The Book: The Man in the Panther's Skin
The Author: Shot'ha Rust'haveli, sometime in the twelfth century
This text: etext of a 1912 translation by Marjory Scott Wardrop
Price: $3.76 (Amazon Digital Services)
So lets talk about the Knight in the Panther's Skin.
Avt'handil
We first meet Avt'handil, who is in love with the King of Arabia, T'hinat'hin, daughter of the Old King Rostevan. (For clarity: T'hinat'in is not a Queen, but a King in her own right, much like King T'hamara of Georgia, Rust'haveli's patron. T'hamara comes in for some fulsome praise in the introductory verses.) Avt'handil is generalissimo of Arabia and does not wear a panther skin. One day while out hunting, Rostevan and Avt'handil come across a knight who does wear a panther skin. This knight murders several of their servants and disappears without talking to anyone. The mystery of this mysterious figure torments the Old King, so the Young King sends Avt'handil on a quest to find out.
Avt'handil quests for three years, and is just about to give up and go home, when he meets three bandits (or, two bandits and a corpse) who have just been beaten up by an uncommunicative man wearing a panther skin.
Tariel
Avt'handil finds the figure in a cave, along with a maidservant. He asks the knight for his story, so that he may return to his King and, desperately, his King. The knight, Tariel, spins his tale of woe: he was the foster son of the King of India and generalissimo, and he fell in love with the King's daughter, Nestan-Daredjan. He fell so much in love with her that he took to his bed, overcome with weeping and swooning, until a message from his bloodthirsty beloved tells him through her maidservant Asmat'h, that he can better prove his love by conquering the neighbouring lands. Which he does.
"Seriously, what's this weeping and swooning shit? Go and kill someone."Victorious, Tariel returns home, where the King asks his opinion on who should marry his daughter. Since the princess is cloistered with her Aunt until such time as she be married, Tariel is reluctant to admit that he has met her, and instead says, "Uh, I dunno," leading to the King nominating a Persian Prince. This distresses both the Princess and the generalissimo, who conclude that the only reasonable course of action is murder.
"I shall kill him and his entire army!"When asked to explain his murderous rampage, Tariel says, "I just didn't want a foreigner to sit on the throne which is mine by right as your foster son, it has nothing to do with your daughter, haha, how ridiculous, how could I possibly be in love with your daughter?" The King nevertheless intuits that his daughter's chastity had been compromised, and vows to murder both her and his sister. The Aunt, a sorceress, learns of this plot, and kills herself out of spite, sending the princess into sorceress exile.
"That's excessive. Just kill him."
Tariel wanders the world in the company of Asmat'h, also disgraced, and befriends P'hridon, prince of Mulghazanzar. P'ridon has an inheritance dispute with his cousins, which Tariel resolves through violence. The two knights, with and sans panther skin, swear eternal brotherhood. It transpires that P'hridon has seen Nestan-Daredjan, and in fact fallen in love with her. However, despite this intelligence Tariel loses the trail of his princess. He retires to a cave on the plains with Asmat'h, now his sworn sister, and resolves to go mad. He takes to dressing in a panther skin because panthers are pretty cats that remind him of his beloved.
More Avt'handil
It is in this state that Avt'handil has found him. Avt'handil is overwhelmed with brotherly love - to the point of weeping and swooning - and the two knights swear eternal brotherhood. Avt'handil then returns home to relate the story to the King and the King. However, he is struck with longing of the weeping and swooning kind for his sworn brother, and makes to leave. King T'hinat'hin understands completely, having witnessed a lot of this weeping and swooning on her own behalf, but the King Rostevan is outraged and forbids it. Reasoning that he's no use to his King as a weeping and swooning wreck, Avt'handil sneaks out and heads for the plains.
He arrives to find Tariel half dead, near a panther and a lion, fully dead. Tariel has lost the will to live, but Avt'handil tells him to buck the hell up, he didn't abandon his country and his girlfriend the King to travel half way to Turkey for a brother who'll just die. Especially not when there's a princess to find and, if possible, rescue!
Avt'handil swears to undertake the quest himself, and rides off to pick up the quest.
"I'm off. No sneaky killing yourself while I'm away!"The first port of call is Mulghazanzar, which might be Turkey. P'hridon is impressed by Avt'handil from the get-go, but is overjoyed to learn of Tariel. The two knights, without panther skins, swear eternal brotherhood, and P'hridon provides some warriors for Avt'handil's quest. Avt'handil continues on, and comes across a band of merchants beset by pirates. Avt'handil solves their problems with violence, and they carry him across the sea and make him their chief.
In the guise of a merchant leader, Avt'handil arrives in the Sea-King's city of Gulansharo, which is possibly Venice. He is invited to meet with the chief merchant of the city, Usen, which he does. Usen's wife, P'hatman, falls for Avt'handil and sets about seducing him. Avt'handil discovers that Nestan-Daredjan has been seen in these parts and in fact this palace, and allows himself to be seduced. P'hatman has a former suitor who needs settling with violence, and once Avt'handil has settled him with violence, he confesses that he is not actually a morally-lax merchant prince but in fact a fine upstanding knight on a heroic rescue mission, and therefore probably shouldn't have been seduced so easily. P'hatman spills the beans.
Yes, she says, Nestan-Daredjan was here. P'hatman and her husband had captured her from the slaves who were carrying her, and took her into their own house where they (a) kept her presence a secret and (b) both fell in love with her. Usen made the mistake of boasting of the captive to the King, but before the King could take her for himself, the princess escaped and was promptly captured by evil sorcerous Kadjis. The evil sorceress-King of the Kadjis seeks to marry her to her son when he comes of age, so while Nestan-Daredjan is imprisoned in an impregnable rock fortress guarded by ten thousand mad warriors and a sorceress-King, there's not a lot of time pressure. Avt'handil goes back to the cave to get Tariel, and they return to P'hridon to come up with a rescue plan.
Three brothers, one cat-skin
P'hridon supplies three thousand of his best warriors, and the three debate the best way to take an impregnable sorcerous fortress.
"Stealth?"Superior tactics win the day, and the impervious fortress turns out to be pervious after all. Tariel and Nestan-Daredjan are reunited. P'hridon marries them, gallantly accepting that Tariel saw her first. The newlyweds plan to return to India and wrest the throne from Nestan-Daredjan's father, but Tariel refuses until Avt'handil is married to his beloved, the King. Avt'handil takes a surprising amount of persuading, but in the end concedes that Arabia is in fact on the way, so he returns, apologises to the King for leaving him in the lurch, and marries King T'hinat'hin. They live happily ever after.
"Not very heroic, is it?"
"Subterfuge?"
"Again..."
"Suicidal frontal attack?"
"Avt'handil won't let me kill myself."
"Something tricky involving tactics?"
"Worth a shot, I guess."
It doesn't seem to occur to anyone that neither P'hridon nor Ashmat'h get to marry anyone.
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I enjoyed with this one, but it must be said that the translation is not an elegant one - it's overly literal and occasionally uncertain, without any sort of poetic flow. There are a lot of unfamiliar metaphors: eyelashes of jet, faces of crystal and ruby, teeth of coral, bodies like aloe trees, faces that burn like the sun with beauty. The Georgian-Arabian idea of courtly love is also quite different from what I'm used to, and involves an awful lot of weeping and swooning.
But there's high adventure, military maneuvers, brotherhood, romance, all that stuff. It was fun.
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