Omar Khayyam as a Frame Story

The literary-critical approach to Omar Khayyam (d. 1131) has gone through several cycles. His introduction to the English-speaking audience by Edward Fitzgerald created a legend around him and established him in the academic canon of medieval Persian literature. In the early twentieth century, however, historical-critical methodology was brought to bear and it was discovered that early biographical dictionaries and mentions of Khayyam by his contemporaries and for 300 years after his death made little mention of his poetry. Fitzgerald’s main manuscript source was from 1460, and is still the earliest exemplar. The Rubaiyat or quatrains attributed to Khayyam are probably not actually by the astronomer of Nishapur. Rather, his legend became a convenient hook upon which to hang irreverent, skeptical or libertine quatrains, likely contributed by a whole host of authors over time. Indeed, the quatrains attributed to Khayyam grew mightily through history, so that the Cambridge scholar E. H. Whinfield gathered up over 500 in the late 19th century, from six major manuscripts and printed sources (from Iran and India), for his critical edition and translation. The cult of authorship that drove twentieth-century conceptions of the “canon,” however, was never appropriate to the study of medieval literature, in which unattributed borrowing and difficult-to-disprove attributions are common. Michel Foucault critiqued the notion of authoriality in toto, showing it a modern conception and one fairly easily deconstructed. This study approaches the oeuvre of quatrains attributed to Khayyam as a trove of material for a kind of secular mentalité, sedimented over centuries. Literary studies of The Thousand and One Nights have explored the conceit of the frame story, wherein tales were grouped around the dilemma of Scheherazade, and i will argue that Omar Khayyam as irreverent rogue is a similar frame story. I ask what function the ascription of authoriality to them played, in giving them authority and popularity for millions of reciters and singers through the ages, such that the people continued to deploy them even in period of Muslim puritanism.