 My name is Hassan Hakimian. I'm the director of the London Middle East Institute. It's a great pleasure to welcome you all to this very special event, the second Comron Jam annual lecture for 2013. And it's an honor to have Professor Dick Davis deliver a series of two lectures, the first one tonight, followed by another one on Monday night. My job is very easy and pleasant, welcoming an audience, a group of friends and admirers of Iran and Iranian studies. And I promise to keep this very short because you are here to hear Professor Davis. And Nargis Farzad, my colleague from Suas, will do the formal introduction to Professor Davis. I just want to say that I appreciate very much your presence here on a Friday night. And I know that this will be a very rewarding evening. Dick is a very well-known, eminent scholar, and his name attracts a lot of attention amongst the Iranian studies circle. Here at Suas, Iranian studies has both deep roots and a long history, which goes back decades. We were told recently that the first lectureship in Zoroastrian studies at Suas was at Suas in 1929, and that was a post funded by the Parsi community from Bombay. Speaking of which, there is a wonderful Zoroastrian exhibition downstairs, rather, in the Brunei Gallery, convened by my colleague Dr. Sarah Stewart. And I'm sure many of you will have already seen it, and if you haven't, make sure that you catch that before mid-December when it will be gone. It's a real experience. As I said, Iranian studies has a long history at Suas, but it's my great honor and pleasure to claim that it has received even a bigger boost in the last few years, to be precise, three years since the formation or setting up of the Center for Iranian Studies. And since then, Suas is firmly on the map, on the international map, when it comes to Iranian studies. And it's one of the few institutions, if not the only one around the world, which claims expertise across a wide range of disciplines related to Iran and covers over 30 academic colleagues here who are engaged with Iranian studies in one way or another. Not exclusively, but either in their teaching or research, they are addressing aspects of Iran, from culture, history, economics, to economics development, law, and religion, women. It's a wide range of subjects. The formation of the Center for Iranian Studies, which was one of the initiatives of the Institute, which I had, has enabled us to bring together a lot of energy and commitment under one roof, as it were, and galvanized commitment in this area. And as a result, here in Suas, hardly a week goes by without us having something related to Iran. And this is really the range of activities is very wide from really special events, special lectures like this one, which is now a very special date in our annual calendar to occasional lectures, to seminars, to film screenings, to concerts, and the list goes on. Now coming back to the occasion of this evening, the second Comron Jam annual lecture, the series was inaugurated with another eminent Iranian studies scholar, Professor Karimiha Kok, last year in 2012. And this is essentially made possible with the generosity of Faridun Jam Charitable Trust, which very kindly made an award, a gift of 2 million pounds to Suas in 2011. Now that endowment is enabling us. The proceeds of the returns from that endowment has enabled us to introduce a number of initiatives relating to Iranian studies, such as scholarships for BA students, for MA students, and also PhD. And the MA Iranian studies, in fact, which was introduced, which was initiated this academic year, literally three or four weeks ago, is one of the results of such initiative. We have been able, thanks to the generosity of the Faridun Jam Charitable Trust, to also institutionalize an annual lecture, which as I said is a real special date or event in our calendar. And I hope you will continue to check our web pages. And if you want to be added to the email list, so as to remain abreast of our activities, make sure you leave your name card or your email sign up upstairs. That would be our pleasure. I know a lot of faces here are familiar, but we always meet up new friends and colleagues, and we want to encourage that. And I say this knowing full well that London is now arguably one of the hubs for Iranian studies. And I don't just mean so as. We have other institutions and organizations, such as BIPs, British Institution of Persian Studies. We have British Museum around the corner, which deals with aspects of Iranian studies. We have Iran Heritage Foundation, which funds, initiates, again, a lot of activities relating to different aspects of Iranian studies. And in fact, we very closely collaborate with them. So the topic of tonight's presentation by Professor Dick Davis is the Perils of Persian Princeses, Women and Medieval Persian Literature. I have to admit I'm an economist. This is not an area in which I'm qualified to speak. But being at SOAS, my job of finding a Persian princess to introduce him wasn't very difficult. Wasn't very difficult. And it's my pleasure to ask my colleague, I guess, Farzad. And I'm sure she won't be speaking so much about the perils, but the pleasures of introducing Dick Davis. And I, with your permission, I'm going actually to join you, sit at the back and relax and enjoy the next hour and a half. May I just remind you that there'll be time for questions and answers. We will have roaming microphones, so there will be an opportunity to put questions to Professor Davis. And equally importantly, there will be a reception afterwards at 7.30 or thereabouts, which everybody here is invited to, and I hope you will be able to join us. And more importantly, have an opportunity to interact with Professor Davis. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, Afram Khonu. It is a personal pleasure and a professional privilege for me to introduce Professor Dick Davis to you tonight. And as they say, he truly does not need an introduction. And if there is anyone in this room who is not familiar with at least half a dozen of Professor Davis's translations of Persian poetry and prose or his academic and scholarly writings, I suggest you keep this very much to yourself and set about getting hold of his books before the Monday lecture. There are very few contemporary academics whose works have had such a profound impact on shaping the paths of scholarships, informing the novices and educating the learners in the field of classical Persian literature, as has Professor Davis. He has been and remains an academic authority on the genesis and evolution of Persian poetic tradition. His style of writing in itself is utterly beautiful, accessible and peerless in terms of clarity and elegance. Richard himself, a gifted and published poet, is one of the most acclaimed translators of medieval classical Persian poetry and modern fiction. His translations of Persian poetry range from the Shahnameh, the Persian Book of Kings, Conference of the Birds, Mantoghoteir by Faridoddina Attar, done with Afghamel Darvendi, Visoramin of Fakhroddine Georgiani, borrowedware medieval Persian epigrams, and most recently Faces of Love, Hafiz and the Poetess of Shiraz, Jahan Malik Khatun and Obey de Zakani, published just this in the summer. In the field of prose, he has translated My Uncle Napoleon and has written about wine at the Persian Table under the title of from Persia to Napa, where he collaborated with Najmiah Batmang-Belige and Burke Owens. He has penned several books about the stories, sources and the themes of the Shahnameh, such as Fathers and Sons, The Lion and the Throne, Tales of Love and War, Epic and Sedition and the Legend of Syovash. And of course, not to be overlooked, are his own collections of poetry. In the distance, a kind of love selected in new poems, seeing the world, visitations, the covenant poems from 1979 to 1983, Wisdom and Wilderness, a book about the American poet Ivor Winters, and more of his own compositions, Belonging, A Trick of Sunlight, Devices and Desires, and most recently, At Home and Far From Home, poems on Iran and Persian culture. We can say, In this, his ninth book of poetry, At Home and Far From Home, he reflects on how association with