Tamar in Poetry and Legend

Beyond Rustaveli’s dedication, Tamar became the idealized queen of the whole Georgian imagination — the perfect, beautiful, invincible sovereign of court poetry, folk song, and legend, and, in the mountain folklore, a figure of almost mythic power. This file traces the making of the legendary Tamar, distinguishing the idealizing move of the poets from the folk-mythologizing of the villages, as the bridge to the source-critical reckoning of the next section.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Idealized Queen of the Poets

The transformation of the historical Tamar into an idealized figure began in her own lifetime, in the court literature of her reign. The two near-contemporary “Histories” already praise her in superlative terms — her beauty, wisdom, piety, mercy, and invincibility — presenting her less as a woman than as the perfection of sovereign virtue (the “Histories” of Tamar, which exalt her “beauty, humility, love of mercy, fidelity, and purity” and call her “protector of the widowed”; see Methodology). Rustaveli’s epic carried the idealization to its height, making her the muse of the national poem (see Shota Rustaveli and the Panther’s Skin). Court poetry of the age — odes and panegyrics addressed to the queen, some ascribed to Rustaveli and his contemporaries — heaped on her the imagery of the sun, of light, of the sun-faced beloved, the standard hyperbole of medieval royal praise raised to its most extravagant pitch (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia: A History, 3rd ed., 2010, on the panegyric poetry of Tamar’s age).

The result was that, even in the sources closest to her, Tamar reaches us already half-idealized — the historical sovereign overlaid with the perfect queen the age wished her to be. This is not deception but the idiom of the culture, and it is the first layer of the legend.

The Folk Tamar of the Mountains

Beyond the court and its literature, a very different Tamar took shape in the folk imagination, especially in the mountain regions of Georgia. Here Tamar became a figure of folklore and near-myth: a queen of superhuman power and beauty, credited in local legend with the building of castles, churches, and towers across the land — countless ruined fortresses in the Georgian highlands are called “Tamar’s castle” — with the working of wonders, and with a presence that shades, in some tales, into that of a pagan or semi-divine sun-goddess figure onto whom older mythological material was transferred (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the folkloric Tamar and the “Tamar’s castle” attributions; on the mountain-folklore Tamar, Charachidzé and the ethnographic tradition). In this folk register the historical queen all but disappears beneath a legendary “Tamar” who is a personification of Georgia’s golden past, a builder-goddess of the mountains, and a figure of story rather than of history.

[Disputed: the extent to which the folkloric “Tamar” preserves any historical memory, as against having absorbed older mythological (even pre-Christian) material under the name of the famous queen, is debated among ethnographers and historians. The countless “Tamar’s castle” and “Tamar built this” attributions across Georgia cannot be taken as records of her building; they are the folk memory of a golden age gathered under one beloved name, and in the highlands they merge with much older legendary strata (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). This collection treats the folk Tamar as folklore — valuable as the culture’s imaginative relation to its past, worthless as biography.]

The Beautiful and Invincible Queen

Certain traits recur across all the legendary registers and became fixed in the popular image: Tamar’s extraordinary beauty, her invincibility in war (the folk and poetic Tamar is often imagined at the head of her armies, sword in hand, though the historical queen did not take the field — see The Military Triumphs), her wisdom and justice, and above all her identification with the golden summit of the nation’s fortunes. The legendary Tamar is Georgia’s Golden Age personified — young, beautiful, victorious, pious, and forever at the height before the fall. That the Mongol catastrophe followed so soon after her death (see The Empire at Its Zenith) fixed her in memory as the last and best sovereign of the good times, and gave the legend its elegiac undertone: to invoke Tamar was to invoke the lost greatness of Georgia (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed., 1994; see Tamar in Georgian Memory).

The Legend and the Grave

The legendizing of Tamar reached even her death and burial. Because her grave was never found (see Repose and Canonization), the mystery became itself a theme of poetry and reflection: the queen who “belongs to everyone and to no one,” whose true tomb is not in any earth but “in the heart of the Georgian,” as the writer Grigol Robakidze put it in his 1918 essay — the unfindable grave transfigured into a symbol of the queen’s belonging to the whole nation rather than to any single place (Robakidze, essay on Tamar, 1918, quoted in the tradition of the lost grave). Here the legendary and the historical meet at their sharpest: the very absence of a documented tomb, a hard limit of historical knowledge, was taken up into the legend as its most poignant motif.

The Bridge to Source-Criticism

This file has traced how thoroughly the historical Tamar is wrapped in idealization and legend — from the panegyric of her own court, through Rustaveli’s epic, to the folk-myth of the mountains. That is precisely why the next section’s source-critical reckoning is necessary. To recover the historical sovereign — what can actually be documented, as against what the poets and the villages made of her — requires peeling back these layers deliberately: reading the “Histories” as panegyric, the folk attributions as folklore, and the surviving portraits and the hard external facts (dates, battles, buildings) as the firmer ground. The legendary Tamar is a real and precious cultural fact, the imaginative achievement of a nation’s love for its greatest queen; but it is not the same thing as the historical Tamar, and the honest reader holds the two apart (see The Queen and the Legend and Methodology).

See Also

References

  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (The folkloric Tamar; the “Tamar’s castle” attributions; the merging with older legendary material.)
  • Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010. (The panegyric court poetry of Tamar’s age; the sun and light imagery.)
  • Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (Tamar as the personified Golden Age; the elegiac memory after the Mongol collapse.)
  • Robakidze, Grigol. Essay on Tamar (1918), quoted in the tradition of the lost grave: “her grave is in the heart of the Georgian.” (Cited via the survey of the burial traditions.)
  • The Georgian Chronicles (Kartlis Tskhovreba), the “Histories” of Tamar — the earliest layer of idealization, read source-critically per Methodology.