From Epic to Romance:Typology of Heroic-Love Story Based on Series of BahramNameh

A heroic love story is a genre of the Persian literary that is similar in some aspects to love tales and in others to heroic tales; however, there are also differences that make it different from these two similar types. In the western literature, love and heroic-love tales both are referred as "romance". In the Persian literature, the series of Bahramnameh describing the life of Bahram Gor are considered as examples of romance genre. Meanwhile, some categorizes these poems as love stories. The present study aims to prove the "love-heroic" nature of this story, to understand the narrative structure of the literary type of a "love-heroic story", and to find its similarities and differences with two genres mentioned before. To this end, morphology, as a typological tool for the recognition of types of narratives in literature, is applied. First, Based on tale morphology in five famous series of Bahramnameh (Haft Peykar by Nizami Ganjavi, Hasht Bihisht by Amir Khosrow, Haft Akhtar by Abdi Beyk, Bahramnameh by Rouh-al-Amin Shahrestani-, and Haft Manzar by Hatefi), the paper identifies functions, characters and narrative models of this series as the example of heroic-love stories. Finally, its similarity and distinction with heroic and love tales are presented.