Omar Khayaam

Rubā‘ī C 134 from the Calcutta MS

[Image source: from Edward Heron-Allen (2), link below.]

AWAKE! for Morning in the Bowl of Night

Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:

    And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught

The Sultán's Turret in a Noose of Light.

(Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, 1st edition, 1859)

WAKE! For the Sun who scatter'd into flight

The Stars before him from the Field of Night,

   Drives Night along with them from Heav'n,                                                                    and strikes

The Sultan's Turret with a Shaft of Light.

(Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, 4th edition, 1879. Unchanged in the posthumous 5th edition.)

The Sun casts the noose of morning upon the roofs,

Kai Khosrū of the day, he throws a stone into the bowl:

Drink wine! for the Herald of the Day, rising up,

Hurls into the days the cry of "Drink ye!"

(Edward Heron-Allen's literal translation of Rubā‘ī C 134, 1899)

The sun doth smite the roofs with Orient ray.

And, Khosrau like, his wine-red sheen display;

    Arise, and drink! the herald of the dawn

Uplifts his voice, and cries, "O drink to-day!"

(Edward Henry Whinfield's 1883 translation, 233 in his numbering)

While Dawn, Day's herald straddling the whole sky,

Offers the drowsy world a toast 'To Wine',

The Sun spills early gold on city roofs –

Day's regal Host, replenishing his jug.

(Robert Graves and Omar Ali-Shah, The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam, 1967)

*

Kai Khosrū or Kay Khosrow, a legendary king of Iran whose story is told in the Shahnahmeh. He was brought up in exile in the desert. He avenged the murder of his father Siavash, ruled for sixty years, and finally disappeared mysteriously into the mountains. In this rubā‘ī he figures, presumably, as an embodiment of kingship: it's simply a fancy way of saying that the sun is the king of the day. Kay Khosrow turns up again in another rubā‘ī (Fitzgerald 1st edition 9, Graves/Ali-Shah 9)

Throwing a stone in the bowl. According to Heron-Allen it was a Bedouin signal to strike camp. No more drinking, so to speak? But the Calcutta MS is anomalous: most other texts of this rubā‘ī throw "wine" (badeh) rather than a "stone" (sakhareh) into the bowl, a much better  fit with the rest of the quatrain. I suppose that's why Fitzgerald rejigged his opening stanza but, reluctant to lose all the energy of that summons to physical movement, made it even less of a translation. Whinfield is surely right to see the image as wine-colour in the bowl of the sky: a pink sunrise.  

[Image source: from Robert Graves and Omar Ali-Shah, The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam (1967), p. 72. This is the same rubā‘ī as C 134, but with the word "wine" (badeh) instead of "stone" (sakhareh).]

*

Omar Khayyam (or "Khayaam", in Graves and Ali-Shah), 1048 - 1131, philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, from Nishapur (NE Iran, not far from the borders with Turkmenistan and Afghanistan). 

In his 1174 anthology of Arabic poetry Kharidat al-qasr (Pearl Pendant of the Palace), Imad al-Din al-Isfahani for the first time describes Omar as a poet and quotes four short Arabic poems. 

But the poems with which Omar is associated all over the world are quatrains in Persian (Rubā‘iyāt). These Rubā‘iyāt were independent, pithy, memorable poems that were at first orally shared. It was a popular form, I suppose, somewhat comparable to haiku in Japan or bayati in Azerbaijan. Over time a good many Rubā‘iyāt were attributed to Omar. Perhaps they were the ones especially characterized by a sceptical flavour, appropriate to a renowned philosopher in the Greek tradition. The upshot is an "Omarian" literature, around 1200 quatrains in all. The main manuscripts are diwans, implying the collected work of a single author (what's more, one who constantly refers to himself by name), but their contents vary enormously. It's possible that the historical mathematician Omar didn't write a single one of these poems. But supposing he did, was it half a dozen, thirty-five, a hundred, 250? Readers and scholars have had many different impressions of a more authentic or central core.

