Rostam and Sohrab

This is the most celebrated tragic episode of the Shahnameh. Hunting near the border, Rostam spent a night in Samangan and married the princess Tahmina; at parting he left a jewel token — bind it in a daughter's hair, or on a son's arm. The boy Sohrab grew up in Turan with his father's strength and precocity, and formed a grand design while still a youth: to find the father he had never seen, overthrow the unworthy kings of both lands, and rule the world beside him. Afrasiyab, king of Turan, saw the danger and set his trap: he sent Sohrab to invade Iran at the head of an army, and ordered his men to keep Rostam's identity hidden, hoping father and son would destroy each other unknowing.

The snare closed step by step. Before the armies, Sohrab asked every prisoner for Rostam and was put off with lies, while Rostam entered the field with his name concealed. They met in single combat day after day: in the wrestling, the youth threw the old champion and raised his blade, but Rostam talked his way free with an invented rule that a champion's life could be taken only at the second fall; at the next encounter Rostam hurled Sohrab down with his last strength and drove a dagger between his ribs without pause. Dying, the young man said he had come only to find his father Rostam, and bared the jewel bound on his arm. The broken hero sent riders to King Kay Kavus begging the royal elixir nushdaru; the suspicious king delayed, and Sohrab was dead before it could come. Ferdowsi opens the tale with a sigh: the killing was a sudden storm snapping an unripe orange from the bough. Matthew Arnold retold it in his 1853 poem Sohrab and Rustum, whose closing lines on the river Oxus became a famous elegiac passage of English verse.