Persian and Iran stares him, and he looks at himself as a traveler, translator, and for many years, an Englishman living in a country that he clearly loves, but looks at the West with suspicion. Dick Davis has taught in many institutions around the world, including Iran, where he lived for 80 years. He was Northern Arts Literary Fellow at Durham University, and then at Newcastle from 1985 to 87, has taught at the University of Santa Barbara, and he now teaches Persian at Ohio State University, or perhaps Professor Emeritus. When asked in an interview to describe the art of translation, Professor Davis replied, and I quote, I hope I've got this right, that translation is like making love. The process becomes much more pleasurable if you are in love with the object of your fascination. On your behalf, I would like to now invite Professor Davis to deliver the first of the two 2013 Jam Lectures onto whom do you beautifully belong, or whose life is it anyway? Women in Medieval Persian Poetry. Professor Davis. I would like to thank Nargis for that very foursome introduction. I don't know where she dug up some of that information, but anyway, I'm very grateful to be asked to be here to give the lecture in the Jam Lecture Series. I'm particularly grateful to Dr. Hassan Hakimiyan and Dr. Nargis Farsad for arranging for my coming here, and I hope that after that magnificent introduction you're not disappointed. In the announcement for my talks, I said that in this first session, as well as discussing the presentation of women in medieval Persian poetry, which is my main subject today, I would refer to two other topics. One is the relative commonness of women warriors in medieval Persian narratives, and this is rather anomalous. It's peculiar. They turn up all the time, and I got interested in why they might turn up. In both prose and verse, mainly in verse, but they turn up in prose as well. And the other is the ambiguous status of the gender of the beloved and the Persian khazal, which is a very technical, complicated subject. Because this latter topic, the gender of the beloved and the khazal, fits rather better with what I'm going to talk about on Monday, I have decided to leave that topic till then, but I will refer to the women warrior question today, though sort of parenthetically, it's not the main focus of my talk. I'm going to talk mainly, though not exclusively, about two 11th century narratives. One is the shanameh, which is arguably the most important 11th century narrative we have from Iran. And the other is vis and rameen, which is certainly the most important romance from the 11th century. Between the two, in fact, they really define what happened to Persian narrative poetry really from then on. The shanameh directly, vis and rameen somewhat by reaction against it, but even so, the vis and rameen's influence is comparable to that of the shanameh. The influence is more complicated in vis and rameen's case, but it's certainly there. I'll start with the shanameh. For a work that purportedly deals largely with warfare and martial heroism and the administration of royal justice and dynastic concerns, which is what the shanameh is, all these matters are traditionally assigned in fredosis period in the Catholic, masculine world, and therefore they are affairs in which women could be expected to be relegated to minor or non-existent roles. For such a work, fredosis shanameh, it contains a surprisingly large and varied cast of female characters. There are over 50, 5-0, there are over 50 women named in the poem. And this is besides those who are referred to simply as the mother of so-and-so and the daughter of so-and-so or the slave of so-and-so. And a number of these women play significant and sometimes primary roles in the narratives in which they take part. And this is surprising for an epic. The epic is probably the best word, Western word to describe the shanameh, though it does rather transcend the limits of what we usually mean by the word epic. The most obvious way in which women are implicated in the poem's narratives is their role in dynastic concerns. And here we immediately encounter a paradox. And this paradox is very important to the way that women are presented in the poem. The poem lays great stress on purity of lineage as a primary quality for a ruler. He has to be descended from the right people. And a good lineage is seen as is conventional in pre-modern texts as the sine qua non for possessing a noble and admirable character. As many of you will know, although the word parasar although it gives us the name Persia, it originally means noble. So you have to come from the right noble origin, as it were. In common with other epics, the fundamental conflict of the poem is between essential ethnicity, and here it's Persian, obviously, and other ethnicities with which it comes into contact. It might be thought, therefore, that a good lineage would mean a purely Persian lineage. But in reality, almost none of the major heroes of the legendary part of the Sholameh, which is the first half of the poem, have such a lineage. They virtually all have foreign, non-Persian mothers. This is important. It changes the way the family feeling of the poem goes forward. It changes what being Persian means, in fact, in the poem. This is true, the non-Persian mother. This is true of the major hero Rostam. His mother is part Indian and part of demonic descent. And those two tend to sort of merge with each other in the early part of the Sholameh. It's true of his son, Sofrab, whose mother comes from the border area between Persia and Central Asia, and he grows up fighting for the Central Asian army against the Persians. It's true of the prince Siavash, whose mother also comes from Central Asia, and it's true of the prince Esfandiar, whose mother comes from Ruhm, whose mother comes from Ruhm. These figures are the protagonists of the major stories of the poem's legendary section. It's also true of the number of the more admirable kings, most notably of K. Khosrow, the son of Siavash, and he is the paradigmatically good king of the poem's legendary section. His mother is also a Central Asian princess. In fact, K. Khosrow, who as I said is the paradigmatically good king, he is the noble king of Persian grandparent. The other three are from Central Asia. A number of things seem to be going on in this insistence on the foreignness of the major characters' mothers. It's possible to see the identification of the feminine with the foreign as an underlining of the alterity of women's status in the poem. In the same way that the poem is about Persia, it is about the male world of warfare. And insofar as the foreign and female intrude into the poem, it's subsumed into one another. The female and the foreign almost become identical in the legendary part of the poem. That is, the non-male and the non-Persian in a poem celebrating male values and activities from a Persian perspective are seen as a single alien entity. Some of the narratives lend oblique support to this notion. For example, the mother of the hero Rustam is both Indian and descended from a demon, as I said. Rustam is sometimes taunted by his enemies with his demonic ancestry. And there is an implication that his less noble traits and he certainly has some, his hubris, his stubbornness, his contumatiousness derive from this maternal inheritance. But for all his faults Rustam is presented as the Persian hero par excellence. The literal saviour of his country on numerous occasions and his faults whether maternally derived or not are an essential part of his character. Without them he would not be what he is. Some heroes make unequivocally misogynist remarks to and about specific foreign women. I'll give you a couple of examples. For example, Esfandia rounds on his mother, Katayun after she has advised him against a particular course of action. Katayun is from Rome, the west and says that no women can give good advice and that it is useless to consult with them. The Persian hero Bijan verbally attacks his saviour the hero in Manigé saying he doesn't trust her since no woman can keep a secret. Katayun as I said is a princess from Rome. Manigé is a central Asian Turk. Foreignness and femininity