What many have sought, Omar Ali-Shah claimed to possess. A twelfth-century manuscript of "uncontradictable authority" containing 111 Rubā‘iyāt. Reading his words (p. 32), you have the feeling that Ali-Shah hardly expected anyone to believe this, noting that at any rate the chosen 111 quatrains were all in one or more of the older manuscripts in  libraries (manuscripts, in other words, that demonstrably exist). Whether his co-translator Robert Graves fully grasped the rules of the game is rather an open question.  But both translators wanted to fashion Omar anew, that is, to reclaim the poetry from what they saw as Edward Fitzgerald's imposition of 19th-century scepticism and hedonism. The idea that Fitzgerald had misrepresented Omar had been around a long time. Fitzgerald himself remarked (preface to Third Edition): 

While the second Edition of this version of Omar was preparing, Monsieur Nicolas, French Consul at Resht, published a very careful and very good Edition of the Text, from a lithograph copy at Teheran, comprising 464 Rubaiyat, with translation and notes of his own.

Mons. Nicolas, whose Edition has reminded me of several things, and instructed me in others, does not consider Omar to be the material Epicurean that I have literally taken him for, but a Mystic, shadowing the Deity under the figure of Wine, Wine-bearer, &c., as Hafiz is supposed to do; in short, a Sufi Poet like Hafiz and the rest.

I cannot see reason to alter my opinion. . .

(Referring to Jean-Baptiste Nicolas, Les Quatrains de Khèyam (1867), link below.)

E. H. Whinfield remarked, in the Introduction to his own 1883 translation: 

European critics, like his contemporaries, mostly consider him an infidel and a voluptuary "of like mind with Sardanapalus." On the other hand, the Sufis have contrived to affix mystical and devotional meanings even to his most Epicurean quatrains; and this method of interpretation is nowadays as universally accepted in Persia and India as the mystical interpretation of the Canticles is in Europe. But neither of these views can be accepted in its entirety. Even if the Sufi symbolism had been definitely formulated as early as Omar's time, which is very doubtful, common sense would forbid us to force a devotional meaning on the palpably Epicurean quatrains; and, on the other hand, unless we are prepared to throw over the authority of all the MSS., including the most ancient ones, we must reckon with the obviously mystical and devotional quatrains. The essential contradiction in the tone and temper of these two sections of Omar's poetry cannot be glossed over, but imperatively calls for explanation.

*

A great deal depends on whether the Omarian poems came from a wine-drinking culture or a teetotal one. A simple question, not so easy to answer conclusively. If nobody drank wine but everyone wrote about it, then yes, it probably signified something else.  

It's a kind of debate that I recognize from my student days, when I was navigating the literature of medieval Christendom. Our favourite poets (Chaucer, Gottfried, Chrétien, Marie de France, Guillaume de Lorris) so often seemed daring, heterodox, rebellious... We were thrilled and a bit taken aback by their seeming failure to comply with the orthodoxy of a very authoritarian age. But were we hopelessly deluded, selectively picking out what spoke to our own Age of Faithlessness, ignorant of the tremendous sophistication of a very different culture, addicted to literalism and averse to allegory, surely the fundamental tool of the imaginative artist in that era of the Ovide Moralisé? Those were the questions raised by D.W. Robertson, Jr and his colleagues. Whether their own interpretations were any better than ours was a moot point, but the methodological issue couldn't be dodged. Since it was medieval poetry we were reading, what did that mean for how we go about reading it? We lived in a time when intuitive common sense was constantly being proved wrong: in psychology, biology, economics, to name but three glaring examples. So why would we continue to trust our common-sense intuitions when reading the poetry of a very different culture? 

*

Graves and Ali-Shah were offering a counter-Fitzgerald, but their poem owes a lot to his, in particular the sequence. 

Most real Persian manuscripts present their quatrains in Diwan order*, that is, alphabetical order of the final letter of the end-rhyme of lines 1, 2 and 4. It's a handy way to find a specific rub'ai if you can only remember one line. It wouldn't work in English, where words that rhyme often end in different letters (mist/kissed, sun/done, fly/high...).

So it was Fitzgerald himself who chose to begin with a quatrain about the dawn that he picked out of the Calcutta manuscript (C 134 in Heron-Allen's numbering). Fitzgerald was constructing a meditation-cum-elegy that would begin in the hopeful dawn, ponder metaphysics in a noon garden, and reserve its most searching and desolate summations for dusk. Yet Ali-Shah's purported 800-year-old manuscript turned out to be in virtually the same sequence as the one Fitzgerald himself had constructed; dawn at the beginning, the garden, the musings of the pots, the fall of night... 

*

Except that the Graves/Ali-Shah version doesn't end with the starkness of Khayyam's empty glass, but in a more pious state of fragile hope. 

