Ferdowsi Spent 30 Years on One Poem
Quick answer: Ferdowsi spent about thirty years writing the Shahnameh, was cheated of his promised payment, and died before vindication came. What his patience teaches.
Somewhere in the middle of the greatest single-author epic ever completed, the poet stops the story of kings and heroes to mourn his own son, dead at thirty-seven while the father, past sixty-five, was still grinding out couplets about other men's glory. Abolqasem Ferdowsi buried a child inside the poem that was consuming his life, then picked the metre back up and kept going. He had been writing the same work for roughly three decades. He finished it as an old man, and was insulted with a payment whose story has been told for a thousand years.
The Shahnameh, the Book of Kings, is the reason the Persian language looks the way it does today, and its author died without knowing he had won. For any writer who has ever wondered whether a long, unfashionable, unpaid project is worth the years, Ferdowsi is the patron saint, and his story deserves telling straight, with its legends clearly labelled.
A landowner bets his life on a book
Ferdowsi was born around 940 CE near Tus, in Khorasan, in today's northeastern Iran. He belonged to the dehqan class, the old Persian landed gentry who saw themselves as custodians of pre-Islamic Iranian memory: the myths, the dynasties, the names. Around 977 he began turning the great prose compilation of Persian royal history into verse, taking up a project that the court poet Daqiqi had started and left unfinished when he was murdered. Ferdowsi folded roughly a thousand of Daqiqi's verses into his own work and credited him by name inside the poem, an act of professional honesty.
The scale of what followed is hard to overstate. The Shahnameh runs to around fifty thousand couplets, manuscripts vary, which makes it several times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey combined, and Ferdowsi composed all of it in a single verse form, the rolling motaqareb metre, sustained across decades without a collaborator. He completed a first version in 994 and kept revising and expanding; the poem itself records its final completion date, corresponding to 8 March 1010. He had spent, by his own testimony, some thirty-five years. In that time his patrons, the Persian-friendly Samanid dynasty, collapsed, and power passed to the Ghaznavid sultan Mahmud, a Turkic ruler with different tastes and different politics.
The insult: silver for gold
The famous payment story comes to us from the writer Nizami Aruzi, who visited Tus and recorded the tale around 1155, some hundred and forty years after the events, so it must be read as polished legend built on a real grievance. As the classic account tells it, Ferdowsi presented the finished Shahnameh to Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni expecting a gold dinar per couplet, sixty thousand in all. What arrived was sixty thousand silver dirhams, a fraction of the value: the wage of a hireling rather than the honour of a poet. Ferdowsi, the story continues, was in the bathhouse when the money came; he divided it on the spot between the bath attendant and a drink seller, and left the city.
He is also credited with a blistering satire on Mahmud, though scholars argue over how much of the surviving text is really his. Whatever the exact truth, the outline is consistent across the old sources: the greatest literary labour of the age was met by its intended patron with something between stinginess and contempt, and the poet went home to Tus poor, old and unrewarded. The poem itself corroborates the mood: in his asides Ferdowsi complains frankly of age, failing eyesight and poverty.
The caravan that arrived too late
Nizami Aruzi's account supplies the ending that every telling since has kept. Mahmud, reproached in later years for his treatment of the poet, repented and dispatched a caravan of indigo worth sixty thousand dinars to Tus. As the camels entered the city through one gate, the story goes, Ferdowsi's funeral procession was leaving through another. The payment was offered to his daughter, who refused it. He had died around 1020, in his late seventies or beyond, believing his life's work had failed to find its reward.
The too-late caravan is legend, impossible to verify and suspiciously perfect. But the vindication it dramatises is entirely real, just slower. The Shahnameh became the central book of Persian civilisation. It is often credited with securing New Persian as a great literary language at the very moment Arabic might have displaced it. For a thousand years its stories, Rostam and Sohrab above all, the father who unknowingly kills his own son in single combat, have been recited in teahouses, painted in the most lavish manuscripts ever produced, and used to teach children their language. In 1934, for the poem's millennium, Iran built Ferdowsi a grand mausoleum at Tus. Sultan Mahmud's empire, for comparison, lasted about a century and a half.
