Introduction to Hungarian Folktales

Dear Reader, you are now holding a very special and varied selection of folktales in your hands. In this volume, you will find many interesting old or indeed completely new pieces of Hungarian epic folklore from different areas. In addition to geographical diversity (Transylvania, Palócland or north-eastern Hungary), diverse fairy tale genres and a varied palette of different folktales are also presented. Discoveries of mostly nineteenth-century collections (materials by János Kriza – John Kriza; János Erdélyi – John Erdélyi; and Gyula Pap – Julius Pap) can be found here, but individual creativity and writing talent is also shown through the tales of Baroness Orczy, which may also be rooted in folklore. Another special feature of this volume is that one of today’s mindful and thorough contemporary Hungarian storytellers, Maja Bumberák, who tells stories in several languages, shares three of her tales, which she compiled from previous collections and finally shaped into her own retellings.

Tradition and Purpose

What is a folktale? What do we know about the tradition of storytelling, and in particular Hungarian storytelling? Hundreds of books deal with this subject, many of them specifically with stories by Hungarian storytellers or the stories of the different ethnicities found here (for example, the Hungarian-speaking region was very rich in Roma storytellers, but there are also Hungarian collections from Slovak or German-speaking storytellers).

The folktale is often referred to as one of the most beautiful genres of epic oral storytelling, and it is also a fact that Hungarians lack the genre of the heroic epic. A heroic epic is a work centred on one or more of a hero’s important acts. It consists of several parts, like a series of stories, but can still be considered a unified work. The hero performs significant acts for the community. There were attempts to find or rewrite the ‘lost Hungarian heroic epic’, but this was not really successful in Hungary, so we can say that the folktale is our longest epic folklore genre. In the old world, the primary purpose of folktales was to entertain and delight. But many researchers have drawn attention to the fact that the folktale was not only entertainment to make monotonous work more bearable, but it also ‘promoted’ certain forms of behaviour and offered solutions to problematic situations. Indirectly, therefore, it had an educational and instructive function, although it is almost certain that the function of being fun and helping to pass the time was much more prevalent. Indeed, one of my mentors was Vilmos Csipkés, a traditional Roma storyteller from north-eastern Hungary (the village of Arló). When asked what a story is for, on two different occasions he gave two different answers. According to him, ‘Well, you know, folktales are mostly entertainment’, but I am still quoting him when I say that ‘folktales educate the people, they develop their brain, they develop their ability to speak.’

In Hungary, it was standard that manual work was accompanied by storytelling almost everywhere, be that working on the land, doing agricultural work related to harvesting, or any other communal labour. Most of this was not independent ‘leisure’ activity. Free time as such did not exist in the peasant culture, usually all the time spent awake was spent being useful (husking beans, weaving baskets, embroidering, etc.). Most of the time when they were ‘resting’, their hands were still busy with something.

Autumn and winter work and monotonous activity favoured storytelling. The community’s more talented storytellers were invited to tell stories during these work occasions, to be there and keep the others talking, in exchange for money, crops or a bottle of brandy. The people smoothed the tobacco faster, stayed longer to pluck feathers, or crumbled more corn if they invited a well-spoken and talented storyteller to the kaláka (community labour). Storytelling also had an economic benefit. Among the winter storytelling occasions, the disznótor (pig-slaying feast) is the most important: at this time, so-called ‘fatter tales’ with an erotic tone often came to the foreground. At other times storytelling was associated with leisure or ‘festive’ occasions.

Thanks to the work of József Faragó (1922–2004), we know that in Transylvania, which is part of today’s Romania, woodcutters working in the mountains listened to tales as a way to relax before falling asleep.

The vigil, for example when someone is dying, and thus an occasion related to the turning point of human life, was a very common storytelling occasion among the Roma living in Hungarian-speaking areas. At such occasions, they often played cards as well.

