A comparative Study of the Patterns of Hidden King's Narrations(Case Study of Three Iranian Narrations)

In Iranian culture, one of the recurring narrative patterns is the narrations in which the story of the birth of a hidden king is mentioned. In this article, three Iranian hidden narrations of the King are examined. In all these narrations, first a prediction announces the birth of the next king, and then the forces for or against it seek it, the child is born, raised in secret, and becomes the king when the opponents are defeated. The study of these narratives has been inspired by a combination of methods used by Propp and Roglan. The functions and characters of the king's hidden narratives are based on Propp's method in The Morphology of Folk Tales. The use of Roglan's models is also important because he examined the myths that have similarities with the subject of this study and gave a general model of them. The present study shows that the three narrations of Fereydoun and Kaykhosrow in Ferdowsi’s Shahname and Ardashir’s narration in Karname-ye Ardashir-e Babakan can all be placed in a single model with five main functions.