The Lion-Leopard Fight in Shota Rustaveli's 'The Man in the Panther Skin'

• In Event: Current Issues in Eurasian Scholarship

Abstract

Beynen analyzes the lion-leopard fight in Shota Rustaveli's “The Man in the Panther Skin.” Rustaveli's poem is generally assumed to show the power of love or friendship. But in the middle of the poem we find a meeting between a lion and a leopard which begins as a courtship but then suddenly and without reason or explanation changes into a mortal fight. This fight is especially troubling since it seems to show that love can change into hate at a moment’s notice without reason, the opposite of the message of Shota’s poem. Beynen proposes that Konrad Lorenz's theory of aggression shows that no such contradiction exists

Author

• Bert Beynen, Temple U