It’s interesting when talking about storytelling occasions that we can also talk about pub-storytelling. There was a storyteller who bankrupted a pub, because out of the two village pubs people would only go to where he was telling stories.

Situations arising out of necessity could also present opportunities for storytelling. Such was the case, for example, during hospital stays, or in labour camps, and in the military. It was special that soldiers, merchants, students or even peasants, who travelled to different places, would share their own communities’ stories. In the old times, this was how stories were exchanged and, thanks to bilingual storytellers, languages and tales migrated, from Budapest to the country, or even across national borders to more distant places.

It is interesting that even the first publication containing Hungarian folktales was based on soldiers’ storytelling. This was the 1822 work by György Gaál (1783–1855), Märchen der Magyaren (Tales of the Magyars).

The Storyteller

In the old days, in a village community, everyone danced and sang. While in the Hungarian-speaking areas women excelled at embroidery and weaving, men mostly excelled in wood carving or other areas of handicraft. However, there are some branches of folk art that were cultivated by specialists. Musicians and storytellers alike belonged to this group. Not everyone told stories – more precisely, not just anyone – but only those people in the community who had abilities possessed by only a few. Specialist storytellers were distinctive figures within the village’s communal society; their environment valued and recognized their talent. Most often, there were one, two or three good or excellent storytellers in a community (meaning a village or a village district, or even a city district). Of course, there are exceptions. For example, in the village of Ketesd, currently located in Romania, folklorist Ágnes Kovács (1919–90) found a community where almost everyone could tell stories, even the children. (In the old world, storytelling was mainly adult entertainment.) Every community is different, and it was like that even in the past. In relation to storytelling, researchers who decided to collect stories in past centuries could encounter a variety of unwritten rules and traditions. There were communities where audience participation was a direct requirement (for example, we have data on this from the Roma storytellers in Nagyecsed), but we also have data, mainly from Palóc regions, where interrupting the tale incurred sanctions: here people were not allowed to speak or ask questions until the end of the story. The tale was probably more or less present in all social strata. Thanks to the excellent Hungarian historical folklorists, we know that, for example, stories were told in the family of János Arany (1817–72, a famous nineteenth-century Hungarian poet and writer). Oral sharing of tales was not only part of peasant culture, but also that of more educated people who could read and write.

While today in many parts of Europe there are many more active female storytellers than men, this would not have been true in the nineteenth or twentieth century. We can only infer anything about this from data where the storyteller’s name or at least their gender has been recorded. We know that (at least in Hungary) we are familiar with many more male storytellers than famous female storytellers. We can ask ourselves, however, in a fundamentally patriarchal society, where the role of women most often consisted of being the ‘silent supporter’ who managed the household or raised the children, how appropriate would it have been for them to tell warlike, scary or romantic stories within the larger community? It is likely that the different normative and moral system of the time, and indeed the lack of research interest, were reasons why we do not have as much data on female storytellers as we do on men. From my own fieldwork experience, I know that female storytellers often only told stories to each other in the family circle, or to children, or while spinning or doing something else in a women’s circle.

A folktale can never be independent of its teller, since the re-creation, the telling, gives life to these folklore text variations. It is also true for folktales that the person who collects or records them (this is especially true of the nineteenth-century collections) can greatly influence the quality and character of the texts that finally end up on the page. Folklorist Vilmos Keszeg emphasizes, in relation to the reading experiences of Transylvanian storytellers, that storytelling and reading are not opposed to each other, on the contrary, they are two forms of the same cultural behaviour. The two different traditions, the two different registers offer the same experience for those who enjoy stories.

So, in relation to orality and writing, we can look at folktales like the water cycle. The rain falls and later re-enters the atmosphere with the help of the sun’s energy. Moisture collects and collects in the clouds until the water condenses again. A folktale is also like this; it appears on paper, then migrates to people’s heads through reading, and later it is formed into words and exists as a spoken story. Then someone records them, writes them down again, it enters into a book, and so the cycle is repeated again and again. Whether folktales are told orally or recorded in writing, one thing is certain: they represent great cultural and emotional value. Just as life-giving water is uniform – its formula (H2O) is the same everywhere in the world – folktales also carry a kind of common knowledge; and yet, just as precipitation can be snow, hail or even a light spring shower, every folktale is unique and unrepeatable.

