Foremost Champion of the Shahnameh
Rostam is the supreme champion of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, son of Zal, lord of Sistan and Zabulistan, and the Kabul princess Rudaba. Too huge to be born by ordinary labor, he came into the world by a cesarean cut taught by the Simurgh; as an infant he ate for five, and grown he stood like a mountain. He alone could master the rose-dappled stallion Rakhsh, wore the tiger-skin cuirass called the babr-e bayan into battle, and swung an ox-headed mace no other man could lift. As the Tahamtan, the mighty-bodied one, he shored up the throne of Persia through the reigns of king after king.
His most famous exploit is the Haft Khan, the Seven Trials: when King Kay Kavus rashly invaded Mazandaran and his whole army was blinded and imprisoned by the sorcery of the White Div, Rostam rode alone through seven stations of peril — Rakhsh killing a lion while his master slept, a waterless desert, a dragon, a witch, the demon captain Arzhang — until he tore the White Div apart in its mountain cave and restored the army's sight with the blood of its liver. Tragedy shadowed him no less than glory: in the wars with Turan he killed his own unrecognized son Sohrab in single combat, and in old age his half-brother Shaghad lured him onto a pit floored with upturned blades, where the dying hero drew his bow one last time and shot his betrayer through the tree he hid behind. His legend circulated in Sistan long before Ferdowsi — a Sogdian fragment already names him — and Matthew Arnold's poem of 1853 carried his story into English letters.
