OMAR KHAYYAM.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10011, 6 April 1910, Page 4

OMAR KHAYYAM.

So much nonsense has been written j about Omar Khayyam that it ,is refreshing: to turn to the scholarly introduction which Dr K. Allena Nicholson has supplied to an illustrated edition of the Rubayat, newly issued by Messrs A. and C. Black. After this introduction has been read, it wili be recognised that there is "no room for such fanciful portraits of the pjet as have hitherto been customary. We know next tc nothing of his life or the society in which he moved, and the few authentic records do not take us far towards an intimate conception of his character." To draw his portrait from the poem is manifestly absurd, since about nine-tenths of the quatrains were composed by other hands, very few —perhaps only one or two—can be proved to be his own work, and there is no internal criterion by which we can distinguish his lines from the "wandering quatrains" which have found their way into the collection. That collection, as Dr NicholsoD truly says. »s "not the product of a single age, or of an individual mind, but the many-sided expression of a people's spiritual and intellectual life, the work of many poets, known and unknown, covering a period of six centuries." Omar Khayyam was an eminent astronomer, and reformed the calander; he was at Balkh in 1112, condescended to an astroJogic prediction of fair weather for a hunting expedition at Merv in 1114, and died about 1123. This is all that can be affirmed concerning him with any certainty on contemporary evidence.