of the passage. Once more, pain and grotesquery abound: the camel is physically maimed (her teats are snipped); the slave has had his ears docked; the foreign camel herder is incomprehensible; the cat is ferocious in its attacks on the poet’s she-camel.
With the camel now transmogrified almost beyond recognition, the poet addresses ʿAblah, his destination. It is as yet unclear whether ʿAntarah has reached her—he entertains the possibility that she may refuse to lower her veil before him. The words he addresses to her epitomize the pre-Islamic warrior ethos: the fulfillment of the warrior’s identity through excess, whether as implacable vengeance or unbounded generosity. And the poet’s demand that ʿAblah recognize his merits with praise reminds us that this ethos is ineffectual and empty without its celebration in verse. The force of this apostrophe and its significance for the shape of the qasida should not be underestimated. It means that, somewhat uncommonly in the pre-Islamic poetic corpus, the boasting intoned in the remainder of the ode (i.e., the mufākharah) is addressed directly to the poet’s beloved, and not to his tribe or opponents. So, once again, the shape of the qasida is destabilized and the shape-shifting of the desert adventure continues, in metaphor and simile: the harm the poet inflicts on his enemies is a snarling lion (bāsil, in Arabic, here rendered as “savage in wrath”); in the mouth of his enemies his actions taste as bitter as colocynth (“desert gourd”).
Now it becomes clear that the dawn raid, alluded to earlier, is about to begin. The raid is launched: three champions are felled in rapid succession. The sequence is structured as a priamel,33 with the most significant kill coming last—at the end of the ode. Again, grotesquery abounds: the severed jugular of the first victim hisses like breath whistling through a harelip; the poet feeds savage hyenas and other predators with butchered flesh, the thud of his spear sounding a clarion call that dinner is ready; spilled blood (as red as resin) and rotting flesh (dark as indigo) frame the three vivid close-ups that zoom in on the killing and pulsate with battle lust, as the poet delights in slaughtering his highborn opponents.
ʿAblah, the poet’s target, is now easy prey: she is an exposed and vulnerable gazelle that beckons and invites him to pounce. But do these verses depict the aftermath of the raid or are they a memory of the time when the poet and his beloved were together? Why is the poet accompanied by a slave girl on the raid? The scene is perhaps more appropriate for the period when ʿAntarah pursued ʿAblah before her tribe struck camp. Once again, meaning is destabilized and uncertainty flits over the chronography, shape, and direction of the poem.
With the poet’s prey apparently captured, the poem launches into an exultant boast (mufākharah), as the poet reiterates his exploits on the battlefield. In a panoramic battle description, ʿAntarah holds the line and leads his tribe to victory in a hard-won contest—the combatants lose the power of language; the poet’s horse almost acquires it. The only words to be heard are the chants, “ʿAntar!” and, “Ho ʿAntar, Onward!” which frame the poet’s charge into the fray and his rout of the enemy.
Many pre-Islamic qasidas end on this note of unbridled exultation, but not so this Golden Ode, for the poet addresses a further bout of self-justification to ʿAblah. The extent of the poem’s instability becomes clear, for ʿAntarah has not yet been able to reach her, seize his prize, and fulfill his desire—ʿAblah remains unattainable, physically and figuratively beyond his reach. The poet is now at war with both kinfolk and foe: the clan that bars his way to ʿAblah traces its descent from Baghīḍ, an ancestor of both the ʿAbs, the poet’s own tribe, and the Dhubyān, its inveterate opponents in the War of Dāḥis and al-Ghabrāʾ. The poet launches into the final (and in a sense the only real) expression of self-glorification (mufākharah) in the qasida as he challenges his opponents to combat.
The poem concludes with a disturbing, intensified image of the desolation it began with: a corpse left unburied on the field of battle, carrion for hyenas and vultures. In this way, we are led by this shimmering mirage of a qasida to ponder the one true reality. It is the conclusion the ode has been straining to reach: Death, the obliteration of existence, is the only true reality; it is the real subject of the ode.
