1) His Biography:
In 940, in the village of Paj, close to the city of Tus, in the Khorasan region of the Samanid Empire, which is located in the modern Razavi Khorasan Province in northeastern Iran, Ferdowsi was born into a family of Iranian landowners (dehqans). The early years of Ferdowsi are not well known. The poet’s wife likely had a college education and belonged to the same dehqan social stratum. He had a son, who passed away at the age of 37, and the poet wrote an elegy about him that he included into the Shahnameh.
The dehqans were a group to whom Ferdowsi belonged. These Iranian nobles were landowners who had thrived under the Sassanid dynasty, the final pre-Islamic dynasty to dominate Iran, and whose dominance had endured into the Islamic era following the conquests of Islam in the 7th century, albeit with waning influence. Due to their standing and its connection to pre-Islamic literature, the dehqans were drawn to it. They therefore considered it their responsibility to preserve pre-Islamic cultural traditions, such as stories about legendary monarchs.
The Iranian Plateau gradually underwent linguistic and cultural changes as a result of the Islamic conquests of the 7th century. As the caliphate’s dominance began to wane by the late 9th century, a number of regional dynasties appeared in Greater Iran. One of these dynasties, the Samanids, who claimed ancestry from the Sassanid general Bahram Chobin, was in charge of Tus, the city where Ferdowsi was raised (whose story Ferdowsi recounts in one of the later sections of the Shahnameh).
Translations of Pahlavi books into New Persian were ordered by the Samanid bureaucracy, who employed the language that had been used to spread Islam over Eastern Iran and replace indigenous tongues. A prose Shahnameh (“Book of Kings”) was compiled by local intellectuals under the direction of Abu Mansur Muhammad, a dehqan and the governor of Tus. It was finished in 1010. Ferdowsi adopted it as one of the sources for his epic, despite the fact that it is no longer extant. Ferdowsi followed in the footsteps of such notable Persian poets as Rudaki and Daqiqi, who were patronised by the Samanid kings.
There may be some early poems by Ferdowsi that have vanished. Around 977, he started work on the Shahnameh with the intention of continuing the work of his fellow poet Daqiqi, who had been murdered by his slave. Ferdowsi, like Daqiqi, drew inspiration from Abd-al-Razzq’s prose, Shahnameh. He finished the first version of the Shahnameh in 994 thanks to considerable funding from Samanid prince Mansur.
Ferdowsi continued to work on the poem after the Turkic Ghaznavids ousted the Samanids in the late 990s, revising several passages to honour the Ghaznavid Sultan Mahmud. Ferdowsi’s treatment by Mahmud and how well he compensated the poet are issues that have long been disputed and served as the foundation for legends about the poet and his patron. Compared to the Samanids, the Turkic Mahmud may have shown less interest in Iranian historical tales. The Shahnameh’s later chapters contain passages that show Ferdowsi’s shifting emotions. In some of them, he laments his son’s death, old age, poverty, and disease; in others, he appears joyful. On March 8, 1010, Ferdowsi finally finished writing his epic.
A local clergyman had forbade Ferdowsi’s burial in the Tus cemetery, therefore he was laid to rest in his own yard. The tomb was covered with a mausoleum built by a Ghaznavid governor of Khorasan, and it became a sacred place. On Reza Shah’s direction, the Society for the National Heritage of Iran restored the tomb between 1928 and 1934, turning it into what would now be considered a national shrine.
2) Shahnameh:
The King gave Ferdowsi the assignment to record Persia’s history once he rose to fame as a poet. To encourage Ferdowsi’s poetry, the King placed him in a special area in his palace with wall-to-wall paintings. For every 1000 couplets that Ferdowsi was able to pen, the King promised to give him 1000 gold pieces. Ferdowsi finished writing the Shahnameh, which is composed of 60,000 couplets, after 30 years of labour. The King received the poetry from him, and he also requested 60,000 gold pieces. However, Ferdowsi and the King had a disagreement throughout the 30 years of writing. The King, in Ferdowsi’s opinion, did not regard him or his work sufficiently. The King thought Ferdowsi was much too proud and only gave him 60,000 silver pieces.
Ferdowsi was incensed. He departed the palace and returned to his house in Tus. However, he left a poem for the King that was pinned to the wall of the office he had spent all those years in. The poem was lengthy and harsh, more of a curse, and it concluded with these words:”heaven’s vengeance will not forget. Shrink tyrant from my words of fire, and tremble at a poets ire.” The King gave the order for Ferdowsi to be located and killed by elephants. Ferdowsi pleaded for pardon as a result. While accepting, the King declared that he would never want to see or hear from Ferdowsi again. Numerous individuals complained to the King. In the end, the King was sorry and sent a camel train to Tus with 60,000 gold pieces, silk, brocade, and velvet clothing, as well as spices and perfumes.
The King’s presents, however, came too late. According to legend, Ferdowsi passed away before the camel train arrived. The burial procession for Ferdowsi exited one gate of the city as the King’s caravan approached another entrance. The daughter of Ferdowsi used the hard-earned money she inherited from her father to construct a new, sturdy bridge and an adjacent lovely stone caravanserai where travellers could relax, buy goods, and share tales. There are numerous depictions of Ferdowsi writing, reading his poetry to the King, and competing with other poets to establish his claim to being the greatest poet among them in the numerous miniature paintings of the Shahnameh.
3) His Legacy:
One of the unquestionable giants of Persian literature is Ferdowsi. Following Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, a number of other works of a similar sort have appeared over the years in the Persian dialect. All of these works were stylistically and methodologically based on Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, but none of them were able to match the recognition and notoriety of Ferdowsi’s masterwork.
Because of the efforts he took to revive and regenerate the Persian language and cultural traditions, Ferdowsi has a special position in Persian history. His writings are credited with playing a significant role in the survival of the Persian language because they allowed for the codification and preservation of a large portion of the tongue. In this regard, Ferdowsi has had a greater influence on Persian culture and language than Nizami, Khayyám, Asadi Tusi, and other important Persian literary luminaries. He is regarded as the father of the current Persian language by many contemporary Iranians.
In actuality, Ferdowsi served as inspiration for numerous later Persian leaders. Reza Shah Pahlavi was one of these important individuals. He founded the Academy of Persian Language and Literature to try and replace Arabic and French terminology in Persian with more appropriate Persian vocabulary. Reza Shah organised the “Ferdowsi Millennial Celebration” in 1934, bringing eminent European and Iranian scholars to Mashhad, Khorasan, to celebrate a millennium of Persian literature since Ferdowsi. Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, which was founded in 1949, also bears Ferdowsi’s name.
Ferdowsi is regarded as the best poet in Persian culture. They have continued to read and hear recitations from his masterpiece, the Shahnameh, where the Persian national epic achieved its definitive and permanent form, for almost a thousand years. The average current Iranian can understand this book just as easily as a modern English speaker can understand the King James Version of the Bible, despite it having been penned nearly 1,000 years ago. Since the poem is based on a Dari original, the language is entirely Persian with very little Arabic in it. The Ferdowsi Library of Wadham College, Oxford University, is home to a specialised Persian department for academics.