Erin And Iran

In <i>Erin and Iran,</i> ten essays by North American and European scholars discuss parallel themes in and interactions between Irish and Iranian cultures. In the first section three essays explore common elements in pre-Christian Irish and pre-Islamic Iranian mythologies, common elements that have often been pointed out by scholars of Indo-European mythology but rarely examined in detail. In the following section four essays address literary subjects, ranging from medieval romances such as <i>Tristan and Isolde</i> and <i>Vis and Ramin</i> to twentieth-century novels such as James Joyce¿s <i>Ulysses</i> and Simin Daneshvar¿s <i>Savushun</i>. In the last section three nineteenth-century travelogues are presented, two written by Irish travelers to Iran and one written by an Indo-Persian traveler to Ireland. Together, these studies constitute the first-ever collection of articles dealing with cultural encounters between the Irish and the Iranians.