The Deaths He Dies Elsewhere

Ferdowsi's is not the only tradition here, and the others are strikingly different. One early historian has no invulnerability, no Simurgh and no tamarisk at all: Rostam hears that the king has converted, raises his province against him, and Esfandiyar is sent with an army and killed in single combat — a straightforward religious war. A twelfth-century mystic removes the arrow too, and has Rostam's armour polished to a mirror and carried past the Simurgh, so that the dazzled prince only believes he has been wounded in the eyes. Later folk versions have him killed with a golden orange, or a stool. The famous version is one of several.