual metaphors are divided into three categories: ontological, directional and structural, and ontological metaphors in turn fall into three sub-categories: container, object / matter, personality (discernment). Arash's long epic poem is one of the valuable works of Mehrdad Avesta.  According to his epic content, he has expressed many abstract concepts with the help of conceptual metaphors. The purpose of this study is to investigate the ontological metaphors in this epic work in a descriptive-analytical manner. After answering the question of how ontological metaphors were used in Arash's epic and what concepts were tangible through this metaphor, the authors came to the conclusion that the poet sought to express sigh and regret. From the turbulent times that have arisen from the war between Iran and Turan, the conceptualized areas such as times, regrets, fears, calamities,  and etc. were expressed with the areas of origin in terms of the vessel, objects and people. Since the essence of the epic is associated with dynamism and mobility, most conceptualization has taken place with the domain of the origin of the character bringing life to abstract concepts.

Some classical texts are considered as supertexts and mother texts in Persian poetry, which more or less spread their shadow over other texts in all or most literary periods. Hakim Abulqasem Ferdowsi's Shahnameh is one of these hypertexts whose signs of its presence can be traced in many subsequent texts, both epic and non-epic. In modern times, poets have been influenced by stories, characters, myths and other aspects of Shahnameh on various occasions.Simin Behbahani is one of the poets who, with a relatively good knowledge of the Shahnameh and its fictional world, has been able to create extensive intertextual interactions with the Shahnameh. In this research, with analytical-descriptive method, we have sought to analyze and examine the fields of familiarity and the amount of use of Simin and the quality and manner of these uses of the Shahnameh. The findings of this research show that Simin Behbahani, due to growing up in a scientific family and personal studies, had a relatively broad knowledge of the stories and influential characters of the Shahnameh, and was able to use the stories of the Shahnameh in various positions to arouse people's sense of love for Iran and also to remember the heroes. Taking refuge in the Shahnameh and its heroes in search of a savior, using lyrical dimensions and drawing the political-social atmosphere of the contemporary era are other factors that have led Simin to use the mythological stories of the Shahnameh.

Horse as a totem of Iranians is a myth that has a significant presence in ritualistic-literary texts of different periods and is considered a recurring myth. Horse has a dual nature in mythologies and also in mystical teachings and is both regarded as a symbol of divine and demonic themes.  For its popularity among the Iranians, horse is mostly recognized as a divine symbol. This article seeks to investigate the transformation of the horse myth through the epic era to the mystical period by content-analysis method. The results of the research show that the horse has a special role and position in epic and heroic texts that it is considered as a complement to heroes and helps them in all stages of life. After the epic era, the horse is still a symbol of sublime themes in mystical texts; but because of its rebellious nature, it is also used as a symbol of the soul, however the same soul, upon hard training and by austerity has the ability to be tamed.

Rostam’s family is very much associated with magic-healing and shamanism in Iranian epics. It is possible that this family belonged to one of the most influential Aryan brotherhood associations in Iran. In these associations, each person performed initiation rituals before entering and in addition to fighting, he acquired the ability to communicate with the underworld to communicate with the spirits and cure diseases. Two stories about Rostam in the national epics of Iran are related to the two concepts of initiation and traveling to the underworld. The first is the story of ''Babr-e Bayan'', which is Rostam's initiation in the shamanic and militancy associations, and the second is the story of ''Haft Khan Rostam'', which is an aspect of a journey to the underworld. In this article, we have examined the signs of shamanic rituals in these two stories. Eventually, it becomes clear that ''Haft Khan Rostam'', unlike ''Haft Khan Esfandiar'', is not his initiation; rather, it is a narration of the shaman traveling to the spirits world to recapture the sick soul.

There are two common approaches in the research of Shahnameh. The first group of studies scrutinize one unique story of Shahnameh, while the other one emphasizes on the coherence of all the stories. In this research the Iranian national epic is interpreted using structuralism. It suggests that Iranian national epic is not a set of scattered stories, but basically it has an Indio-European style. To that end, present study embeds on two theoretical foundations: first, according to George Dumézil’s theory, Indo-European universe has a class system. Secondly, according to Bahman Sarkarati, Iranian national epic is classified into three eras based on limited age of the universe and a confrontation between the celestial and the evil powers. In the first era, celestial order became a class system with the rise of Hooshang, Tahmoores, and Jamshid dynasties; respectively, which agrees with George Dumézil’s theory of three functional groups. In the second era, an evil period is manifested through the destruction of the class system.