In Erin and Iran, 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 Tristan and Isolde and Vis and Ramin to twentieth-century novels such as James Joyce’s Ulysses and Simin Daneshvar’s Savushun. 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.

In the mid-1920s, the Iranian state legislated a wide-ranging reform of the citizenry’s naming practices. Honorary titles and honorifics were abolished, family names were made obligatory, and an office for registering names and citizens’ life events (birth, marriage, divorce, and death) was established. The main motivation for this onomastic reform was conscription, which necessitated knowledge of young men’s ages, identities, and whereabouts. The introduction of conscription was itself part of the state-building efforts that followed the weakening of the central government induced by the First World War.

In Onomastic Reforms, H. E. Chehabi explains the traditional naming practices of Iranians before the reform, describes the public debates surrounding their obsolescence, traces the legislative measures and decrees that constituted the reform, and explores the ways Iranians chose or invented surnames for themselves.

This volume presents several articles and other writings of Sorour S. Soroudi (1938–2002), who taught in the Department of Iranian Studies at the Hebrew University for three decades. Soroudi’s research was concentrated in three main areas, all of which are well represented in this collection. First, Soroudi was an early specialist in modern Persian poetry, particularly that of the constitutional era; her studies and translations did much to bring this poetry to the attention of critics and scholars. Second, on the basis of extensive fieldwork as well as literary study, Soroudi contributed greatly to the study of Judeo-Persian literature and folk culture. Third, Soroudi explored the history and culture of Iranian Jewry, which she situated in the larger context of Iranian history. This volume, meticulously and sensitively edited by Houchang E. Chehabi, brings together many of Dr. Soroudi’s published articles in these two areas. Included in this book is a previously unpublished piece as well as an article that appears here in English for the first time.