Ori Z Soltes

Epic poetry is poetry that focuses on the actions of a hero. Many cultures are defined by tales, whose stories capture features that a given culture values most. Shota Rustaveli’s twelfth century masterpiece, The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, both expresses Georgian values and offers a heroic adventure that fits comfortably into the patterns of heroic myth encountered across the panoply of civilizations.

Epic heroes have at least two primary traits in common: they are both connected to the realm of the Unknown Other and their adventure carries them out into that Other. By nature they stand, as it were, with one foot in our realm and the other in the divine realm. That connection may be spiritual as much as physical, and sometimes it is implied without being stated outright, simply expressed by heroic accomplishment. Aeneas and Gilgamesh, like Akhilleos and Herakles, are semi-divine in parentage. Odysseos’ success is facilitated by his relationship with the goddess Athena; Moses’ success as a heroic intermediary is facilitated by the particular relationship that he has with the God of Israel. Dante the heroic character can pass through the realms of the Dead because the god-like author of his epic adventure is Dante the poet. For it is that connection which makes possible the heroic voyage out and back – into another reality beyond the realm of the everyday, the familiar, the safely circumscribed in time and space –a voyage that would destroy a non-hero.

One epic journey echoes another, as the myth of the hero and the heroic adventure conform to a general formula that, from Stith Thompson’s Guide to Folklore Motifs to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, can be and has been sketched out. The journey of Dante through the three realms of the Other Realm emulates the journey of Aeneas into the underworld, which in turn echoes Odysseos’ arrival at the outer edge of reality where he finds an entrance to the underworld. That adventure is part of the epic tradition that, in Western and Near Eastern literature, may be said to begin with the journey of the Mesopotamian hero, Gilgamesh, to the underworld, to find the flower of immortality. Structurally, that journey is also taken by Moses, when he ventures to the edge of the wilderness, while a shepherd in Midian, where he encounters a bush that defies the norms of our reality – it burns yet is not consumed; which sets in motion a yet larger adventure, in which, ascending toward the Other on Mount Sinai, he plucks the flower of spiritual immortality – the Ten Commandments – and brings it back to the ordinary people who await him below in everyday reality.

Into this rich and diverse tradition, Rustaveli’s magnificent poem, The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, fits comfortably. It tells the tale, first, of the quest of the young warrior Avtandil to find the knight of the poem’s title, whose extraordinary prowess and sudden disappearance have provoked the distress of Rostevan, king of the Arabs. Interwoven with this quest is the love story between Avtandil and Tinatin – King Rostevan’s daughter. Avtandil seeks her hand in marriage, which doubles the imperative for heroic action on his part. After wandering the edges of the world, Avtandil eventually finds the knight, Tariel – which leads the story into its second, yet more central quest: to find the kidnapped/disappeared Nestan-Darejan, the ladylove of Tariel. This in turn leads to questing, as it were, even beyond the edges of that edge. In turn, as the tale proceeds, a third hero, the knight Pridon, joins his forces to those of Avtandil and Tariel. Both the primary story within this story – of the circumstances that led to Nestan-Darejan’s disappearance -- and an array of other intertwined subplots, sub-stories and sub-adventures unfold one after the other, comprising the majority of the epic. The tale concludes in grand and glorious victory, marriage and happiness-forever-after for the chivalric knights and their sweethearts.

The expected parts of a heroic myth are there from the beginning, from the Campbellian Call to Adventure (the mysterious appearance and disappearance of the Knight, which impels Avtandil out) to the constant and delightful digressions of tales within the larger tale (so that the ultimate quest, not for Tariel, but for his lady, doesn’t become clear until well into the poem; and our arrival at the denouement is continuously held back). Reluctances and Obstructions, approaching and falling back from the goal, so that the story is extended, and the reader’s/listener’s gratification in the accomplishment of the goal is delayed, are part of it.