On the Sources of Folktales

Interest in folktales, and storytelling itself, could be as old as humanity. In Europe and beyond, we have written evidence of people entertaining each other with stories since ancient times. In later periods, we also find collections of folktales all over Europe and the rest of the world (One Thousand and One Nights has been present since the ninth century; Straparola Giovanni Francesco’s The Facetious Nights from 1550–53; or Charles Perrault’s Tales of Mother Goose from 1697, etc.) but the largest wave of interest in folktales happened during the nineteenth century. We have all heard of the work of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm from Germany. Their tales have been published in more than 250 editions and have been translated into more than 160 languages. With their first major work, the volume Kinder und Hausmärchen, published in 1812, they gave a new direction to the examination of folktales, since before the Grimms’ work, such an interest in folktales was not typical. This happened in Hungary as well, where the nineteenth century was the era of awakening national self-awareness. In this age, almost everything that was ‘ethnic’ was seen as valued, to be saved. Dialects, folk customs, folk music, and folk dance became areas of keen interest. Literary masters, writers, collectors, intellectuals, and even politicians of the time saw ‘the People’ in a romanticized way as a homogeneous unit, blessed with a collective poetic talent. It is no coincidence that the Grimm brothers’ seminal idea, about the nature and importance of collectivity, according to which ‘the People create’ (‘Das Volk dichtet’) found such good breeding ground throughout Europe. This strong romantic exaggeration was, of course, viewed critically by later ages, and in the twentieth century it became clear that the individual has at least as much of a role in the process of creating various pieces of folk art as the community. Tradition provides a framework and the community a natural filter or control, but the creative individual – the storyteller – is also an important factor in the creation of each work.

John Erdélyi

Let us now return to Hungary in the first half of the nineteenth century. At this time, ethnography as a scientific discipline did not even officially exist. It is likely that the first university lectures on folk poetry and folklore were given in Budapest by John Erdélyi (1814–68), whose name (as editor, collector and publisher) is connected to many of the folktales published in this volume. At that time there were no departments of folklore or ethnography at Hungarian universities. And although it was possible to listen to lectures of an ethnographic or folkloristic nature at various Hungarian universities from the middle of the nineteenth century, the first Department of Ethnography in Hungary was established only in 1934 at Eötvös Loránd University. The Hungarian Ethnological Society was officially founded in 1889, modelled after the English Folklore Society founded in 1878.

However, there was a group in Hungary which greatly influenced the literary taste of its time as well as the scientific trends related to the topic (literature, linguistics). The Kisfaludy Society was established in 1836, in Pest (at that time Buda and Pest were not yet one united city.) Although the society had many projects and different goals (such as publishing books and magazines), it is important to note that they encouraged the collection of folk stories. The secretary of the Kisfaludy Society at the time was John Erdélyi. He was a Hungarian lawyer, poet, critic, aesthete, folklore collector, teacher, and a regular member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Based on John Erdélyi’s idea, the company published an appeal in the press in 1844. People were encouraged to submit works of folklore, following which Erdélyi would compile his own work from these submitted materials. The appeal was successful, as letters were received from many parts of the Hungarian-speaking regions. Works from a variety of genres were submitted, originating from various sources. John Erdélyi’s material can be considered special, since it was the first collection of this type of folklore in Hungary. Of course, let us not forget that from the submitted texts it’s absolutely impossible to know who actually told these stories (if at all they were ever spoken). Thanks to one of the great historical fact-finding studies of academician folklorist Judit Gulyás, we do know on whose correspondence and materials Erdélyi actually based the tales included in his Népdalok és mondák (Folksongs and Legends). The book’s three volumes contained a total of 33 folktales, one legend and one other text (and many folk songs in addition). In this selection, we present 20 tales from the three volumes, edited by John Erdélyi, and also many tales from another nineteenth-century collection.