LXXV

And when Thyself with shining Foot shall pass
Among the Guests Star-scatter'd on The Grass,
   And in Thy joyous Errand reach the Spot
Where I made one—turn down an empty Glass!

TAMÁM SHUD.

(Final stanza of Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, 1st edition, 1859.)

CI.

 And when like her, oh Saki, you shall pass
 Among the Guests Star-scatter'd on the Grass,
   And in your joyous errand reach the spot
 Where I made One--turn down an empty Glass!

TAMAM.

(Final stanza of Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, 4th edition, 1879. Unchanged in the posthumous 5th edition.)

107

Sweet friends, in joy assembled here together,

Never forget us, once your sweetest friends.

Before you greet the jug, Khayaam adjures you:

When his turn comes, turn down his empty bowl.

108

Khayaam, who stitched the hides for Wisdom's tent

Has tumbled in Grief's clutches. He lies burning;

The shears of Death have closed upon his guys

And Hope the Broker sells him for a song.

109

Fools, with damnation as your destiny,

Sentenced to fuel the eternal fires of Hell, 

How long will you still plead for Omar's pardon,

Nudging his mercy from the Merciful?

110

Though pearls in praise of God I never strung,

Though dust of sin lies clotted on my brow,

Yet will I not despair of mercy. When

Did Omar argue that the One was Two?

111

The palace with huge walls soaring to Heaven,

Where prostrate Kings did reverence at the gate –

A ring-dove perches on its battlements;

'Where, where?' it coos, 'where, where?'

(Final five stanzas of Robert Graves and Omar Ali-Shah, The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam, 1967.)

TAMÁM SHUD, TAMAM: FINIS.

Though pearls in praise of God...  This is the first rubā‘ī in the 15th-century Ouseley MS in the Bodleian Library; like some other diwan collections, the Ouseley MS starts with a couple of praise poems that are not in diwan sequence. (See Edward Heron-Allen (1)). The Ouseley MS was Fitzgerald's main source of rubā‘iyāt, but he made no use of this first one; evidently he thought it was spurious (see his Preface to the 5th edition). Graves and Ali-Shah, on the other hand, positioned it so it would resound in the departing reader's ear. Perhaps Ali-Shah had in mind the story told by al-Shahrazuri (13th century CE), that Omar on the day of his death left his gold toothpick as a place-marker in  Avicenna's account of The One and the Many; see Robert Arnot for a translation. Juan Cole suggests that the "two" is an allusion to Zoroastrianism, which was often accused (inaccurately) of dualism. (All links below.)

The palace with huge walls... Fitzgerald translated this rub'ai in his 2nd edition (quatrain 20), but subsequently dropped the idea. 

*

The five editions of Edward Fitzgerald's poem, on Wikisource.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Rubaiyat_of_Omar_Khayyam_(tr._Fitzgerald)

The first and fifth editions, on Project Gutenberg.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/246/246-h/246-h.htm

Jean-Baptiste Nicolas, Les Quatrains de Khèyam, 1867. His 464 quatrains don't include a parallel to C 134, as far as I can see. 

https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Quatrains_de_Kh%C3%A8yam

Edward Henry Whinfield, The Quatrains of Omar Khayyám: The Persian Text with an English Verse Translation, 1883. Selects 500 quatrains from various sources. 

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Quatrains_of_Omar_Khayyam_(tr._Whinfield,_1883)

Edward Heron-Allen (1), The Ruba'iyat of Omar Khayyām: Being A Facsimile of the Manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, with a Transcript into Modern Persian Characters; Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, and Some Sidelights upon Edward Fitzgerald's Poem, by Edward Heron-Allen (2nd Edition, 1898).

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=pqNfHgsRvHEC&pg=PR22&dq=edward+heron-allen+ouseley&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjcitG_z7GWAxUsR0EAHdubLLIQuwV6BAgLEAg#v=onepage&q=edward%20heron-allen%20ouseley&f=false

Edward Heron-Allen (2), Edward Fitzgerald's Rubâ‘iyât of Omar Khayyâm, With their Original Persian Sources Collated from his Own MSS., and Literally Translated (1899).

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Ahe95OSJZ1MC&printsec=frontcover&dq=edward+heron-allen+rubaiyat&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

On Omar Khayyam in Sufi culture I learnt a lot from Robert Arnot's General Introduction to The Sufistic Quatrains of Omar Khayyam (1903). I can't find out anything about Robert Arnot, except that he had an MA and had previously written a study of "The Vine in Symbolism". He was presumably American. I was delighted to discover this book on Project Gutenberg. And since it contains all the quatrains translated by Fitzgerald, Heron-Allen, Whinfield and Nicolas (the latter retranslated into English), it's also a handy way to search them all at once!