THE ABBASID DISCOVERY OF ʿANTARAH
The story of the discovery of ʿAntarah is the story of the recovery of the Jāhiliyyah in the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries, when this body of oral verse came to be salvaged, recorded, and studied by Abbasid language experts, scholars, enthusiasts, and intellectuals. Ibn Qutaybah (d. 276/889), one of the architects of high Arabic culture, and part of the second wave of scholars who devoted their lives and energies to this corpus of poetry and the Qurʾan, summed up pre-Islamic poetry thus:
Poetry is the source of the Arabs’ learning, the basis of their wisdom, the archive of their history, the repository of their battle lore. It is the wall built to protect the memory of their glories, the moat that safeguards their laurels. It is the truthful witness on the day of crisis, the irrefutable proof in disputes. He who has no decisive proof to support his claims of nobility, or his claims about his ancestors’ glory and praiseworthy deeds, will find that his efforts are in vain, even if his glorious deeds are famous. Their memory will be effaced over time even if they are momentous. But he who has his merits committed to rhyming verse and bound in meter, and gives them renown through a choice verse, a memorable maxim, or a subtle notion, will immortalize them for all time. He will secure them against disavowal, and protect them from the plots of enemies. He will repel the jealous eye. Even if his glories are modest, they will forever be evident for all to see and recollect.34
By the middle of the third/ninth century, discussion of pre-Islamic hero warriors had become so widespread that al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/868–69), theologian, author, and prominent intellectual, could write in a discussion of lexicography:
There are warrior-knights who, with their steeds, attain the pinnacle of fame and yet still fail to enjoy the same reputation as those who are much less deserving. Consider how our uneducated colleagues think that Ibn al-Qirriyyah is a more famous orator than Saḥbān Wāʾil, and that ʿUbayd ibn al-Ḥurr is a greater paragon of knighthood than Zuhayr ibn Dhuʾayb. The same is true of their treatment of ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād and ʿUtaybah ibn al-Ḥārith ibn Shihāb, and they love to quote ʿAmr ibn Maʿdī Karib but have never even heard of Bisṭām ibn Qays.35
Al-Jāḥiẓ is annoyed that a lack of specialized knowledge means that for many of his contemporaries ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād is a warrior of greater renown than ʿUtaybah ibn al-Ḥārith, the chieftain of the Tamīm kin group.36
The genesis of the legend of ʿAntarah and the story of the collection of his poetry are accordingly unclear, but the cultural currents that led to it being written down gather around a series of narratives known as “The Battle Lore of the Arabs” (Ayyām al-ʿArab), i.e., the stories of the wars, conflicts, and skirmishes that were fought by the North Arabian tribes a century or so before the advent of Islam. Any form of fighting, from the slinging of stones to full-scale military engagement, qualified as worthy of record and justified the label of “battle day.”37
A typical battle narrative is told in an unadorned prose style and is usually identified by the name of the place where the incident occurred. Accuracy of geographic and genealogical detail is paramount, with scant regard paid to chronological accuracy. The main protagonists, the tribal context, and the bone of contention that led to the dispute are introduced, and then the narrative is typically focused on the actions of individuals, as a composite picture of the events of the battle is drawn. Sometimes tribal champions exchange poetic taunts before engaging in combat. Often dialogues proliferate. The narrative culminates in a rehearsal of the poetry, usually boasts and vaunts, composed to celebrate the victory or commemorate the memory of the glorious dead. Poems relating to the event are quoted, often as fragments. Poetry is central. It corroborates and ensures the veracity of the narrative, while the narrative contextualizes, justifies, and explains the poetry. In this way, the powerful and enduring concept that poetry is “the (historical and genealogical) register of the Arabs” (al-shiʿr dīwān al-ʿarab) took root and became widespread.
These tales of tribal conflict began life as the collective memory of an oral society; as one of the means whereby, unsystematically but consistently,