Novel
Amiran-Darejaniani
ამირან-დარეჯანიანი
Anonymous · 1150
Synopsis
Abesalom, king of the Indians, is haunted by a portrait of knights accompanied by a message: these men delivered the daughter of the king of the Seas, held captive by the Kajis, a tribe of sorcerers. He finally finds the last survivor of the painting, Savarsamidze, who tells him of the expeditions of Amiran, son of Darejan, and his companions Nosar and Badri. Giants, dragons and champions follow one another; a woman's love is won by the sword and is only the pretext for still greater battles.
Context
The narrative, in twelve episodes, is framed by the king's visit to the old storyteller. Tradition attributes it to Mose Khoneli, a writer at the court of Tamar, though nothing establishes this. The text is preserved in late copies, in which the order of the parts varies; it was printed for the first time in 1896 by the self-taught bibliophile Zakaria Tchitchinadzé. Robert Horne Stevenson gave an annotated English translation of it in 1958, now digitised.
Who it is for
A prose work in twelve parts, with no French version; the English one can be read online. It is worth knowing that the sequence read is not always that of the copyists.
Prizes and reception
One of the works that herald, in the twelfth century, the birth of a secular literature in Georgian, and one of the great chivalric romances of the Georgian Middle Ages.