seem here to be linked and dismissed as untrustworthy. But significantly enough both Esfandia and Bijan are proved wrong in their accusations against the women who are trying to help them. Katayun's advice is correct. Esfandia's expedition which she advises him against leads to his death. Manigé is Bijan's faithful companion through all vicissitudes and Bijan's king unambiguously reproaches Bijan for his ungrateful and ungracious behaviour towards her and tells him he should make amends to her. If individual characters seem to embody or express misogyny the narratives of the poem neutralise and deny this and this always happens. Whenever women give advice in the poem I don't think there's a single exception to this statement. Whenever women give advice in the poem to a male character it is almost always rejected and the advice is almost always correct. In fact I think always correct. I say almost only because there might be one I've missed but it's a pattern that goes through the poem. As soon as some woman either a sister or a beloved or a mother tells a hero don't do that you know the hero is going to do it and you know it's going to end in disaster. The female as an aspect of the foreign and therefore as a double source of anxiety is certainly to an extent present in the poem. But the narratives often emphatic exogamy marrying out would appear to be there more for political and dynastic reasons rather than primarily as an aspect of covered female directed anxiety. As a historical chronicle that seeks to aggrandise the culture from which it springs the poem is concerned with conquest and empire and this is often symbolised by a Persian prince marrying a foreign princess. In keeping with basic patriarchal values the male partner of the marriage is seen as the dominant partner and the female is subservient. The marrying of Persian heroes or princes to foreign princesses symbolises Persian conquest or at least alliances in which the female partner's ethnicity or country is seen as acknowledging subservience to Persian hegemony. We can see this by looking at what happens when the opposite occurs. On the two occasions in the legendary part of the poem Persian princesses become the sexual partners of foreign conquerors, that is it's the other way round. The woman of the persons and the men of the foreigners. On these two occasions these are the daughters of King Jamshid are captured by the demon Kings Ahak and the daughters of King Gostasper captured by the central Asian prince Arjasp. In these two cases the relationship is presented as one of rape rather than consensual marriage and the rescue of the women in question becomes a duty of their male kinsfolk. So Persian men can marry foreign women but foreign women cannot marry Persian men. But it is possible to see this exogamy in a much more positive light, one that is less ethnocentric and male oriented and one that is I believe often born out by details of the narratives themselves. I've spent a long time with the Shana me and as some of you know I translated it which took me seven years and I've written about it extensively and the more I've studied it the more I've become with it the more I've realized what a complicated, difficult not difficult in the sense of hard to read because it goes down like honey it's extremely attractive to read but difficult to understand exactly what is going on in it. It's an extremely complex text and one of the things it does is it presents versions of the world which are contradicted by what actually happens in the poem. It does that over and over again. I think it's actually one of the reasons why the poem is so fruitful within the culture because it is so interpretable in different ways. For example, it is in some sense certainly a celebration of kingship. There's no doubt at all that the poem is a celebration of kingship but few of its kings are morally admirable and many are presented in a very unfavorable manner as either stupid or cruel or both. And in saying that it's the stupid and cruel kings who Ferdowsi spends most time describing. One king Kavuso is the stupidest king in the poem by far in the standard edition of the poem the nine volume, the oldest standard edition the nine volume, Moscow edition of the poem he takes up three volumes. He's a third of the poem just one king and he's the stupidest king in the poem. So it's the kings who don't actually come out of things very well who Ferdowsi is most interested in. Again it's a text that overtly celebrates patriarchy it certainly does but it will be difficult to find a more repossessing set of fathers gathered in one place and when fathers and sons conflict which they do frequently the reader's sympathies are almost invariably directed to be with the son. The Persian husband foreign wife Topos can be seen in a similarly ambiguous fashion. If on the one hand this can be considered as a celebration of Persian and male superiority it also functions as an unfolding of the foreign and the feminine into the heart of the Persian polity where both are celebrated and literally produce new life. It is surely significant that a number of the Persian heroes who have foreign mothers are destroyed less by confrontation with outside forces but as a result of devious actions committed by men from their own families. The feminine and foreign give birth to the poem's central heroes while the domestic and the male lead these same heroes to betrayal and violent death. This is true of the fates of Rostam, Sohrab, Esfandiar and more ambiguously but nevertheless certainly the case Siawash. I want to look for a moment at a number of stories from the legendary section of the poem in which women play a prominent role. Not surprisingly for an epic these are mainly love stories, mainly but not entirely. Now I know there are many people here, a number of people here who know the Shanameh very well but I know there are also some people here who hardly know it at all so please those of you who know it very well indulge me for a moment I'm going to tell some of these stories, I'll tell them very briefly. There is first of all the first great love poem in the story is the love story between Zal and Rudabai who are Rostam's parents and in this story Zal is a princess from Kabul Kabul in the Shanameh is always counted as part of India of course Afghanistan didn't exist when the Shanameh was written Western Afghanistan is seen as part of Iran Eastern Afghanistan is seen as part of India so she is an Indian princess and she has a demonic inheritance through her father who is descended from the demon kings Ahal. Zal is the father of Rostam and he falls in love with Rudabai who becomes Rostam's mother he is the son of Sam who is the king of Sistan which is the eastern province of Iran and the marriage is forbidden nevertheless the two marry now when the two fall in love with each other what's most interesting from the point of view of the points that I'm trying to make in this article today is that Rudabai is as much the instigator of the love affair as Zal is in fact if anything she is more the instigator Zal is interested in her but Rudabai actually sends her servant girls to invite Zal to the castle and when Zal gets to the castle she lets him into her chamber and they swear eternal love to one another and they sleep together and then after they have slept together Zal goes to his father and says for reasons we needn't go into you promised you would give me anything I wanted because you were awful to me when I was a child what I want is to marry Rudabai and his father says absolutely impossible she is a foreigner her family worships awful gods they descend it from a demon, forget it of course Zal and Rudabai do get married now the point I want to emphasise here is Rudabai's independence and Rudabai's sort of she's as much the initiator of this love affair as Zal is within the complications of the story it's quite a complicated story I don't want to go into all the details Rudabai's mother, Sindhakt plays an extraordinary part because when Rudabai's father who's called Mehrab hears of the fact that her daughter wishes to marry this Persian prince Zal and that Zal wishes to marry her and Rudabai's father goes into