CivilWar’s Reviews > Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings > Status Update

I remember when I first read the Šāhnāma I was so disappointed bc it had none of the nuance, detail or psychological depth of Homer, but then I learned Avestan & Iranian theologies, Zoroastrian & of the Scythians and co, as well as how epic transpositions works and the countless ways IE storytellers went abt it so when I returned I went "holy shit Ferdowsi is a genius actually just in a different way than Homer lmao"

anyway with the Sekandar arc done, we are out of the realm of legend (the Sekandar anime arc being only 1% history, 99% a mix of more epic transposition as everything that preceded it (sans Darius III as the hapless opponent of Alexander) + Ferdowsi's rewrite of the the Alexander Romance lmao), reaching the Parthian Period, I will brush up on Parthian history before continuing or there'd be no point

Sekandar (=Alexander The Great) is literally just a transposed Freyr (yes, from Germanic mythology), it's actually crazy how Freyr-like Ferdowsi has made him - from the Zoroastrian texts he was using as a source, the natural conclusion is that he is a transposition of Haᵘrvatāt, the structural equivalent to Freyr's place in the Germanic pantheon (it adds up because Homay = Freyja and Dārāb = Njördr too, all in order)

It's been frozen at this point for a minute lmao but also I've read the first arc of the Shahnameh anime, the Pishdadian Dynasty arc, so many fucking times by now that I can't even count it by memory anymore lmao