Ferdowsi spent a lifetime forging the Persian Book of Kings
Abu al-Qasim Ferdowsi (940–1025) composed the Shahnameh, among the longest epics by a single poet and the core of Persian literary identity. A landowner from near Tus, he worked on it for over three decades, finishing on 8 March 1010 after a change of dynasty upended his patronage.
He was born in the village of Paj near Tus, in today's northeastern Iran, into the dehqans, a landed gentry that had thrived under the pre-Islamic Sasanians and saw itself as guardian of old Iranian lore, including tales of legendary kings. Beyond his kunya, Abū al-Qāsim, and his pen name Firdawsī, meaning of paradise, nothing about his name is certain; Persian sources often add the title Hakim, philosopher. He married a woman of his own class and lost a son at 37, whom he mourned in an elegy set into the epic.
He grew up under the Samanids, a local dynasty that claimed Sasanian descent, ran its government in New Persian and patronised poets such as Rudaki and Daqiqi. Around 977 Ferdowsi took up the Book of Kings where Daqiqi, murdered by his slave, had stopped, drawing on a prose Shahnameh compiled for the governor of Tus. The Samanid prince Mansur supported him, and a first version was done in the mid-990s.
Then the Turkic Ghaznavids toppled the Samanids, and Ferdowsi reworked passages to flatter Sultan Mahmud. How well Mahmud rewarded him is disputed and has spawned legends, including a satire against the sultan attributed to the poet. Late sections swing between complaints of age, poverty, illness and grief and happier moods.
The epic ties pre-Islamic Iran to its Islamic successor and bears traces of Zoroastrian, Zurvanite, Manichaean and Mithraic ideas, though Ferdowsi was a Shia Muslim. Scholars following Nöldeke see him as a monotheist loyal to his ancestors, with a fatalism perhaps inherited from Sasanian Zurvanism. He prized wisdom as the root of all good, and his poem became a heritage for Persians, Turks and Indians alike.
Source: Ferdowsi