John Kriza

It might not be too bold to call John Kriza a polymath, since he was also a nineteenth-century ethnographer, literary translator, poet, and even a Unitarian minister and bishop. He was born in 1811 in Nagyajta (Aita Mare) and died in 1875 in Kolozsvár (Cluj).

Wild Roses: A Collection of Szekler Folk Poetry was published in January 1863. Many folklore genres appear in this collection, such as ballads, folk songs or folktales. John Kriza dates his preface December 27, 1862. This is what he says about the tales: ‘Only a handful of folktales can be published this time, as a demonstration of our people’s imaginative power, which is still gushing up from a rich source…’

Many famous folklorists have written useful and important works about what Kriza’s collecting network was like, who its members were, where the songs, ballads and tales came from, how he edited or perhaps ‘improved’ the texts. Other researchers such as Ágnes Kovács, Katalin Olosz, Anna Szakál or Mariann Domokos will greatly help readers interested in this important nineteenth-century collection to get a more detailed and thorough picture of the folktales, literary taste, and the ideas about folklore in those days.

In short, it can be said that Kriza worked with an entire network of collectors. Folklorist Anna Szakál, in a 2012 work, identifies a total of 37 people who can be assumed or are definitely stated to have been John Kriza’s fellow collectors. Names of storytellers were not recorded in that era. As I mentioned earlier, they viewed ‘the People’ as a collective creative unit. Nevertheless, we know of three people by name, who were storytellers who contributed to Wild Roses. There is even a biography of one of them, Gergely Gotthard, better known as Geczi Puczok (that was his ‘mock name’ or nickname), about whom Marianna Domokos concludes in her doctoral dissertation that he was probably an extremely popular storyteller of his time. In a nineteenth-century biographical source, it is mentioned that he was a Szekler storyteller, who was first a postman, but later became a beggar. He travelled through Szeklerland (Székelyföld), reciting folktales and folk songs. That was his livelihood. Our selection includes the two folktales attributed to him by researchers. According to the records, Megölő Istefán (‘Stephen the Murderer’) and Józsi Halász (‘Fisher Joe’) originate from him.

The two other storytellers, who were also mentioned in the notes by one of Kriza’s fellow collectors, Gergely Marosi, were Miska Fa and Tamás Róka (Puskás). Both were from Székelykeresztúr. In this selection, we present the tale of ‘Prince Csihan’ by Tamás Róka.

Julius Pap

This book also contains tales with nineteenth-century sources. Specifically, the work by Julius Pap (1813–70) entitled Palóc Folk Poems, which was published in Sárospatak in 1865. Julius Pap compiled a collection of tales from the Palóc area. In this selection, we present four stories from him.

Baroness Orczy

In terms of nineteenth-century sources, we have an outlier. This is Baroness Orczy (Emma Orczy, 1865–1947), her creative imagination, and her ‘Hungarian folk tales’. Emma Orczy came from a rich aristocratic, landowning family. She was born in Tarnaörs and was three years old when her parents set off to try their luck first in Brussels and then in London. She didn’t speak a word of English until she was 15 years old, and later, as an adult, she became one of the best-known writers in England. Her adventure novel The Scarlet Pimpernel has sold more than 17 million copies worldwide, and they even named a crater on the planet Venus after her.

However, there were still a couple of stops before world fame. She published her first book in 1895, which was a collection of tales entitled Old Hungarian Fairy Tales. In the preface of the book, the baroness writes that the tales are from an old, small book, which was already dirty and torn, with a worn-out binding, and the title is: Népmesék (Folk Tales), which was written out in Hungarian in the English text. Irrespective of whether the baroness was telling the truth or not, based on the texts, we can say that one of the stories is a variant of a well-known Hungarian tale type. That is the tale entitled ‘That’s Not True’, which is also published in this selection. In her other tales, there is a lot of individual invention and writer’s fantasy, so though they often have the feel and spirit of folk and fairy tales, they are arguably not folktales in the strictest sense of the word.