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38511/38511-h/38511-h.htm

Also on Omar and Sufism, check out this recent and excellent paper by Ali Yansori, "Theology of Play in Omar Khayyam: Unacknowledged Parallels Between Hinduism, Persian Sufism, and Khayyam’s Quatrains" (2024):

https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/15/10/1266

Juan Cole on the Rubā‘iyāt of Omar Khayyam (interview with Mitch Jeserich):

https://www.juancole.com/2025/04/history-rubaiyat-khayyam.html

Juan Cole is a recent translator of the Ouseley MS (though like Fitzgerald he ignores the first rub'ai, reckoning it's an imposition). Here he outlines his own plausible if speculative ideas about the Rubā‘iyāt; the poems were anonymous and by many hands, some popular and some courtly.  The notion of constructing a corpus attached to the name of Omar Khayyam really took off in the 15th century CE, when Persia was under Mongol rule and relatively liberal in terms of religious orthodoxy. The Rubā‘ī form had evolved earlier, but is not in Old Persian; perhaps it owed something, both in form and content, to Chinese influence along the Silk Road.

On the Rubā‘ī form in Persian literature:

https://kamaustine.com/2025/08/19/what-are-persian-quatrains-rubaiyat/

*

Visiting my mum and dad's I took new interest in the Rubā‘iyāt in their bookcase. It was a Folio Society edition from 1955, containing Fitzgerald's first version but with the four miniatures below. 

The miniatures were taken from a manuscript of the Rubā‘iyāt originating in Herat and dated 911 AH (1505-1506 CE). The manuscript, in the collection of the scholar S. Najib Ashraf Nadvi, was a recent discovery; a facsimile was published by M. Mahfuz-ul-Haq in 1939. Apparently it's the only early text of the Rubā‘iyāt to have illustrations. They are of the school of (but probably not by) the celebrated miniaturist Behzād. 

I found some of this information in an interesting article by William H. Martin and Sandra Mason:

https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/khayyam-omar/khayyam-omar-v-illustrations-of-english-translations-of-the-rubaiyat/

*

Suddenly his eyes lit up. He went back toward his disciples, and then turned towards the crowd triumphantly and shouted, 'By God, how did I not recognize Omar, son of Ibrahim Khayyam of Nishapur? Omar, the star of Khorassan, the genius of Persia and Mesopotamia, the prince of philosophers!'

As he mimed a deep bow, he fluttered his fingers on both sides of his turban and succeeded in drawing out the guffaws of the onlookers. 'How did I not recognize the man who composed such a pious and devotional rubai:

  You have broken my jug of wine, Lord.

You have barred me from the path of pleasure, Lord.

  You have spilt my ruby wine on the ground.

God forgive me, but perchance you are drunk, Lord.

Omar listened indignantly, but worried. This provocation could provide an excuse for murder on the spot. Without wasting a second, he shot back his response in a loud, clear voice lest anyone in the crowd be fooled. 'I do not recognize this quatrain. Indeed this is the first time I have ever heard it. But here is a rubai which I myself have composed:

They know nothing, neither do they desire to know.

  Men with no knowledge who rule the world!

   If you are not of them, they call you infidel

    Ignore them, Khayyam, go your own way.

Omar really should not have accompanied the words 'men with no knowledge' with a scornful gesture toward his opponents. Hands came at him, grabbing his robe which started to rip. He tottered, his back struck someone's knee and then landed on a paving stone ....

(Amin Maalouf, Samarkand Ch 1, translation by Russell Harris)

Both these manuscripts, the unseen one purportedly belonging to the Shah family and the illustrated one belonging to Professor Nadvi, look like they fed into Amin Maalouf's fabulously wide-ranging historical novel Samarcande (1989). Here the premise is that Omar Khayyam's own handwritten manuscript, with illustrations and an accompanying biography of its author, survives unknown almost into modern times. The first half retells Khayyam's story, supposedly based on this biography (actually interweaving history, the old legend of the Three Schoolfellows, and the author's own invention). The second half tells how the fabled manuscript is tracked down and eventually read by the novel's American narrator and his lover the Persian princess Shireen, but is lost for ever when the Titanic goes down. (This unrepentant garnish of Hollywood-style romance invites us into a shared meditation on Persian history; in the wake of the 1979 Iranian revolution, the novel asserts that the history concerns everyone and belongs to everyone; that Iran and the wider world are a single question.) 

