The Scene the Copyists Could Not Leave Alone

Her entrance has a second history, in the margins. The Shahnameh survives in a great many manuscripts, and scholars comparing them have shown that this particular passage — an unmarried princess walking into a hero's chamber and saying what she wants — drew more intervention than the material around it. Copyists added lines to it. Reciters working from their own prompt-books softened it, explained it, or moralised over it. The critical editions of the last century work back toward what Ferdowsi is likeliest to have written, and what they recover is the plainer and bolder version. Later hands kept trying to tidy her, and the tidying is still legible in the record.