A 12th-century Georgian epic poem, considered one of the greatest achievements of Georgian literature. Set across fictionalized Arabia, India, and Persia, it weaves themes of friendship, love, and devotion into an allegorical masterpiece.
The poet
Shota Rustaveli (c. 1160–after 1220) is Georgia's national poet. He served at the court of Queen Tamar and is best known for this single surviving epic, which has been called the Georgian national epic and a masterpiece of medieval literature. The poem's allegorical frame—set in fictionalized India, Arabia, and Persia—reflects the cosmopolitan culture of the Georgian Golden Age.
The Shairi verse form
The poem is written in shairi — quatrains of sixteen-syllable lines with a caesura dividing each line into two equal halves. All four lines of each stanza share the same end-rhyme. This demanding form, sustained across more than 1,600 stanzas, is part of what makes the poem a virtuoso achievement of medieval literature. In the Georgian reader mode, each stanza preserves this authentic four-line structure.
Manuscript history
No 12th-century original manuscript survives. The oldest known copy dates to 1646. King Vakhtang VI produced a critical edition in 1712 using three manuscripts (now lost). The text has been transmitted through centuries of scribal copying, which introduced variant readings and corruptions. Modern critical editions (notably those by Shanidze, Tsereteli, and others) attempt to reconstruct a reliable text from the surviving manuscript tradition.
This edition
This site is a modern, bilingual way to experience Georgia's national epic, with stable stanza links for reading, sharing, and citation. The English text is from the prose translation by Marjory Scott Wardrop (1912), which is in the public domain. Wardrop's translation ends at stanza 1600; the poem's final stanzas are available only in Georgian. The authentic Georgian text is from the critical edition hosted at poetry.ge and is complete across all 1,670 stanzas. The site is designed for readable, accessible long-form reading with annotations, illustrations, and bilingual toggles.
Wardrop's prose rendering is the only English translation in the public domain. It is valued for its scholarly fidelity, but as prose it does not convey the shairi verse form, rhyme, or rhythmic intensity of Rustaveli's Georgian. Several verse translations exist: Venera Urushadze (1968) rendered the poem in hexameter, Katherine Vivian (1977) and R.H. Stevenson (1977) each produced verse versions, and Lyn Coffin (2015) created the first English translation in the original sixteen-syllable shairi form. Readers seeking the poem as poetry are encouraged to seek out these editions or engage with the Georgian text directly.
Sources & editions
| English text | Marjory Scott Wardrop, prose translation (London, 1912). Public domain. Wardrop's translation covers stanzas 1–1600; the final 70 stanzas (chapters 46–47) were left untranslated at the time of her death in 1909 and are available in Georgian only. No other complete English translation is in the public domain. |
| Georgian text | Authentic Georgian text (1,670 quatrains) from the critical edition hosted at poetry.ge. All 48 sections (prologue + 47 chapters) are complete. In the “ქართული” reader mode, stanzas preserve the original four-line shairi form with canonical numbering (1–1670). |
| Parallel view | The side-by-side "Parallel" mode shows Wardrop’s English alongside a modern Georgian paraphrase aligned line-by-line. This paraphrase is not the original verse—it is provided for comparison only. For the authentic poem, use the “ქართული” mode. |
| Stanza numbering | Follows the continuous numbering of the Wardrop (1912) text. Chapter divisions match Wardrop. Stanza links use /chapter/{slug}#stanza-{n} or ?stanza={n}#stanza-{n}; both are stable and cite-safe. |
| Illustrations | Chapters 1–34: Mihály Zichy, 1888 illustrated edition (34 plates). Chapters 42–47: miniatures from the 1646 Tavakalashvili manuscript (H-599), the oldest surviving copy. Chapter 45: miniature from the 18th-century Tseretliseuli manuscript. All public domain via Wikimedia Commons. |
| Site version | Site version: pantherskin.org v1.1.0 (citations include this). |
Accessibility
We aim for WCAG 2.1 AA: adjustable font size and line spacing, light/dark/sepia themes, keyboard navigation, skip links, semantic headings, and screen-reader-friendly labels. Footnotes and annotations open in accessible popovers.