a flat panic because he knows if this happens the Persian king and he is in theory a kind of sub-king, a little kinglet under the Persian king the Persian king being appalled at one of his princes marrying somebody with such a dubious lineage as it were the Persian king who ordered Kabul to be destroyed and Mehrab threatens to kill his wife and his daughter in order to avert this to say it's not my fault I had nothing to do with this, please don't kill me it was my awful wife and my awful daughter look I killed them, he threatens to do this in fact Mehrab is contemptible in the story and Sindhakt saves the day, Sindhakt goes disguised as an ambassador to Sam who is Zal's father and she persuades him to go to Manichur who is the Persian king and make it possible for the two to marry Sindhakt saves the day now in both these cases both Rudabai herself the woman who marries Zal and Sindhakt the mother they are the initiators of what happens in the poem Rudabai is the initiator of the love affair Sindhakt is the initiator of the political solution to the problem which for a moment seems as if it's going to end in the destruction of Kabul the man in the case that is Mehrab the father of Rudabai is presented as a kind of panic-stricken idiot Sindhakt is a far stronger person than he is now this pattern of resourceful women achieving their ends Rudabai wants to marry Zal and she gets him Sindhakt wants to save her family and her country and she manages it this pattern of resourceful women achieving their ends often when the men folk whom one would expect to be in control of the situation fail in some way like Zal and Rudabai tale this pattern is repeated a number of times throughout the mythological legendary first half of the poem what is probably the single most admired love story in the whole poem that of Bijan and Manijé repeats the topos of the resourceful daughter like Rudabai pitted against a brutal father like Mehrab and again we have a rather ineffectual male involved although here it is the male lover it is Bijan himself who cuts a relatively poor figure he is the female protagonist Bijan is sent off to Central Asia to kill some boar a herd of wild boar who are ravaging a particular place which is called Armenia which is Armenia so he is sent off to Armenia and he kills these boar and then he hears that there is a spring festival it is the festival of Noruz at which the princesses come and they celebrate Noruz in a particularly beautiful rural spot and his companion who is a rather evil so and so says why don't you go to that rural spot and see if you can capture a nice princess in fact the companion wants him to be killed and Bijan says ok and so off he goes and he sees this beautiful girl in the distance who is Manijé who is the daughter of the king of Central Asia and he thinks oh she is nice but he just sits there Manijé sees him and she sends her nurse very like Rudabai sending her servant girls she sends her nurse she says go and bring him over here I want to see him and when she comes she compliments him and says how marvellous he is and they spend two or three days together and then she says well I've got to go home now and he says well I'll go home too and she says that's what you think and she drugs him puts him to sleep and he's put in a litter she hides him in the litter and she takes him to her father's castle and he wakes up in the castle and he realizes he's in the castle of Iran's mortal enemy and what's more he's been sleeping with the mortal enemy's daughter he's not in a good situation at all and he panics and Manijé says I'll forget it just enjoy yourself who knows what will come well what comes is that they're found out he's hauled before the king Afrosyab and Afrosyab wants to kill him at first but he's dissuaded from this and he locks him or he puts him in a deep well and he puts a great stone over the well so that Bijan can't get out and Manijé then pleads and whines and screams and he says the king is Manijé's father the king says well if you're so keen on being with him be with him you're out of the court you're not my daughter anymore you can go and be his jailer he throws her out Manijé finally gets news to Iran Rostam comes and rescues Bijan but the point I'm making is that Manijé makes all the running in this story exactly in the same way that Ruderbey and Sindokth make the running in the Zal story it's not the men who actually do the things that make the plot work it's the women who do the things that make the plot work there are other examples the most famous example perhaps and it's just one moment in the poem it's a very splendid moment is the mother of Sohrab who is Rostam's son who is Tahmine Rostam loses his horse when he's wandering around in the border area between Iran and Turan Turan is Central Asia and when he wakes up the horse disappears whilst he's asleep he throws his tracks but they peter out in a marsh and beyond the marsh is a town and he decides that his horse must have been stolen by people in the town so he goes into the town he bursts into the king's court and he says where's my horse if you don't give me back my horse I'm going to kill you all and the king says calm down we're having a nice feast have some wine don't make such a fuss who are you and Rostam tells his story he says I am Rostam I am the great hero I am this that and the other it's very like if those of you who know Othello it's very like Desdemona listening to Othello talking about his exploits and she falls in love with him listening and Tahmine who is the daughter of the king is listening to Rostam from behind the curtain and she thinks my god he's somebody then Rostam is half he's made half drunk and he's sent off to a chamber to sleep and then he's just falling asleep and he realizes that there's somebody else in his room and he says who are you and there's a servant with her with a taper and he sees this beautiful princess and she says I'm going to quote from my translation my name is Tahmine longing has torn my wretched life into though I was born the daughter of the king of Samangan and I'm descended from a warrior clan but like a legend I have heard the story of your heroic battles and your glory of how you have no fear and face alone dragons and demons and the dark unknown of how you sneak into Tehran at night and prowl the borders to provoke a fight of how when warriors see your mace they quail and feel their lion hearts within them fail I bit my lip to hear such talk and knew I longed to see you to catch sight of you to glimpse your marshal chest and mighty face and now god brings you to this lowly place if you desire me I am yours and none shall see or hear of me from this day on desire destroys my mind I long to bear within my woman's womb your sun and air now remember Rustam has lost his horse I promise you your horse if you agree since all of Samangan must yield to me so Rustam thinks well I get a nice companion for the night and I get my horse back so he moves over and he says bethah mate here we see clearly not just an equivalence of the lovers like Zal and Rudabbe, Bijan and Manje though in those cases too it's the woman who makes the running as I've been emphasising but a relationship in which the woman is unequivocally the instigator of the proceedings in fact Tahmine's coming on to Rustam in this way was considered so shocking by copyists of the poem that almost all manuscripts introduce a hastily arranged marriage at this point before the two sleep together and in the 1960s the Iranian scholar Mujtaba Minovi found out that these lines which are in almost all manuscripts are certainly an interpolation he pointed it out on stylistic grounds on the fact that they don't really fit what's going on and also on the grounds of the massive improbability of it that you know you suddenly interrupt proceedings to call in Tahmine's father and a priest in order for them to get married and then the father and the priest leaves and they get on with things and then the Florence manuscript the so-called Florence manuscript as a commentary on the Quran of all things the so-called Florence manuscript discovered in the 1970s confirmed this the lines are not in there though they have been penciled in in