What Can Medieval Persian Folk Narratives in Prose Tell Us about the Poetic Canon(s)?

In scholarly literature the mediaeval Persian folk narratives in prose are variously defined as folk stories as popular romances, or as heroic novels. For lack of a better option, I adopt the emic definition of dāstān as their genre designation. Dāstāns are capacious fictional prose narratives with branching plots, which relate the heroic-romantic adventures of their eponymous heroes, often with a religious, Islamic emphasis. Their composition and transmission are connected with the institution of professional or semiprofessional storytellers (muḥaddithūn, qiṣṣa-khvānān or naqqālān). Notwithstanding the importance of dāstāns for a better understanding of the evolution of medieval Persian narrative writing, as well as of the issue of orality and the interplay between the oral and the written, their research has long been an academic backwater in the study of mediaeval Persian literature, first and foremost because of the evaluative and hierarchical approaches to literature still prevalent in the field. Dāstāns are usually perceived as not sufficiently sophisticated, if not outright primitive, ostensibly lacking the complexity and refinement of classical Persian poetry and prose. The paper aims to show the importance of this genre as an integral part of the literary system of mediaeval Persian literature by examining verse insertions authored by various poets and found in some of the dāstāns compiled (or copied) before the tenth/sixteenth century (e.g., Samak-i ʿayyār, Fīrūzshāh-nāma, Abū Muslim-nāma). The statistical and qualitative analysis of the corpus of verse insertions will highlight: (1) the predilection for specific poets; (2) the differentiation within the corpus of the poetry of individual poets (e.g., among the poems of Niẓāmī’s Khamsa), which usually remains imperceptible behind the laudatory, but all too general stances of the tadhkiras; (3) the patterns of insertion and the function of the inserted poetry in folk narratives versus, for instance, the often prosimetric ornamental prose (nathr-i fannī). This investigation will help to assess the reception of particular poets in the periods when specific dāstāns were compiled and/or copied; as such, it will enhance our knowledge of the nature and make-up of poetic canon(s) and the mechanisms of their formation as time- and place-sensitive entities, as reflected in mediaeval folk literature.