A study of the story of Bijan and Manijeh in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (The Epic of Kings)

Bijan and Manijeh is an independent, love story in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. The present paper aims at investigating this story, which is regarded as a love story through which Ferdowsi had initiated his epic, in terms of lingual, literary, intellectual, and psychological aspects. For this purpose, then, this paper elaborates on the lyric and epic poetry, their primacy-recency relationship, and introduces the main characters of the story. In the section on interpreting the story, the introduction ( in terms of its prominent features) and the main text, in terms of the above-said aspects, will be discussed, and in the characterization section, the focus will be on the character of Bijan and the dominant guile in the beginning and the end of the story on the one hand, and the character of Manijeh and consequently the type of outlook Ferdowsi had taken and that of the traditional culture to the personality of women on the other hand.