The Twentieth Century

Before I write about the final, twenty-first-century sources of our compilation, we need to jump back in time a little! With her oeuvre, Baroness Orczy already took us to the beginning of the twentieth century, but it wasn’t until around 1940 that we arrived at a turning point, which had a great impact on the manner of researching, collecting and recording folktales. Within folkloristics the performer-centred study of narration, focusing on the creative individual, had its roots in the nineteenth century, but developed only in the middle of the twentieth century. Gyula Ortutay (1910–78) produced a programmatic work under the auspices of the Institute of Ethnography at Eötvös Loránd University, which was preceded by very thorough fieldwork. This work was the publication entitled Mihály Fedics Tells Stories (Fedics Mihály mesél), which was published in 1940. In international folkloristics, the trend of the performer-centred study of narration, often referred to as the Budapest School or the Hungarian School, differs in its essence and purpose from the approach of earlier folklorists, in that it moves from the text to the context. Its focus is therefore on the person who creates the folklore work, in this case the storyteller and their environment. (Compared to previous collections, it was also a new phenomenon that folktales were written down word by word, and in more fortunate cases, the audience reactions were also recorded.)

Ortutay and his students, such as Linda Dégh (1918–2014), Sándor Erdész (1929–2006) or Ágnes Kovács, were also curious about the storyteller’s education, their place and status in the community, whether the person had lived elsewhere earlier, whether they spoke any foreign languages, and from whom they learnt their stories. They were also interested in the place, time and occasions for storytelling, the process of learning to tell stories, and, to a lesser extent, the performative phenomena, dialect, gestures, pronunciation, improvisation skills, and the tendency or lack thereof to alter the tale. They wanted to know whether they were dealing with a reproductive storyteller (i.e. storytellers who perform their stories in the same manner, almost word for word) or creative storytellers (who try to incorporate new and different motifs, swap episodes, combine different types of stories, etc.). I have already mentioned that, prior to this, folktale researchers were mostly concerned with the examination of folktale texts. Previously, all over the world, research revolved around defining types, finding new texts, new versions, the systematization and the historical and geographical distribution of folktales. All in all, the focus was on the text rather than the context or the individual who created it. The focus of the new trend, however, was on the storyteller, on the telling of the story, on the rules of the spoken word. Their predecessors, the folktale researchers of the nineteenth century and the turn of the century, had thus not yet understood the importance of the language (and the individual variations) of storytelling. Although, if I want to be thorough in regard to the activities of the generation prior to the performer-centred school of folktale research, I must mention Lajos Kálmány (1852–1919), who – at the beginning of the twentieth century – had already embarked on a path in relation to his storyteller, Mihály Borbély (1882–1953). In the publication of his stories, in addition to the text itself, researching the storyteller and the storytelling community were also seen as important and necessary. Incidentally, Borbély was the first Hungarian storyteller whose tales were recorded and published by Lajos Kálmány as a freestanding volume.

Revival and Folklorism

So far, we have only addressed the areas of scientific research. However, there was a phenomenon appearing in the second half of the twentieth century, which put communities and tradition in focus, and proved to be a community building force, affecting the whole of Hungarian society. And – although only later, in the last decades of the twentieth century – it also influenced the folklorism of storytelling.

Folklorism is when certain folk elements are taken out of their original context and appear in a different context, e.g. a tombstone-shaped keyring, a nativity scene played in a nursery school, a folk-song singing competition, folk dancing at a factory opening.

