Shota Rustaveli and The Knight in the Panther’s Skin

Shota Rustaveli’s Vepkhistqaosani — The Knight in the Panther’s Skin — is the masterpiece of medieval Georgian literature, composed in Tamar’s reign and dedicated in its prologue to the queen, who is its exalted and idealized subject. This file examines the poem, its dedication to Tamar, and the enduring legend of Rustaveli’s personal devotion to her — treated, per the repository methodology, as a legend of uncertain foundation and not as documented fact.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Poem

The Knight in the Panther’s Skin (Georgian Vepkhistqaosani, also rendered The Man in the Panther’s Skin or The Lord of the Panther-Skin) is a long chivalric epic of some 1,600-odd quatrains, composed around the turn of the thirteenth century, in the reign of Tamar, by the poet Shota Rustaveli. It is the supreme work of medieval Georgian literature and one of the great secular poems of the Christian East — a romance of love, friendship, loyalty, and heroic quest, set in an idealized, cosmopolitan Orient and celebrating a humane and courtly ethic of virtue (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia: A History, 3rd ed., 2010, on Rustaveli and the Vepkhistqaosani; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). The poem’s ideals — the ennobling power of love, the sacredness of friendship and fidelity, the union of martial valour and refined feeling — express the courtly culture of Tamar’s Georgia at its most confident, and it has been, ever since, the central classic of the Georgian literary tradition, so beloved that in the traditional culture it was said every household should possess a copy and every bride bring one in her dowry (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010).

The Dedication to Tamar

The poem is dedicated to Tamar. In its prologue Rustaveli names and praises the queen in the language of extravagant homage, presenting the whole work as an offering to her and taking her, implicitly, as the ideal against which its heroines and its vision of sovereign virtue are measured (Rustaveli, The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, prologue, trans. Wardrop, 1912; Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, on the dedication). The queen is the exalted, idealized subject of the poem in a double sense: named in the dedication as its dedicatee and patron, and present throughout as the type of the perfect sovereign — for the poem’s meditation on kingship, including the celebrated line that a “lion’s cub is of the same worth, whether female or male,” reads naturally as a reflection on and vindication of Tamar’s own accession as a woman crowned king (Rustaveli, The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, trans. Wardrop, 1912, the “lion’s cub” passage; see Crowned in Her Father’s Lifetime). Through this dedication, the greatest work of the national literature is bound permanently to Tamar’s name, and much of her later fame as the muse and emblem of the Golden Age flows from it (see Tamar in Poetry and Legend).

[Disputed: Shota Rustaveli himself is a figure known almost entirely through the poem and later tradition; his life, dates, and even the details of his identity are poorly documented, and much of what is “known” of him is inference from the poem or later legend (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, on the scarcity of secure biographical information about Rustaveli). The dedication to Tamar within the poem is the firm fact; the biography of the poet around it is largely reconstruction.]

The Legend of Rustaveli’s Devotion

Around the dedication grew one of the most famous stories of Georgian culture: that Rustaveli was consumed by a hopeless love for the queen he served, that the poem is in some sense a monument to that unattainable love, and that the poet ended his days, disappointed or renounced, as a monk — by one persistent tradition, in the Georgian Monastery of the Cross in Jerusalem, where a portrait identified as Rustaveli survives among its frescoes (the legend, summarized in Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010; the Tamar of Georgia tradition: “Rustaveli was even consumed with love for the queen and ended his days in a monastery”). The story is a beautiful and enduring one, and it has shaped the reception of the poem — casting the Vepkhistqaosani as, among other things, the sublimated expression of a courtier-poet’s devotion to an unreachable sovereign.

It is, however, a legend, and the honest course is to label it as such rather than to repeat it as biography.

[Disputed / legendary: the tradition that Rustaveli was personally in love with Tamar, and that this love explains the poem and his supposed retreat to a monastery, is not documented in any contemporary source; it is a later, romantic elaboration of the poem’s dedication and of the scanty and largely legendary information about the poet’s life. Some scholars regard the whole story — the love, the monastic end, the Jerusalem portrait’s identification as Rustaveli — as legend of varying and uncertain foundation (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010). Per METHODOLOGY §3.5, this collection reports the devotion-legend as a legend attached to the poem, not as a fact about Rustaveli’s or Tamar’s life. What is documented is the dedication of the poem to Tamar; the poet’s love for her is tradition, not record.]

Why the Poem Matters for Tamar

The importance of the Vepkhistqaosani for the memory of Tamar can hardly be overstated. It did for her reputation what no chronicle could: it made her the muse of the national epic, the idealized queen at the heart of the poem every Georgian read, and so fixed her permanently in the imaginative life of the culture. The legend of Rustaveli’s devotion, whatever its truth, deepened this by wrapping the queen in a story of sublime, unattainable love — making Tamar not only a great sovereign but a figure of romance. When later Georgians thought of Tamar, they thought of her partly through Rustaveli’s poem and its legend; and the process by which the historical queen became the idealized “Tamar” of national memory runs directly through this dedication (see Tamar in Poetry and Legend and The Queen and the Legend). The sober reader keeps the fact (a great poem, dedicated to Tamar, that made her its emblem) distinct from the legend (a poet’s hopeless love), and values both — the one as history, the other as the culture’s own poetry about its greatest queen.

See Also

References

  • Rustaveli, Shota. The Knight in the Panther’s Skin. Trans. Marjory Scott Wardrop. London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1912. (The dedication to Tamar; the “lion’s cub” passage on female sovereignty.)
  • Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010. (Rustaveli and the Vepkhistqaosani; the scarcity of secure biography of the poet; the dedication to Tamar; the devotion-legend and the monastic-end tradition as legend.)
  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (Rustaveli in the Golden-Age context.)
  • Tamar of Georgia, encyclopedic entry (used to locate the “consumed with love … ended his days in a monastery” form of the legend).