Ibn Arabshah: “The Winter and Timur”

GOETHE WAS MOVED to include a “Book of Timur” in the West-Eastern Divan after encountering the work of Ibn Arabshah (Muhammad Ibn Arabshah, 1389–1450), an Arabian author during the period of the Mamlukes. He composed a satirical history of Timur, that is, Tamerlane (1336–1405). Goethe came upon a famous episode of this work in rhyming Arabic prose, accompanied by a translation into Latin, in William Jones’s Poeseos Asiaticae, of which Goethe owned a copy. This text inspired him to write “The Winter and Timur” (“Der Winter und Timur”), the balladesque poem constituting most of the “Book of Timur.” He wrote the poem while in Jena on 11 December 1814. His reading notes relating to Ibn Arabshah are based on Jones’s work and Herbelot’s Bibliotheque orientale and were likely written down shortly before the poem’s composition: “† 1450. / Ben Arabshah / An Arab / The Story of Timur / Two Parts / [the first] Concerning Timur / [the second] Concerning his nephew / Khalil Soltan. / Agiaib al macdur fi / akhbar Timur (in French). The wondrous workings / of God’s will / in the chronicle / of Timur.” The note’s first ten lines, the date of the poet’s death, the spelling of his name, and his nationality are based on Jones’s Poeseos Asiaticae, as Goethe indicated in a marginal note (omitted here) in which the brief description of the work and its title in Arabic appeared; Herbelot’s Bibliotheque orientale provided the translation of the title.

We do not know whether or how intensively Goethe studied the two volumes of Tamerlane’s biography, one of the earliest works of Arabic literature to become known in the West. For generations, until well into the nineteenth century, Ibn Arabshah’s biography of Tamerlane was required reading for Arabian students. Jones included the section that was to interest Goethe so greatly in his Poeseos Asiaticae in 1774, which Eichhorn translated and published in 1777.

Ibn Arabshah was not a historian in the ordinary sense, as he did not write his poetically inspired history of Tamerlane sine ira et studio but rather in quest of vengeance.