the margin later on by some later shocked person now in these and other love stories in the mythological legendary section of the Shana May the women act on their desires and initiate proceedings they also get what they want out of life and they get it largely on their own initiative what is significant I think many things are significant about this but I want to I want to talk about it from the point of view of the women as it were is that there is no hint whatsoever in the poem that these women's actions are to be seen as represent reprehensible rather female desire and ambition and any ingenuity and determined use to satisfy it are presented at worst neutrally with the non-committal implication of well that's how people are and at best in a positive light Rudebe, Sindok, her mother Manije and Tahmine are all clearly meant to elicit the audience's sympathy and approbation there is no fuss for example as one might expect there to be about virginity or the necessity for preserving it before marriage the satisfaction of female love longing and desire inside or outside of marriage is seen as a natural and not a reprehensible course of action Zal and Rudebe marry as eventually to Bijan and Manije though it is clear that Zal and Rudebe are married and it's also clear that Bijan and Manije do so as well and in both cases at the instigation of the woman Tahmine and Rostam as we saw simply sleep together at Tahmine's instigation and they never marry despite the interpolated bit in the manuscripts if female desire entails social risk which it does in all these tales it is still presented as understandable and possessed of its own glamour and justification now I see I'm I don't want to overrun my time and I have an awful lot to say I'm going to skip a bit there are some stories in which women do not appear in a love story though they're relatively rare in the Shalame but there are some the most famous perhaps is Rostam, sorry, Sofrab's Sofrab's encounter with a female warrior called Gordofarid Gordofarid is a warrior from Iran and Sofrab who is the son of Rostam Central Asia leading a Central Asian army to attack Iran he is confronted by this female warrior Gordofarid who presents herself as a warrior and he can't see that she's a woman at first and they begin to fight and her helmet gets knocked off and her hair streams out and he realises it's a woman that he's fighting and she begins to taunt him and to say come on you can't beat a woman what kind of a warrior are you and he gets annoyed and in his annoyance he becomes the kind of flustered warrior and she gets away from him, she tricks him and then she climbs up on the battlements of the town which she disappears into and he's stuck outside the walls and she climbs up on the battlements and taunts him and tells him to run away because the great hero Rostam will come and kill him if he hangs around again, that's an example of a woman giving somebody advice which he ignores and then it happens there's one other great example of a female warrior too in the Shahnameh which very few people know about because most people don't read the second half of the poem which I admit is far less entrancing than the first half but it does contain some fabulous stories and that hero is a woman called Gordier who is also presented as a warrior and in many ways Gordier is the most complex female character in the poem and at least that part of the second part of the poem is well worth reading for the portrait of Gordier she is the brother of Bahram Chubin and in the histories that were written before the Shahnameh there are a number of them she is unequivocally also Bahram Chubin's wife this brother-sister marriage was very common in the Persian royal and aristocratic families and it occurs a lot in pre-Islamic stories taken from pre-Islamic Iran as we'll see in a moment it occurs in Beeson Ramin too the poem almost begins with the brother-sister marriage Ferdowsi was clearly embarrassed by this because he excises that from the poem and in fact there are other moments where Ferdowsi has to record what we marriage is that we would regard as incestuous and that Islam of course regards as incestuous and Ferdowsi himself clearly did and he clearly gets embarrassed about it at one point he actually has to put it in because it's necessary to the plot and he has a couple of lines in which he says they did it according to the custom called Pahlavi that is washing his hands with nothing to do with me that's what they did then now there's a moment about this woman Maria question which has fascinated me recently both Sohrab and Sam Sam is the man the father of Zal who Sindokht goes to to kind of save the political situation when Mehrab her husband fears that Kabul is going to be overrun with Persian warriors and destroyed both Sohrab and Sam are surprised to find that they're opponent as a woman but the poet doesn't register the same surprise on his own or his audience's behalf the Gordoff read should fight in this way is presented as somehow natural and since her skill as a warrior is emphasized the implication is that she has undergone extensive martial training now you might think that's an interesting one off but it isn't this instance of a woman Maria who has been trained as such is not a tall unique in Persian 11th century texts for example the heroines of the 11th century verse romances Vah-Meghan Azra and Varghay and Golshar are both warriors Vah-Meghan Azra we only have fragments of but in one of the fragments it says that not only is she a warrior Azra is the woman it means virgin most of you know that but for those of you who didn't Azra we are told in this fragment is not only a warrior she is the commander of her father's armies and in Varghay and Golshar which we have the whole poem they're both warriors Azra has been specifically trained to be the commander of her father's troops in battle and Golshar kills one man in hand-to-hand combat and another when he threatens her lover and again the lover is a bit like Bijan the lover is a bit of a wimp compared with the woman who's the real kind of force in the relationship Persian medieval prose romances also contain a number of female warriors for example in the Darab-Name the women in question are Homa'i and Boran-Dokht in Samakah-Eyar a absolutely wonderful prose romance they are Sokh-Vard Arban-Dokht and Ruz-Afsun and in the Abu-Muslim-Name they are Majlis-Afruz, Bibi-Seti and Ruh-Afzai at first sight we seem to be dealing here with the Persian equivalent of the Amazon Topos and a number of scholars have said this but there is a crucial difference between the Persian treatment of this theme and the way it is presented in Greek material and in most subsequent European medieval and Renaissance texts in Greek and later European texts the female warrior is normally from an alien culture indeed in Greek texts the fact that there is such a thing as a female warrior at all implies something profoundly weird and un-Greek about the culture in question but in Persian medieval texts including the Shoname the female warriors who appear are Persian that is from the point of view of the poem they are one of us and the existence of a female warrior does not imply an incomprehensible exoticism as it almost invariable does in European texts it is perhaps significant that most medieval Persian texts which involve female warriors can be shown to have pre-Islamic roots the one exception is the Abu Muslim Naame but in fact the Abu Muslim Naame despite the fact that it is about an Islamic subject does seem to have an awful lot of pre-Islamic motifs in it and my own feeling is that the female warriors in the Abu Muslim Naame despite the fact that it is a poem about an Islamic subject that that particular motif comes from pre-Islamic folk narratives and the fact that the legendary tales of the Shoname in particular these stories seem to have been drawn mainly from Parthian that is north-eastern Iranian sources the legendary stories of Iran of the Shoname are almost certainly Parthian in origin they are full of Parthian names for example and the geography of them is Parthia it is not the part of Iran it is a part of Iran it isn't now part of Iran it is central Asia, it is around