*

* Diwan:  an important word across the Middle East, with numerous meanings. The basic one is "register", related to the ancient Sumerian word dub ("clay tablet"). It was thus used to mean a collection of poems, as in this post. But as a register of citizens it also came to mean the collective ministries of central government (e.g. Persian, Ottoman empires), hence e.g. a family council, an assembly room. It lies behind the English word divan (low couch) and the French word douane (customs house). 

*

Medieval European literature: exegetical methodologies, contrasted with new critical methodology.

I found a lively outline of this debate in Paul A. Olson's 2017 Foreword to D.W Robertson Jr's Uncollected Essays.  

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1188&context=englishfacpubs

moonset and moonrise (literary)

It was the absence of a moon in the evening that made Jupiter shine so brilliantly last week. (On Sept 21st Jupiter was at its brightest for 47 years.) But anyway, here are some moon observations from the Brief History.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), from "Strange Fits of Passion" (1799):

Upon the moon I fixed my eye,
All over the wide lea;
With quickening pace my horse drew nigh
Those paths so dear to me.

And now we reached the orchard plot;
And, as we climbed the hill,
The sinking moon to Lucy’s cot
Came near, and nearer still.

Wordsworth wrote the Lucy poems while in Germany.

The moon sets every day, but we don’t often see it do so. Canonical literature, so loquacious about sunsets, virtually ignores the existence of moonsets, except in this poem.

We most usually notice the moon when it’s full, and we draw each other's attention to the big (or apparently big) moonrise that occurs soon after sunset. A moonset near the full, however, would occur around dawn, the coldest part of the night; when (at least in temperate climes) we tend to sleep on, and even if we happen to be out and about the spectacle of moonset is probably lost in the mist (if not in broad daylight). The most impressive moonset I've seen was a lazy moon on a cold winter night which became yellower and bigger, and finally just after midnight a smoky red as it dropped into the west. So rarely have I noticed a moonset in my fifty years that it hadn't really occurred to me that the setting moon must often go through the same colour changes as the setting sun.

If the moon is going to set earlier in the evening, not too many hours after sunset, it must be a brand-new sliver of a moon, which is probably not what most readers envisage while they're reading Wordsworth's poem. Yet evening, we imagine, is when the action takes place.

However, the hill makes a difference. After crossing the “wide lea”, with the moon spreading its light, the lover starts to ascend rather sharply, and “Lucy’s cot” is on a ridge. Thus the moon could seem to “set” when still comparatively high in the sky. Wordsworth had often noticed the sharpness of Lakeland’s high night-horizons, and e.g. famously written of how “the stars moved along the edges of the hills”.

My horse moved on; hoof after hoof
He raised, and never stopped:
When down behind the cottage roof,
At once, the bright moon dropped.

To realize the emotional charge of this, it’s worth going out on a suitable clear evening and making it happen. The roof should be quite close, perhaps less than a hundred meters away; it happens just as the lover arrives. The moon falls “at once” because it is the lover’s own relatively rapid approach, not the moon’s descent, that causes it to drop out of sight. In those nights without any streetlights, the instantaneous change in the light would have been dramatic. If you are suitably sensitized, it still can cause a shiver.

*

A graveyard in moonlight, engraving by Thomas Bewick for his History of British Birds, Vol II (Water Birds), 1804).

[Image source: British Museum .]

In the opening pages of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë says (of the above Bewick engraving): "I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quite solitary churchyard with its inscribed headstone; its gate, its two trees, its low horizon, girdled by a broken wall, and its newly risen crescent, attesting the hour of even-tide." In fact a crescent moon rises either early in the day (if waxing) or late in the night (if waning). The sharp crescent moon we see in the evening is not newly risen, it just seems that way because we only notice it when it gets dark; actually, it's getting ready to set. As for Charlotte's assertion that the crescent-shape implies even-tide, she's right in this case, because it's a waxing moon (horns pointing to the left); but a waning crescent would mean it's near dawn. 

