Some notes and assumptions on the genesis and the disputed authorship of the Sām-nāme, attributed to Khwāju Kermāni

The Persian poem Sām-nāme (SN), attributed to Khwāju Kermāni (14th century), depicts Sām’s heroic deeds and his relentless battles against enemies, demons and monsters in order to reunite with his beloved, Princess Paridokht. As some scholars have pointed out, it is actually a late work - a collage of various texts, dating from the Timurid or Safavid era, including Khwāju’s verse romance Homāy o Homāyun - which is why Sām-nāme has been traditionally attributed to him. However, according to our hypothesis, this SN-collage retains an older part of a purely epic-heroic character, forming the core of the central section of SN. This original core, which we will refer to as the Ur-SN, has been supplemented with additional material from oral and folkloric literature over the centuries, and has been subject to further arrangements and re-use for the purposes of plagiarism or recycling. The work has also been the subject of rewritings (bāz-nevisi), including a Safavid-era Sām o Pari by Ḥasan Beyg ʿEtābi Tekellu Qazvini, or even reductions, as evidenced by a Sām-nāme-ye kuchak from the same period. This article attempts to support, on the basis of various linguistic and philological observations, the hypothesis that a substantial part of the ‘epic-heroic’ section of the SN has its origin in the Persian epic literature of the 11th and 12th centuries, in the Seljuk era. Another hypothesis put forward here is that the author of the Ur-SN was probably of Mazdean faith or at least close to the Zoroastrian milieu, a fact that can be deduced from the analysis of the religious-ideological structure of the work, which takes up theological themes of Mazdeism. This last aspect probably conditioned the life of the work and led to partial censorship and interpolations in the centuries following its composition. In the SN-collage that has come down to us, the story of Sām, a true “holy hero”, nevertheless achieved a significant circulation, as evidenced by at least 21 manuscripts, probably thanks to the collage with the Homāy o Homāyun, a poem that has been guaranteed over the centuries by the name of Khwāju Kermāni.