A Year Old at a Month

The Shahnameh gives him a childhood measured in impossibilities. His mother Tahmineh names him Sohrab for the brightness of him at birth, and then Ferdowsi runs through the growth without slowing for it: at a month he looks a year old, at three he is drilling with weapons, at five he has a lion's heart, and by ten there is nobody in Samangan who will face him. The verse does not explain any of this, and it does not need to. He is the son of a man the poem has already described growing the same way, and the point of the speed is that there is no time in it.