Twice ToldMohl, Le livre des rois, vol. 5 (Paris, Imprimerie nationale): preface pp. iv to v and the Heftwad passages, pp. 260 and 263
- Language
- French
- Reading
- transcribed from the page image
- Translation
- ours
- Retrieved
- 6 October 2026
Julius Mohl’s French prose translation of Ferdowsi, in seven volumes, gives “Heftwad et le ver” in the Aschkanides section of vol. 5. His preface to the volume offers the silk reading.
[Preface, p. iv, to p. v] Il se contente de rendre compte de la chute de cette dynastie par l’histoire romanesque d’Ardeschir Babekan, histoire qui appartient essentiellement au cycle des traditions sassanides, et il y fait entrer le singulier épisode d’Heftwad et du ver, qui porte tous les caractères d’un conte populaire local et ne tient à rien de ce qui précède et de ce qui suit. Je suis disposé à croire que ce conte est un vague souvenir de l’introduction du ver à soie en Perse et de la prospérité que cette nouvelle industrie devait avoir répandue.
[p. 260] puis il remplit de plomb et d’étain deux caisses, plaça dans ses bagages un chaudron de bronze, qui lui était indispensable pour son plan.
[p. 263] J’ai donné au ver de l’étain fondu, et la puissance et l’impétuosité de Heftwad sont brisées.
Translation
[Preface] He contents himself with accounting for the fall of this dynasty through the romantic story of Ardeschir Babekan, a story that belongs essentially to the cycle of Sasanian traditions, and into it he works the singular episode of Heftwad and the worm, which has all the marks of a local folk tale and has no tie to what comes before or after. I am inclined to believe that this tale is a vague memory of the introduction of the silkworm into Persia and of the prosperity that this new industry must have spread.
[p. 260] then he filled two chests with lead and tin, and put in his baggage a bronze cauldron, which his plan could not do without.
[p. 263] “I have given the worm molten tin, and the power and the fury of Heftwad are broken.”
Notes
- Mohl reads the Persian poem, not the Kārnāmag. The two metals on p. 260 are plomb (lead) and étain (tin); the pot is bronze. On p. 263 Ardeschir says only “étain fondu”, molten tin. Warner (1912, p. 242) has “lead and solder” and “a brazen pot” for the same line, and “boiling lead” two pages on.
- On pp. 247 to 248 the apple, the worm and the spinning girl appear: “un ver caché au milieu” of the fruit, and the girl says she will spin “grâce à l’étoile du ver de la pomme”. This page was read only in the library’s OCR, so we do not quote it on the site.
- Mohl’s preface p. v, after the passage above, cites a report he says he saw at the Ministry of Commerce about thirty years earlier, in which Breton spinners made a legend of a fairy called Machine who had seven steel fingers. He uses it as a modern parallel for a spinners’ tale about a machine, which is his argument for the Heftwad story as an industrial legend.