The 1970s saw the launch of the so-called ‘Dance-house Movement’ in Hungary, which is now on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage Best Safeguarding Practices Register. The basic idea of the Dance-house Movement was that since cultural goods – primarily folk music and folk dance, but also crafts and folktales – are no longer inherited instinctively, they are consciously selected, compared and summarized using the results of scientific research and then re-used in new communities (e.g. in cities, not only in rural areas).

The modern or contemporary storytelling movement began to come to life and function actively only later than in, say, Great Britain, and there are social reasons for this. In relation to the phenomenon of folklorism in Hungary, it is only from the mid-2000s that we can talk about conscious storytelling activities connected to the Dance-house Movement. What is important to mention is that the Hungarian Heritage House has been organizing a storytelling training course under the title ‘Hungarian Folk Tale – Traditional Storytelling’ since 2007. Vilmos Voigt, internationally renowned folklorist and folktale scholar, was teaching in this course for more than 10 years. Since the start of the first year, more than 300 students have completed this accredited course. The course’s methodology has become part of UNESCO’s National Register of Best Safeguarding Practices. Trends related to twenty-first-century Hungarian folktale and storytelling, as well as applied storytelling (story therapy, folktale pedagogy, etc.) were summarized by Maja Bumberák in her study published in British Facts and Fiction Storytelling Magazine (November 2018). We can say that today Hungary is experiencing a renaissance of folktales and folktale-telling.

The Art of Storytelling in Performance

Folktale-telling is first and foremost an art, which has its own unwritten – and nowadays written – rules. Currently, the so-called revival of professional storytellers, brought up in the framework of folklorism, consciously polish their tales and develop their individual style during their years of practice, usually striving to maintain a harmonious balance between the oral folklore tradition and the ever-changing factors of the here and now (audience, storytelling settings, etc.).

The conscious folktale-tellers (I am not talking about applied storytellers, but about performing artists) select their material from authentic collections, reading or listening to several versions before creating their own. They are familiar with the laws of the spoken word, and are in living contact with their audiences. They improvise, and are not afraid of innovation, but are nevertheless aware of the limits which stop them going beyond the boundaries of this folklore genre. They live the tradition and do not put it in a glass showcase. They use the tale, they tell it, live it, and handle it with wisdom, awareness, but also instinct. They serve the community and indeed create community through storytelling. Through storytelling, they connect past and present, known and unknown paths.

Maja Bumberák

Maja Bumberák is an art therapist, storyteller and singer. Her three tales published in this volume are all retellings based on ethnographically authentic collections from the twentieth century (in which every breath and every word uttered was written down and recorded by researchers just as it was spoken by the storyteller at the time of recording).

The story entitled ‘The Priest and the Believers’, is a version developed from a story by Mihály Fedics (1851–1938) and variations found in two other Hungarian collections. The tale of ‘Mezőszárnyasi’ is one of the most beautiful pieces in the volume. Maja adapted it mostly from the story by Palkó Józsefné (Mrs. József Palkó, 1880–1962), a Szekler woman from Bukovina, but the formulas of the Transylvanian Roma storyteller János Cifra were also an inspiration for Maja’s own version. The tale entitled ‘Cibere’ is a humorous story that gives a little insight into linguistic ingenuity and humour (the most important element of the tale itself is the name of a dish), and we hope that the readers will enjoy and retell the tale!

On the Structure of Folktales

Judit Raffai, a folklorist living in Serbia, and an instructor at the Hungarian Folktale – Traditional Storytelling course at the Hungarian Heritage House, when speaking about folktales often compares storytelling to a type of creative building process with the use of building blocks. According to this metaphor, the storyteller is the architect who knows that not all the elements fit everywhere, so the storyteller needs to know the structure in order to tell a folktale smoothly and authentically.

Genre

Now let us briefly review the structure of folktales, using the examples in this volume to illustrate and explain each part. If we want to understand the units of a folktale’s structure, we must start with the largest unit, the notion of the folktale genre, as well as its various subgenres.

