Reading and Language Commons^™

Arnold's Sources For Schrab And Rustum, Louise Pound

Department of English: Faculty Publications

It is generally assumed, either explicitly or by inference that Matthew Arnold's Schrab and Rustum (1853) is based on the story as told in the abridgment of the Sháhnáma of Firdawsí by the Rev. J. A. Atkinson (1832), which gives in an appendix a complete rendering of the Schrab and Rustum episode in heroic couplets ; or on Sir John Malcolm's History of Persia (1815); but no one has investigated the relative use made of the two, or the exact debt of the poet to either.