the Oksius it is that area the kind of central a province of Iran farce is not mentioned in the legendary poems at all except for one instance which is clearly a kind of reading back into the poem from a later time so the legendary stories in Parthian this is pretty well established by the Iranian scholar Mehdat Bahar who was the son of the poet Nouria Bahar Bahar and also a student for a while at London University a very long time ago and one of the great scholars of pre-Islamic Iran these stories seem to have been drawn mainly from Parthian north-eastern sources this raises the possibility that in some of the perhaps nomadic tribes of this area there may in sobal reality have been female warriors at some stage of the tribe's historical development and in fact in nomadic tribes there is not this strict division between what women do and what men do both tend to do everything just for kind of practical purposes it's very difficult if you're on the move for the women to be secluded for example I would like to mention a couple of historical tidbits here though I'm no historian this is all secondary from things I've read one is that graves of female warriors are well attested from Scythian burial sites in some such sites up to 20% of the skeletons buried with weapons indicating warrior status are of women now the Parthians are usually assumed to be a branch of Scythian culture in fact the old name for the Parthians was the Saka and the name Sistan of that particular province was originally Sakaistan the place of the Saka that is the place of the Parthians Sistan then went far north of where it now goes it went sort of up into Central Asia now it's much closer to the Gulf if we go further back we find that Greek and Latin literature contains a number of references to female warriors being present in Persian armies these can be found in Herodotus, Plutarch and Cirtius Rufus the most spectacular reference is that of the price of the queen and admiral Artemisia at the Battle of Salamis now this is almost certainly historical this is almost certainly not story at which Xerxes said that she this admiral and queen that she fought better than all his male sea captains put together in fact there's a very complicated detailed description of her fighting in Herodotus the survival of the motive of motif of female warriors in works which derive from pre-Islamic Persian narratives may well be I think a trace memory of a historical reality rather than a male fantasy about landish and unnatural aggression which is how it tends to be presented in western texts but I want to return to the shaname the positive image of women as individuals who exercise considerable autonomy in their choice of lovers and life partners and are able to direct the course of their own lives more or less as they wish this image this is important I think it virtually disappears after the advent of Alexander the Great that is with the advent of history as soon as we stop the legendary part when we come into history the whole image of women changes utterly in the poem they become completely different and they are admired for different things and they are condemned for many of the things they have been admired for in the legendary stories the second half of the poem is virtually all concerned with the Sasanian kings the Salucids who came after Alexander are not mentioned and the Parthenian kings are skated over in a few pages almost immediately we get into the Sasanians the presentation of female roles in the Sasanian half of the shaname is arguably more complex and detailed than in the earlier tales but also paradoxically enough much more predictable certainly it tends to be less engaging for a contemporary reader or perhaps for any reader and often though there are one or two notable exceptions to this Gaudier is the great exception it's less aesthetically compelling the stories are just less beautifully put together they don't grab you in the same way the predictability and complexity can perhaps best be illustrated by quoting a speech made by the young Sasanian prince Bahram Ghur when he finally became king gained the reputation of being one of the most hedonistic of all Persian monarchs he spends an awful time sleeping with people and in fact there's one very funny speech in which his prime minister starts grumbling and says he spends so much time on sex that I'm sure he's going to die of weakness in a year or two and he won't be able to defend the country and so on and so forth Bahram is brought up by an Arab called Monser who acts as a surrogate father to him and one day the adolescent prince addresses his guardian as follows you are a noble well-intentioned man but you hem me in with your excessive care and constant worry everyone we see has some secret sorrow that turns his face yellow with grief and a free man's health is revived by pleasure so allow me this one further pleasure then the pleasure that cures all pains whether he is a prince or a warrior a young man finds comfort and happiness with women they are the foundation of our faith comfort, happiness faith and they guide young men toward goodness and a spiritual guide have now think of all that comfort, happiness, faith guide us towards goodness have five or six beautiful slave girls as splendid as the sun brought here so that I can buy one or two of them I have been thinking to that I should have children if I had a child that would bring me some comfort and the king would be pleased and the men would praise me for it it's not clear whether the complicated incongruousness of this speech for a modern reader women make us more moral so buy me some slave girls think about that was also an incongruity for the author perhaps but then again perhaps not now women are here primarily regarded as adjuncts to men's psychological and sensual well-being they are not there as an end in themselves they are there for men they may be morally ennobling they may exist to provide physical comfort or they may produce children but their function is to serve men this is basically the view of women that the second half of the poem espouses or at least that its characters tend to espouse and the poet doesn't seem to withdraw from it so we have a completely different view of what women are for as it were in the first half of the poem and in the second part of the poem they are there for themselves they are an end in themselves if we want to invoke Kant that is they are sort of there they are an ethical reality who have to be taken as such in the second half of the poem they are there to aid men to be better to provide men with comfort and to provide men with children if one had to sum up in one sentence and I've got lots of examples of this but I haven't got time if one had to sum up in one sentence the poem and those of its historical section it would be that the women of the former section generally succeed in confronting the world on their own terms whereas the women of the latter section virtually always fail if they attempt to do this and most of them do not even make the attempt being content to live within a male shadow either a father's or a husband's one another point also worth making is that the named women in the legendary part of the poem are almost all non-Iranians but as brides and mothers they are welcomed into the Iranian polity when foreign women appear in the second half of the poem they are much less welcome miscegenation is now regarded with deep suspicion and that the Prince Hormuzd for example has a central Asian mother and the Prince Shirui has a Byzantine mother is seen in each case as a distinct negative that kind of thing was not seen as a negative in the legendary part a courtier called Simaia Borzin that is in Turkish this man descended from Turks is not worthy of the throne no one wants him from king as a king and it's because of his foreign descent that doesn't matter in the first half of the poem Khosro Parviz describes his son Shirui as bad gohar that is of evil lineage and it's clear from the context that it is the boy's mother's non-person lineage to which he's referring since this child of evil in lineage was born from his mother the implicit preference in the historical section is for emphatic