Fairy tales or magical tales, for example, are one such large unit, but anecdotes, jokes and religious tales also make up separate groups. Each have different features and characteristics. The most ‘exciting’ and perhaps the best known are the fairy tales, which include adventures, magical places and objects, magical characters, but also fighting, love, courage and heroes. These protagonists with extraordinary abilities often fight supernatural creatures (often dragons in Hungarian folktales) and they are often aided by magical objects and miraculous helpers so that they can achieve their goals. Our selection mostly includes magical tales, but we can also find anecdotes, jokes and realistic tales. Humour is dominant in the anecdotes and jokes, and the characters are often simple genre characters, priests, spinsters, simple-minded people. Here there is no fairy-tale wonder. In realistic tales, as in ‘The Count’s Daughter’, the hero is not led to success by fairy-tale miracles or miraculous objects and helpers, but by wit, luck or ingenuity. Emotions, and a romantic, often sentimental style is evident in many of these tales. The subgenre is considered by many to have its roots in the Renaissance. Our selection even includes religious tales.

Religious tales are rooted in Christian beliefs and culture, and are mainly about serious and humorous events related to Jesus. In addition to Lord Jesus and Lord God, they also feature St. Peter, other saints, and even angels and the devil. Miracles can be a feature, indeed a determining factor in religious tales, but while in fairy tales miracles are obvious and natural, here they are always seen as an ethical or moral reward, a sign or the result of some good deed. For example, in our selection, ‘The Baa-lambs’ is a religious tale.

Type

Let’s now turn to the concept of tale types. Each tale subgenre has several types. For example, within the subgenre of magical tales there are several types of tales. A given type is the tale’s short, generalized content frame. There are several variations of a story type, which means that there is not only one ‘valid’ version of a given type, but many interesting, valuable and unique ‘solutions’.

Many readers will be familiar with the story of the ‘Three Oranges’. In this type, girls often jump out of oranges, looking for water, but in other Hungarian versions, thirsty maidens come out of reeds, water plants or even cucumbers. In the academic world, this type is classified by Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, in the folktale catalogue, as Aath 408, ‘The Three Oranges’. Another well-known and especially popular type in Hungarian-speaking regions is the story of ‘Shepherd Paul’. This heroic tale is usually the story of a hero with great power, who was born or raised in miraculous circumstances by a beast for a mother, and who walks in the world of the three realms, descending to the underworld to fight the evil dragons who kidnap princesses. In our present version, the motif of the birth from an animal, the miraculous coming into the world has been lost, but the fact that the sheep suckles the child for seven years can be seen as a remnant of this motif. In other versions, the child is born of a white horse or a beautiful cow, and is so strong that he can twist trees by hand. This story type is recorded by researchers as Aath 301B ‘The Strong Man and his Companions’. A particularly beautiful so-called song-insert story type is the ‘My Father Killed Me my Mother Ate Me’, Aath 420 type, listed in our present selection as ‘The Crow’s Nest’. A small number of Hungarian folktales, like some of those of other European peoples, contain verse interludes sung by storytellers. Our selection also includes a sad tale, bizarre at first sight to many, with traces of symbolic rebirth and atonement. There is repetition of a verse within the tale which goes as follows: ‘My mother killed me, My father ate me, My sister gathered up my bones, She wrapped them in clean white linen, She placed them in a hollow tree, And now, behold, I am a young crow.’

Many of the tales in the volume could be identified and typified in this way, but we will not go into so much detail here.

Episode

The next building block is the episode. In a story, episodes are logically built upon each other, forming a unified, self-contained story within the whole story. An episode is larger than a motif, but smaller than a stand-alone type. For example, in ‘The Travels of Truth and Falsehood’, the first section of the story up until Falsehood leads Truth to the gallows is an episode. An episode in ‘Fairy Elizabeth’ is when the lad goes to the lake and is slapped by the fairy girls, has his clothes stolen from him, and returns home sad.

