SOURCE: “Ferdowsi's Oral Poetic Heritage,” in Poet and Hero in the Persian “Book of Kings,” Cornell University Press, 1994, pp. 58-72.

In the essay below, Davidson analyzes the oral tradition from which Ferdowsi drew the Shah-Nama and in which the text figured as a recitation piece. Davidson contends that the Shah-Nama was shaped by the creativity of its oral tradition.

The composite picture of an assembly of mōbads, whose coming together literally constitutes Ferdowsi's “sourcebook” by way of their collective recitation, can be supplemented by individual pictures, recurring throughout the Shāhnāma, of individual recitation. Here too, as in the composite picture, the idea of an archetypal book can be combined with the idea of performance, wherever Ferdowsi claims that he heard a given story from a reciter, who in turn got it from an “ancient book”: …

Now, O aged singer, What did the book of...