So, too, the classic kinds of imagery – similes and metaphors on the one hand and epic hyperbole on the other – are well represented. Young heroes are consistently as slender and tall as cypress trees; Tariel and Avtandil are bright like two suns, “or as the moon which scatters its beams on the meadow beneath it” (quatrain 278). When strongholds filled with treasure are opened up, “never had mortal eye beheld such abundance of treasures!” (quatrain 451). In his initial return to Tinatin, before having to go forth again (for while the goal of finding the Knight has been attained, that has proven to be only the prelude to the real adventure, of finding the Knight’s ladylove), Avtandil is “an unscathed battle-worn lion who had roamed the fields with lions” (quatrain 684). When he arrives in the city of Gulansharo, and enters the home of Patman Khatun, a wealthy merchant’s wife, “when the crystal and the ruby, the jet and the enamel [his dark hair and fair skin] entered the building, those who beheld him compared his arms and feet to a lion’s” (quatrain 1062).

When Tariel weeps over the loss of his ladylove, “the tears that flow from his eyes are sufficient to fill up the Tigris” (one of the two major rivers in Mesopotamia; quatrain 840). And when Avtandil weeps in thinking of Tinatin while he lies reluctantly in Patman Khatun’s arms, (in order to assure her help in his quest, of course), “his tears flowed to mingle with oceans. Two vessels of shining black jet shone brightly in ebony pools” (quatrain 1241). (We are reminded, somewhat, of Odysseus, weeping – only after seven years, however! -- for home and Penelope, at the entrance to Calypso’s cave, as we are also reminded of the help that both Calypso and Circe extend to him after his dalliances with them).

This is a more complex epic than most, in that it offers two heroes, really: even if the eponymous Knight is the greatest warrior of them all, yet most of the story focuses on the adventures of Avtandil, who is indeed the mightiest knight in his own kingdom, with his own loyal retainer, Shermadin, but who modestly appoints himself the loyal retainer of that knight. Other epics have analogous figures. Akhilleos has a devoted retainer, Patroklos, and Gilgamesh has a friend and fellow warrior, Enkidu, whose valourous skills are in fact equal to his own – but there is no question that Achilles is the hero, not Patroklos, and it is Enkidu’s very illness that sends Gilgamesh alone on his quest in the first place. Only in this epic do we find truly a “double hero” -- to go along with a double quest.

For (to repeat), Avtandil’s quest, as he begins it, is to find the Knight in the Panther’s Skin, Tariel; having found the Knight, his quest becomes to find the lady whose loss has turned Tariel’s existence into a vale of tears – she is the flower of immortality which will cure Tariel’s (love-)sickness. Indeed the poem not only complicates the traditional role of the epic hero and offers new twists to the varied turns toward a goal that epic quests habitually take. It also complicates the standard values of epic poetry, by placing romantic love on an equal footing with collegial love, intertwining them both at the center of the epic’s tapestry. In short, Rustaveli has presented us with a poem that is simultaneously epic and lyric, anticipating that interweave in European literature by five centuries. Indeed the prologue is overrun with instructions regarding what proper love is and with instructions for the lover, as the stage is set for the story.

Again, although the interweave of eris and eros (strife and love) are not uncommon to epic poetry, elsewhere the erotic element is neither so idealized nor as central to the plot. Achilles’ argument with Agamemnon may focus on a girl, but his primary significant other is his buddy, Patroklos, whose role as an alter ego is mainly a means of setting the tragedy in final motion. Odysseos has any number of women, (as his wife awaits him loyally for twenty years) but his primary concern is himself. Aeneas’ love of destiny is greater in the end than his lust for Dido. Siegfried has Brunhild and Nala (in the Mahabharata) has Damayanti as sidebars to their central actions. But in Rustaveli’s epic we find a focussed emphasis on constant and substantial devotion between both friends and lovers, expressed by those wandering forth and those waiting behind, by making war and resisting the temptation to make love (except when necessary to further the quest of regaining the lost lover). This is a love poem that is simultaneously charged and chaste.

Perhaps this is in part a consequence of the fact that the poem is dedicated to a woman, Queen Tamar, (1184-1213), or rather to the remarkable fact that a woman could overcome the prejudices towards a woman-who-would-be-king of those around her, not only succeeding as Queen, but bringing the Georgian Golden Age to its ultimate level of grandeur during her reign. Queen Tamar is the object of the poet’s devotion, and she is represented by the heroic women in the poem, just as the poet’s own alter ego is the series of heroes in love with those women.