Translator's Preface (Wardrop, 1912)
This is an attempt to give a faithful rendering, word by word, of a book which is the mirror of the soul of a cultured people with a great past; the mirror is chipped and tarnished by time and mischance, but the loving labour of scholars may soon renew its lustre and repair some of its injuries. The history of the poem makes it worthy of perusal, for it has been in a unique manner the book of a nation for seven hundred years; down to our own days the young people learned it by heart; every woman was expected to know every word of it, and on her marriage to carry a copy of it to her new home. Such veneration shown for so long a period proves that the story of the Panther-clad Knight presents an image of the Georgian outlook on life, and justifies the presumption that merits tested by the experience of a quarter of a million days, most of them troublous, may be apparent to other races, that such a book may be of value to mankind.
It now becomes necessary to say something of the poet, though we have much less historical knowledge of him than of Shakespeare. His life seems to have lasted from 1172 to 1216. The personal name Shotʼha is said to be a form of Ashotʼha, and Rustʼhaveli means Rustʼhavian, man of Rustʼhavi — he was thus from the district of Akhaltzikhe. Tradition says he was educated at the church school of Rustʼhavi and various monasteries, and was then sent to Athens, Olympus, and Jerusalem. On his return he wrote Odes in honour of the sainted Queen Tʼhamara (a.d. 1184–1212), and as a reward was appointed treasurer at the brilliant court of that great and good sovereign, whose reign saw Georgiaʼs political power and literary culture at their highest point of achievement. The popular story tells how, hopelessly in love with his queen, he retired to the monastery of Holy Rood at Jerusalem, where, on a pillar over a portrait, is the inscription: “May God pardon Shotʼha, the painter of this. Amen. Rustʼhaveli.”
The oldest manuscript is said to be an undated parchment; another copy, on paper, is alleged to be of the year 1443; and a third is dated 1678. These were used by King Vakhtang VI. for his edition of 1712; but they have apparently been lost, and, so far as we know, there is no existing manuscript earlier than the seventeenth century, and none dated before 1646. It is most desirable that attention should be devoted to the purification of the text. The poem is written in quatrains of rhyming lines of sixteen syllables, with an accentuation dividing the lines into halves. It is meant to be sung to the “Davidic” harp. In the remoter parts of the country, minstrels may perhaps even now be heard chanting the story of Tariel.
The poem is a glorification of friendship, and the story is of the mutual aid of three starlike heroes wont to serve one another; even the gratification of the tenderest love must be postponed to this high duty; the betrothed, the newly-wedded, must part for this. Friendship is thus the main fact of life, the thing that makes it worth living; but its highest form is that noblest love of which some of the introductory quatrains treat. This is the divine frenzy, breathed only into the gentle, the fair, the wise, the brave, and the generous, unseating the charioteer Reason, transforming the lover into the divine likeness. It is a tender feeling, pure in its essence, hiding itself from the view of the world, needing not love in return, but enduring patiently the wrath of the beloved; it is changeless in its object, steadfast to the end. It is in this passion, relentless and beautiful like the panther whose coat he wears, that Tariel is wrapped.
When he wrote his poem, Rustʼhaveli had evidently no violent prejudice for one religion more than another, but was of a critical and eclectic turn of mind, and formed for himself a working philosophy of life, showing Persian and Arabian tendencies, but with so much of Christianity and Neo-Platonism as to bring it near to Occidental minds. There is throughout the poem manifest joy in life and action: God createth not evil; ill is fleeting; since there is gladness in the world, why should any be sad? It is after all a good world, fair to look upon despite its horrid deserts, a world to sing in either because one is happy or because one wishes to be so. The keynote is optimism quand même.
The English translation endeavours to present the authorʼs ideas and expressions with such fidelity that it may be of use to those who wish to read the original. This version was begun in Kent in 1891, and the first draft was completed at Kertch on November 1, 1898; but in spite of frequent revision and correction, carried on till December, 1909, it is imperfect, and the translator estimated that ten more years of study at least would be required to bring it to its final shape. Nevertheless, as it stands it is a contribution to Georgian studies in Europe, a stepping-stone to help others in a difficult task. Through the corruption of the text and the lack of critical editions and such lexicographic, grammatical, and philological aids as readers of other great literatures enjoy, there are many passages which seem incapable of satisfactory interpretation; these are rendered as literally as possible.
— Marjory Scott Wardrop, 1912 · Public Domain (Excerpted from the Preface to the 1912 London edition, as preserved on Wikisource)