The King–Hero Opposition in Selected Kurdish Folktales from Iran: A Structural and Ecocritical Reading

This study employs a descriptive-analytical-documentary method to examine the structural and thematic opposition between the king and the hero in a selected corpus of Kurdish folktales from Iranian Kurdistan. Drawing on primary sources including the collections of Lescot (1991), Rudanko (2011), and Sesil and Sesil (2007), the research analyzes a number of tales that feature a king or ruling figure in opposition to a protagonist. The analytical framework integrates Vladimir Propp's morphological model—used selectively as a heuristic tool—with an ecocritical interpretation of symbolic tensions between royal authority and folk agency. Findings reveal a recurrent tripartite structural pattern—confrontation, mediation, and resolution—in several examined tales, where the hero frequently challenges or exposes the limits of royal power through supernatural abilities (khārq-e 'ādat), wit, or moral integrity. The analysis suggests that these narratives may reflect concerns about authority, social inequality, and the relationship between local agency and centralized power. The study also explores underexplored gender dynamics, noting that heroines like Fatili operate within different narrative constraints than their male counterparts. The study concludes that the king–hero dynamic, while not uniform across the corpus, systematically encodes aspects of a cultural worldview in the selected materials, contributing to structural folkloristics, Middle Eastern narrative studies, and ecocritical literary analysis. Suggestions for future research include expanding the corpus to include tales from Iraqi and Turkish Kurdistan, employing quantitative methods, and conducting comparative studies with Persian, Armenian, and Turkish oral traditions.