And at the beginning of Chapter 5, the young Jane Eyre is leaving Mrs Reed's house for Lowood. "Five o'clock had hardly struck on the morning of the 19th of January, when Bessie brought a candle into my closet and found me already up and nearly dressed. I had risen half an hour before her entrance, and had washed my face, and put on my clothes by the light of a half-moon just setting, whose ray streamed through the narrow window near my crib." Well, wrong again! A waxing half-moon would have set at midnight; a waning half moon would still be on the rise. But a moon that sets some time between 5 and 6 in the morning (as we are later informed) would have to be almost a full moon - say, 90%. Here, and later (e.g. Chapter 9), Charlotte Brontë registers what a significant aid moonlight was for getting things done in the hours of darkness. There was more reason in those days for noticing the moon; evidently this didn't necessarily mean observing it. It's tempting to make more of these small inaccuracies than they probably merit: to be struck by the mixture, in Charlotte Brontë, of very close observation - we have just read the wonderful description of pine-tree debris clotted together by frost - combined with a certain proud inattentiveness to fact. It's no wonder to be ignorant of the moon's movements, but it does seem remarkable for someone to be so aware of the moon as a mobile creature and yet not to know its patterns. And I can't resist connecting this with how long the author had been satisfied with her Angrian settings of a Yorkshire landscape in Africa, in total defiance of what we suppose she must have known of African climates. Naturalism was a cloak she learnt to put on, but her imagination was always busy with other things than naturalism.

*

Perhaps the same can be claimed for the poet Charlotte Smith, though she was certainly a strikingly observant naturalist. 

And yet she has this stanza in her "Studies by the sea":

  What glories on the sun attend,

  When the full tides of evening flow,

  Where in still changing beauty, blend

  With amber light, the opal's glow;

  While in the east the diamond bow

  Rises in virgin lustre bright,

  And from the horizon seems to throw,

  A partial line of trembling light

To the hush'd shore; and all the tranquil deep

Beneath the modest moon, is sooth'd to sleep.

The issue here is "the diamond bow": that, I feel, has to mean a crescent moon. 

But crescent moons don't rise in the evening: full moons do. 

I feel sure that Charlotte Smith knew that. But somehow she was willing to have it both ways. To flood her seascape not with a mere orb but with a dazzling, impossible crescent. 

*

But a proud inattentiveness to fact isn't the right explanation for an even more affronting sentence, from a famous scene in Scott's The Heart of Midlothian:

As our heroine approached this ominous and unhallowed spot, she paused and looked to the moon, now rising broad in the north-west, and shedding a more distinct light than it had afforded during her walk thither. Eyeing the planet for a moment, she then slowly and fearfully turned her head towards the cairn, from which it was at first averted.

(Ch 14)

In this case, "north-west" is evidently just a slip of the pen: Scott meant to write "north-east", which is about where the full moon does rise. This is confirmed by what he adds straight afterwards: the moonlight had been obscured during Jeanie's walk from St Leonard’s (because of the ridge to the north of Arthur's Seat), but now that she's arrived at Muschat's Cairn, which is at the extreme north of Holyrood Park, her view to the north-east is uninterrupted. 

*

Here's a passage from the English translation of Amin Maalouf's 1989 novel Samarkand that got me puzzling:

That night, when he went back toward the belvedere which was serving him as a house, Khayyam did not take a lamp with him, telling himself that it was too late to read or write. However, his path was only faintly illuminated by the moon, a frail crescent at the end of the month of shawwal. As he walked further from the qadi's villa....  (p. 30)

Earlier, we heard that it's three weeks after Ramadan (the month that precedes Shawwal), but perhaps that shouldn't be interpreted too precisely. These are lunar months, each beginning with the first sight of the new moon. So now, if we were exactly at the start of the fourth quarter, the moon would be a half moon, but since we're told it's a crescent it must be a few days later. And this also means that it must be a long way through the night; 4 am, say.

I can't positively assert that there's any mistake but all the other indications are that this scene takes place in the middle of the night, not shortly before dawn. (Omar finds Jahan waiting for him in the belvedere. . .)

*

Finally, a poem that's very definitely observation. It may be titled "Moonset", but I'm not sure because the anthology where I found it sometimes makes up its own titles. 

Idles the night wind through the dreaming firs,

   That waking murmur low,

As some lost melody returning stirs

   The love of long ago;

And through the far, cool distance, zephyr fanned,

The moon is sinking into shadow-land.

The first stanza of three. It's by E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) (1861 - 1914). A Canadian poet, popular in her lifetime, she was born on the Six Nations Indian Reserve in Canada West (Ontario), the daughter of an Englishwoman and a Mohawk chief.