LABID is the only one of these poets who embraced Islam. His Moiallaqa, however, like almost all his other poetical works, belongs to the Pagan period. He is said to have lived till 661, or even later; certainly it is true of him, what is asserted with less likelihood of several others of these poets, that he lived to a ripe old age.
The seven Motallaqat, and also the poems appended to them, represent almost every type of ancient Arabian poetry in its excellences and its weaknesses. In order rightly to appreciate these, we must translate ourselves into the world of the Bedouin, and seek to realize the peculiar conditions of his life, together with the views and thoughts resulting from those conditions. In the Motallaqa of Tarafa we are repelled by the long, anatomi cally exact description of his camel; but such a description had an extraordinary charm of its own for the Bedouins, every man of whom was a perfect connoisseur on this subject down to the minutest points; and the remaining parts of the poem, together with the other extant fragments of his songs, show that Tarafa had a real poetic gift. In the Motallaq5,t of 'Amr and klarith, for the preservation of which we are especially grateful to the com piler, we can read the haughty spirit of the powerful chieftains, boastfully celebrating the splendours of their tribe. These two poems have also ascertain historical importance. The song of Zuhair contains the practical wisdom of a sober man of the world. The other poems are fairly typical examples of the customary qa.lida, the long poem of ancient Arabia, and bring before us the various phases of Bedouin life.
It is a phenomenon which deserves the fullest recognition, that the needy inhabitants of a barren country should thus have produced an artistic poetry distinguished by so high a degree of uniformity. Even the extraordinary strict metrical system, ob served by poets who had no inkling of theory and no knowledge of an alphabet, excites surprise. In the most ancient poems the metrical form is as scrupulously regarded as in later corn positions. The only poem which shows unusual metrical freedom is the song of (Abid. It is, however, remarkable that eAbid's contemporary Amra'al-Qais, in a poem which in other respects also exhibits certain coincidences with that of tAbid (No. 55, ed. Ahlwardt), allows himself considerable licence in the use of the very same metre—one which, moreover, is extremely rare in the ancient period. Presumably, the violent deviations from the schema in tAbid are due simply to incorrect transmission by com pilers who failed to grasp the metre. The other poems ascribed to (Abid, together with all the rest attributed to Amra'al-Qais, are constructed in precise accord with the metrical canons. It is necessary always to bear in mind that these ancient poems, which for a century or more were preserved by oral tradition alone, have reached us in a much mutilated condition. Fortunately, there was a class of men who made it their special business to learn by rote the works either of a single poet or of several.
The poets themselves used the services of these rhapsodists (rawi). The last representative of this class is Hammad, to whom is attributed the collection of the Moeallaq5,t; but he, at the same time, marks the transition of the rhapsodist to the critic and scholar. The most favourable opinion of the rhapsodists would require us to make allowance for occasional mistakes: expressions would be transposed, the order of verses disarranged, passages omitted, and probably portions of different poems pieced together. It is clear, however, that Hammad dealt in the most arbitrary fashion with the enormous quantity of poetry which he professed to know thoroughly. The seven Moeallaqat are indeed free from the suspicion of forgery, but even in them the text is frequently altered and many verses are transposed. The loose structure of Arabic poems was extremely favourable to such alterations. Some of the Motallaqat have several preambles : so, especially, that of `Amr, the first eight verses of which belong not to the poem but to another poet. Elsewhere, also, we find spurious verses in the Moeallaqat. Some of these poems, which have been handed down to us in other exemplars besides the collection itself, exhibit great divergences both in the order and number of the verses and in textual details. This is particularly the case with the oldest Moiallaqa—that of Amra'al-Qais—the critical treat ment of which is a problem of such extreme difficulty that only an approximate solution can ever be reached. The variations of the text, outside the Mocallaqat collection, have here and there exercised an influence on the text of that collection. It would be well if our manuscripts at least gave the Molallaqat in the exact form of kiammad's days. The best text—in fact, we may say, a really good text—is that of the latest Moiallaqa, the song of Labid.
The Mo'allaqat exist in many manuscripts, some with old commen taries, of which a few are valuable. They have also been several times printed. Especial mention is due to the edition of Charles (afterwards Sir Charles) Lyall with the commentary of Tibrizi (Calcutta, 1894). Attempts to translate these poems, verse for verse, in poetical form, could scarcely have a happy result. The strangeness, both of the expression and of the subjects, only admits of a para phrastic version for large portions, unless the sense is to be entirely obliterated. An attempt at such a translation, in conjunction with a commentary based on the principles of modern science, has been made by the present author: "Fiinf Mo'allaqat iibersetzt and erklart," in the Sitzungsberichte der kais. Akad. d. Wiss. in Wien. Classe. Bde. cxl.–cxiv. A supplement to this is formed by an article, by Dr. Bernh. Geiger, on the Mo'allaqa of Tarafa, in the Wiener Zeitschrift fur die Kunde des Morgenlands, xix. 323 sqq. See further the separate articles on the seven poets. (TH. N.; X.)