Burning Bright: Monsters, Back-stories, and Rostam's Babr-e Bayan

Rostam’s iconic garment, the babr-e bayān, is referenced throughout the hero’s story in the Shāhnāmeh, and acquired a distinctive visual representation in later illuminations. But the story of how Rostam acquired the coat through a youthful act of monster-slaying exists only in later versions, incorporated into classical works including the Shāhnāmeh and Farāmarznāmeh but bearing the marks of other eras and narrative-poetic styles. This paper seeks to compare different versions of the Dāstān-e Babr-e Bayān, exploring both why poets were drawn to narrate this episode and how their versions reflect thematic concerns including masculinity, the natural world, and India. While a handful of Persian-language articles have explored this subject, their focuses have tended towards the etymological and an attempt to establish the suit’s linguistic and mythological origins. In addition to offering a contribution in English, this study aims to re-orient discussion towards literary representations of Rostam’s acquisition of the garment. Though ostensibly a suit of armor, the babr-e bayān is (as its name suggests) linked to animal skins, particularly those of big cats. In the sources, however, these predators become interchangeable with both dragon-like and demon-like beasts, complicating the symbolic fields typically ascribed to each of these categories. Rostam’s destruction of this monster is woven into coming-of-age narratives that emphasize Oedipal conflict and sexual awakening, consciously drawing on tropes from the core Shāhnāmeh narrative while altering them into a novel (if occasionally less refined) form. Metatextually, the seemingly late production of these texts reflect both an ongoing interest in creative intervention in classical works and, more specifically, the desire to account for Rostam’s iconographic idiosyncrasies. Drawing on the research of scholars including Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh and Marjolijn van Zutphen, contemporary theories of monstrosity and fan-fiction, as well as originally manuscript work, this paper takes a multi-faceted approach to a set of rarely-discussed texts that nonetheless represent an integral part of the Shāhnāmeh’s legacy.