endogamy rather than exogamy marrying within the family although Ferdowsi is clearly embarrassed by the pre-Islamic laws that encourage marriages within the immediate family as is evident from his treatment of the daughter-father Homo'i-Bahman relationship and the way that he glosses over something earlier historians unequivocally recorded which I've already mentioned that Gaudier was married to her brother Homo'i-Bahman women in the second half of the poem they seem to fit the expectations of the medieval period in which Ferdowsi is writing women in the first half of the poem represent an either fantastic or real very different kind of image of the role of women which is much more independent it's much more decisive they have much more autonomy when they do things they get what they want and when they give advice they're always right that's not the case in the second half of the poem but I'm going to have to do it very briefly because of time about how much time you have I think another 10 minutes we're not having drinks still half-past leave 15 minutes for questions 10 more minutes I would like to turn now to the major romance of the 11th century a work written some 40 years after the completion of the Shana May this is Gourgani's Vis and Ramine I will admit that this is a work with which I am besotted I read this poem sort of almost by chance I got interested in something which involved my reading Vis and Ramine and I read it and I don't think I've ever fallen in love fallen in love with a poem with such a kind of it was a coup d'etre it just hit me over the head I was just I just thought this is one of the greatest poems I've written I still believe that it is an extraordinary poem it's not very well known in Iran it's known as a poem people know that it exists and people know that its rhetoric was very influential in the development of the rhetoric of the romance in Iran which it was but very few people read it it's not generally read and it's thought to be a very immoral poem in fact in the 19th century the word Vis was synonymous with whore Vis is the heroine of the poem but it is I believe it's certainly in my opinion the greatest Persian romance I've written and I know that there are a lot of partisans of Nezami in this room I do think it's a more interesting romance than anything by Nezami but that's not a popular opinion in my opinion it's one of the really great romances of the world I'll very briefly give you the plot it's a complicated plot so I'll really simplify it at the beginning of the poem there is a woman called Shahru who is the guest of a king called Mubad Mubad really fancies her and he says I would like to marry you or have you as my mistress and she says don't be silly I'm already married and I have sons and let me marry your daughter and she says I have no daughters I have no daughters because any daughter you have will be fabulously beautiful I have no daughters but if I have one and she thinks that she's too old to have a daughter if I have one I will give her to you he says okay so they swear to this in fact it's written they write it out and of course she gets pregnant and has a daughter who is Vis Vis grows up with a nurse fabulously described I'll talk about the nurse in a moment she grows up with this with the nurse and she also grows up as a playmate of a young prince called Ramin but when Ramin is 10 they are separated they're about the same age although Vis's exact age isn't given but they're clearly about the same age so they've been childhood playmates together and then they're separated when Ramin is 10 when Vis becomes an adolescent her mother marries her off to her brother and Vis is the mother's daughter this is common this was common in Zoroastrian royal families this always horrifies people and when I say this the room always goes dead silent which it has now but what one should look at if you're bothered about this is a Sasanian law book called the Book of a Thousand Judgements which has been translated into English and it has inheritance laws which is the children of brother sister marriages of father daughter marriages and there is one inheritance law and this shows how rare this was because there's only one and there are a number in the other circumstances there is one inheritance law for the children of mother son marriages which is obviously much rarer just for biological reasons but apparently it did happen sometimes so she marries Vis off to her brother who is called Viru at this point that's the guy who she had promised Vis to if she were ever born Mobad's brother appears demanding that Vis be sent to Mobad as his bride and there is a war and Vis's father is killed or a battle and Vis's father is killed and Mobad then bribes Shahrou with money and the amount of the gifts that he gives Shahrou to hand over Vis Vis tries to hide but she's captured and she's handed over to Mobad well she's handed over actually to Mobad's other brother not the one who came demanding her but his younger brother who is Ramin so Ramin has to take Vis to his older brother to whom she was promised before she was born and of course he falls in love with her and he falls absolutely desperately, hopelessly in love with her but she's taken to Mobad and she hates Mobad he's much older than she is of course he is, he wanted to marry her mother he's far old and she says I hate old age I don't want anything to do with it I'm not going to have anything to do with this awful man and she gets her nurse and the nurse says don't worry I know magic, I will make a talisman and we will bury this talisman and as long as this talisman is there and she makes a talisman of a man and a woman who are bound together by copper and as long as they are bound together you can sleep with other women but you won't be able to sleep with you and she says great do it so this is done and so Vis does not sleep with Mobad Ramin meanwhile is desperately in love with Vis and he can't get anywhere near her so he suborns the nurse he says to the nurse tell Vis tell Vis, tell Vis and the nurse says forget it there's no way, no I mean she's already pining for her brother who she lost and now she's married to this awful old man but she certainly doesn't want a third person in her life anyway there's an awful lot of that and finally the nurse agrees to work on Vis and she works on Vis and it's about a third of the poem her working on Vis Vis finally agrees to see him that's it of course they're in love it's all over them on both sides they're in love and the rest of the poem is the ways that they're separated they're brought together the king tries to kill them they run away and so on and so forth the poem ends happily with them as king and queen and they reign for a hundred years and they have very successful sons who rule the world, very nice now I really am running out of time so the best way I think to this poem is really a poem about women there's one paragraph I do want to read you and then I'm just going to read you a couple of speeches by the women so you can see what feisty women they are and I will stop we can say that Vis and Ramin is very much a woman's poem I think it's unique among medieval Persian narratives it really is there is no other medieval Persian narrative that I'm aware of that puts women at the center of the story in this way in that the women characters in it are in general far more vividly and memorably portrayed than other male counterparts and given this it's not surprising that women more or less completely dominate and direct the unfolding of the narrative if we take the lovers themselves for example it's clear that Vis the woman is a far more interesting complex self-divided character the woman is her male counterpart Ramin who is something of a cipher when set beside her if we look at Vis's family it is her mother and not her father whom we see in various important scenes at the poems opening who makes all the important family decisions that generate the plot it's the mother Shahruh who promises Vis to Mubad it's Shahruh who tells Vis to marry her brother Viru and then she herself marries the two saying they needn't bother to bring a priest to perform the ceremony she marries the two herself it's Shahruh