What actually kept him going
Thirty-five years is too long for spite or ambition alone. What the poem's own asides reveal is a man sustained by the conviction that he was saving something: a language and a memory that would otherwise wash away. He says that he has built a lofty palace of verse that wind and rain will never wear down, and that he will not die while its words live. That is not the voice of a man writing for a fee. The work had a different employer all along.
There was also structure holding him up. A single fixed metre, an ordered source text and a story with an end gave every writing day a defined task. Long projects fail in the fog; Ferdowsi had rails. And he had witnesses: local patrons in Tus who supported him modestly through the decades, remembered gratefully in the poem.
What a working writer can take from this
First, separate the work's worth from the patron's verdict. Ferdowsi was paid in silver by a man history remembers chiefly for underpaying him. If a serious piece of yours has ever been dismissed by a distracted editor or an indifferent market, you have stood in the small version of his bathhouse. The payment is information about the payer, not about the poem. Write for the language, then invoice whoever is available.
Second, respect the mechanics of long work. Ferdowsi's example argues for one metre, one map, one steady rhythm: choose constraints that remove daily decisions, credit those whose work you build on, and mourn inside the project rather than abandoning it, the way he folded his son's elegy into the epic and continued. A poem does not need to take thirty years, but the habit of finishing regardless of applause scales down perfectly. It is also, frankly, the argument for sending work where a verdict is guaranteed: Writory's contest scores every single entry each month, which means no poem is paid in the silver of silence.
Where to start reading
The Shahnameh is enormous, so enter through an episode. Rostam and Sohrab is the one that has broken hearts for a millennium: begin there, then the tale of Zal and the Simorgh, then the tragedy of Siyavash. Dick Davis's much-praised English translation presents the epic in a mix of prose and verse and is the standard modern doorway. Illustrated editions are worth seeking out, because the Shahnameh generated some of the greatest painting in Islamic art.
As you read, watch for the poet's asides, the moments Ferdowsi steps out from behind the kings to speak of his age, his losses and his hopes for the poem. They are the oldest surviving diary of a long project, and they sound startlingly like a writer you know.
What poets can take from this
- Choose constraints that remove daily decisions; one steady form carried Ferdowsi through fifty thousand couplets.
- Credit the writers whose work you build on, as Ferdowsi credited Daqiqi inside the poem itself.
- Judge your work by the standard of the work, not by the size or speed of the payment it attracts.
- Keep small, local supporters close; they sustained Ferdowsi for decades while the sultan looked away.
- When grief interrupts a long project, write the grief into it rather than abandoning the whole.
- Reread your own project notes yearly; like Ferdowsi's asides, they are the record that keeps you honest.
Try it yourself
Write a poem that pauses an epic in progress: a narrator telling some grand story stops mid-tale to grieve or confess something personal, then resumes. Let the seam between the two voices stay visible.
Questions
How long did Ferdowsi take to write the Shahnameh?
By his own testimony, around thirty to thirty-five years. He began around 977 CE, completed a first version in 994, and the poem records its final completion on a date corresponding to 8 March 1010. The finished epic runs to roughly fifty thousand couplets.
Was Ferdowsi really cheated of his payment?
The classic account, written down by Nizami Aruzi about 140 years later, says Sultan Mahmud paid him sixty thousand silver dirhams instead of the promised gold dinars, and that a repentant caravan of full payment arrived only as Ferdowsi's funeral left the city. The details are legend, but the poet's own verses confirm he felt poorly rewarded and died in poverty.
Why is the Shahnameh so important?
It preserved the myths and royal history of pre-Islamic Persia and is often credited with securing the Persian language as a literary language at a moment when Arabic dominated. A millennium later it remains the national epic of Iran and a shared treasure across the Persian-speaking world.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.