Moreover, in likening his patroness to a panther in the nineteenth quatrain of the prologue, the poet forges a link between Tamar and the knight for whom his poem is named. Tariel is the initial goal of Avtandil, as Tinatin waits behind; he (Tariel) becomes the one waiting as Avtandil goes forth, alone, to find Nestan-Darejan on Tariel’s behalf, which makes Tariel at one and the same time like Tinatin (awaiting Avtandil’s return) and like Avtandil (when the two eventually set forth together and fight side-by side to claim Nestan-Darejan). That the Knight in the Panther’s Skin who thus transgresses traditional epic gender boundaries should be so directly linked to a Queen who, as kingly ruler transgresses analogous boundaries, is perhaps not accidental. It is in any case perfectly appropriate to the originality of the culture which spawned this epic.

Rustaveli invokes supernatural power, as other epic poets do, at the inception of his poem. But he invokes the all-good God to assist him against the wiles of Satan’s evil, not to help him shape his poem. Part of the backbone of the story is the importance of believing in a God that is ultimately good, logical and in charge of things, as when Avtandil assures Tariel that they will find Nestan-Darejan: “Why did the Lord create you, if he wished to part you forever? Why should he wish to embitter your life with unending sorrows?…” (quatrain 919). At the same time, the cultural influences of the non-Christian world are evident, as when, in quatrains 946-953, the seven planets associated with pagan religion are invoked (which is by definition non-Christian, since it assumes that powers other than the one God’s are up there affecting things down here).

Similarly, magical powers play a considerable role, as in the ultimate battle between the good hero-warriors and supernatural evil forces. It is not merely that the heroes can overcome supernatural malefactors, but (one recalls how Odysseus overcame the supernatural wiles of Circe with superior supernatural assistance) in quatrain 1355 (and elsewhere) the bad kaji (evil sorcerers/demons) power is inferior to the good power of the devis (more powerful sorcerers/demons) assisting the heroes: white magic over black magic; stronger over weaker. In the end, these heroes, like other epic heroes, have supernatural assistance. Yet this theme is not taken in the obvious direction in which it might have been: to assert the greater power of Christian spirituality over all others. Indeed Christianity plays no role in the poem at all. Although Rustaveli is a Christian poet he sets his tale, (borrowed, as he tells us in the prologue, from the Muslim Persians), in Arabia, Persia, India – in short, in the lands whose forms of spirituality have been antithetical for centuries to that of his native Georgia. And although the Muslim Turks (presumably Seljuks) are an almost off-handed reference to evil, his Muslim characters are presented with the utmost sympathy.

In part one might conjecture that the setting of the narrative is chosen simply to be exotic for Rustaveli’s audience, by virtue of being part of a different and distant reality, an other-than-familiar-Christian reality. Yet it would and could have been just as logical to offer chivalric Christian heroes battling Muslim or similar foes – perhaps even within a Crusades-evoking context. The positive portrayal of his Muslim heroes suggests, rather, an open-mindedness which is quite typical of Georgian cultural history, but extraordinary for the world at large (especially during Rustaveli’s era, the height of the Crusades) and the epic poetry across it.

Indeed, while I am not aware of any particular rituals that grow out of the “myth” around which this narrative is constructed, there are at least three values which, to this day, Georgians assert of themselves that are underscored in the poem and because of which it is regarded as their national epic. The first is the claim of honor, specifically in the matter of giving one’s word that one will do something for someone and exhausting every possibility, however far-flung, to assure that the act is done (this claim may be present in most cultures, but is particularly emphatic with Georgians). The second is the wide-open mind-set regarding differing cultures to which I have alluded: as much as Georgia was, for centuries, the final Christian outpost facing Islam from the East, it never absorbed into itself an antipathy for Islam or Muslims per se. That religious and ethnic openness extended to Jews as well, and for it Georgians are fiercely proud. Thirdly, Georgians would assert of themselves that their culture is inherently more gender-oppression free than are others, both nearby and far afield. For them both Queen Tamar and Tinatin are symbols of the relative ease with which women can be, have been and are prominent in Georgian culture. Together these three ideas and their concomitants, voiced in The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, reflect important ways in which Georgians see their world as shaped.