who is bribed into handing Vis over to Mubad Vis's father is absent from all these scenes we never hear him speak and in fact he is conveniently killed off fairly early in the poem and then there is Vis's nurse who seems an extraordinary creation for such a time and place one of the things I've got interested in is there is I hope I don't annoy any nationalists here by saying this but it seems to be obviously true there is a clear relationship between Hellenistic literature and medieval personal literature they use the same motifs they use the same rhetoric and the same metaphors there is clearly some kind of connection between the two though I think it's more complicated than just a simple influence from one to the other because the Hellenistic romances themselves are full of Persian stuff and in fact the poetic style of late antiquity in the West was called the Asian style and the Asians for the Greeks and the Romans meant the Persians so it was known as the Persian style so this style which we see in Hellenistic literature and then in early medieval Persian literature was seen in the West as a Persian style anyway but it was also the style of Hellenistic literature so there is a connection and if we look at Vis's nurse she is terribly like the nurse in Greek and Roman comedy she's a kind of amoral fixer of things and for a western audience she's most like the nurse in Romeo and Juliet she's terribly like the nurse in Romeo and Juliet who is also an amoral fixer of things and also if you know Troilus and Crusade by choice she's like Pandoras she's a character who's given anything like as much stature in the poem as are the women as Vis's second husband Moabad and his chief role is to be her foil okay I'm just going to read a couple of speeches the first time that Vis speaks this is Vis's very first speech this is when she finds out that her mother had promised her to Moabad before she was even born she hasn't been told this and then she finds it out on her wedding day Moabad's from Moabad saying this woman belongs to us, give her to us and Vis turns to her mother and says what the hell what's this about and her mother says well you know I'm sorry and this is the first time we hear Vis speak Vis saw her silent mother turning pale like one who senses falter and then fail and shouted what's this where was your good sense where were your wisdom and intelligence I tell you you have done an evil thing in promising your daughter to this king this what you can do wisdom you say the whole world laughs at you that's the first time Vis speaks she is clearly not a woman to be trifled with there's a wonderful speech when or it's not a speech actually it describes the internal discussion in Vis's heart the first time she sees Romine and she really desires him she wants him, she feels herself falling in love with him but she feels for God's sake you can't relate twice you can't do this and this internal dialogue is beautifully presented I'm going to read that and then there's lots more I'd like to read but we haven't time Vis gazed at him and you would say she saw her soul's perfection there without a flaw and as she looked to the love she'd lavished on Viru her brother was instantaneously gone and then she asked herself how would it be oh heart what more should I expect of you when you so easily forget Viru I'm here without my mother and my brother why should I feed love's fire now for another I cannot bear the loneliness I feel how long I've suffered I'm not made of steel I will submit then since I won't discover a finer man than this to be my lover these were her thoughts and with a heartfelt sigh she thought of all the days that had gone by but took good care that she did not reveal what had begun to feel she turned now to her nurse and said Ramine is just as you described I've never seen a finer man he's handsome and it's true he's very similar to Prince Viru but he won't get what he desires I might be like the moon dear nurse but this moon's light won't shine on him I have no desire that he or I should undergo such misery for me I don't want shame and degradation for him I don't want longing and frustration I wish him well and may he go in peace and never give another thought to Vis what she outwardly says and what she inwardly feels are completely different but when she came down from the upper floor she could not see the sunlight anymore it's a fabulous image the world goes dark before her eyes the demon love before Vis could depart had sunk his poison claws within her heart and quickly from her heart and face he stole colour and strength and wisdom from her soul at times her fancies took her by surprise and conquered her and blinded reason's eyes at times she'd think my cruelest enemy would not desire a nastier fate for me and then it's not as though no woman's ever thought love was worth her serious endeavour and if it's love for someone who's as fine as Prince Ramin why shouldn't he be mine but then shame drove desire away and made her feel she should be cautious and afraid and this back and forth goes on for a long time I'll stop but this celebration of female desire which is similar to but much more extendedly treated as a man in the legendary stories of the Charneau May is something which disappears from the Persian romance pretty well the poem is really remarkable there's a lot I'd love to say about Vis but we don't have time the poem is really remarkable for its frank celebration of female sexuality and indeed of woman's whole bodily carnal existence now Grogani is a man and this is obviously an act of imaginative empathy on his part but it is a really extraordinary act of imaginative empathy that presents this woman's inner life and not only her inner life but her bodily life as well for example it's the only medieval Persian poem or medieval any poem that I know of which describes menstruation and it does it without either prurience or disgust it's just given as a fact the reality of woman's kind of physical and mental existence is something which Grogani has really kind of as I say it's an act of extreme imaginative empathy and it's very moving to read it's extraordinarily beautifully done now we contrast this with later developments in the poems of Nezami which I wanted to talk about at some length but there isn't time in the poems of Nezami the romances of Nezami who is the great romance writer of Persian I know I accept that he's a wonderful author but the women are there really as the women were there for Bahrongur they are there to provide they are there are spiritual guides like the women who Bahrongur meets in the Haft Pekar and like Shirin in Khosrow and Shirin they are there to elevate to improve the spiritual state of the man who is at the centre of the poem the women are there to serve to make better the men now they do make the men better they are not there to sort of subvert the men and drag them down to hell and lust and awfulness like that they make the women better and in that way Nezami has been presented as kind of the friend of women in Persian poetry and he is he's very tender towards his women but the women are finally there for the sake of the moral improvement of the hero the hero is what they are there for in Visaramin the women are there for themselves and the hell with the hero or the hero is quite secondary the men are secondary the same in the legendary stories of the Shana Men and then when we get to Jami who is in the 15th century the women in fact become this stereotypical snare they represent the body which drags one away from the spirit in both Yusuf and Zuleika and Salaman and Absal there is a real horror of female sexuality in fact both the heroes run away from women who are trying to sleep with them and the women are presented as kind of voracious and destroying it's very difficult to read Nezami's narratives and not to feel that he's profoundly misogynist in fact so a genre which begins in Persian as a celebration of the flesh and his desires and the female sexuality in Gorgani by the time we get to Jami it has become a way of transcending the flesh and its desires and the condemnation of female sexuality which it seems to me is not a very good development but I think it's the case