Formula

A unit smaller than the episode is the so-called formula. These are the constant elements that the active storyteller uses as a ‘crutch’. Many storytellers have a usable ‘stock’ of such formulas for, for example, describing beauty, for showing hunger, for expressing sadness, for greeting someone (when the protagonist is greeted in a faraway place) or for describing other plots or general situations that frequently recur in many tales. There are almost always formulas at the beginning and the end of a tale, called introductory and closing formulas. These usually bring the listener into and out of the tale. The main purpose of the introductory formula is to lead the listener (in this case the reader) away from reality into the world of fantasy. It is characterized by a formula of impossibility, content that is removed from reality in both place and time. In this case, the tale does not ‘lie about itself’, since it has already indicated in the introductory formula that what is going to happen is not real, but a fantasy or work of imagination. Let’s look at some of the introductory formulas from our volume!

The tale of ‘Fairy Elizabeth’ opens with this beautiful formula: ‘There was once somewhere, I don’t know where, beyond seven times seven countries, and even beyond them…’

In ‘Prince Csihan’, humour is already present in the idea that you should listen carefully to the tale. This too is a long, beautiful introductory formula: ‘There was once – I don’t know where, at the other side of seven times seven countries, or even beyond them, on the tumbledown side of a tumbledown stove – a poplar tree, and this poplar tree had sixty-five branches, and on every branch sat sixty-six crows; and may those who don’t listen to my story have their eyes picked out by those crows!’

Closing formulas are used to conclude folktales, heroic tales, animal tales and anecdotes and jokes. But what is the purpose of the closing formula? Closing formulas are meant to bring the listener (in this case the reader) back to reality. With humour, with exaggerations of the ‘mundane’, but often with fun, with a dance or a wedding, we are jolted back and understand that we have arrived: the story is over.

In the tale entitled ‘The Lamb with the Golden Fleece’, a snapping violin string (humour) brings an end to the festivities: ‘The wedding lasted from one Monday to the other Tuesday, and the whole land was in great joy, and if the strings of the fiddle hadn’t broken, they would have been dancing yet!’

In the story ‘Knight Rose’, an absurd but funny sentence relating to the main heroes closes the tale: ‘May they curl themselves into an eggshell and be your guests tomorrow.’

In one of Maja Bumberák’s tales (borrowed from the storyteller Mihály Fedics), the local landscape, the Danube and the Tisza River also appear in the closing formula. The impossible image of the rivers tied in sacks and the water gushing out of the sacks is a fitting conclusion to the beautiful fairy tale, ‘Mezőszárnyasi’.

Element

I would like to talk briefly about two more concepts related to structure. The first of these is the element, which is the smallest unit of the folktale. Folktale elements are characters, objects and concepts that typically occur only in tales. They may be fictional or unfeasible, or even objects from earlier times. For example, the dragon, the poor man or the táltos horse (táltos paripa), which often appear in Hungarian tales, are such folktale elements. The water of youth, or a magical human skull or even ‘the little bag which never gets full’ can be an element of a tale.

Motif

Finally, a folktale motif consists of several folktale elements that are connected together and combined with an action. This is the case, for example, when the girls who jump out of the magical orange die of thirst without water (‘The Three Oranges’), and also when an old witch weaves the enemy formations on a loom (‘Prince Mirkó’).

On the World of Tales

The world of tales, i.e. the images, places, people and landscapes, objects and events in folktales, on the one hand transport the listener or reader to the high realms of fantasy, but on the other hand, also reflect the reality of everyday life, the storyteller’s environment. For example, the part in the story of ‘Mezőszárnyasi’ where a henhouse is found behind the royal palace shows the mindset and world of peasant storytellers. This was probably not intended as a joke or a pun by the Bukovina Szekler storyteller Palkó Józsefné (Mrs József Palkó, from whom Maja’s original story comes), but rather to project the reality of her own life on to a king’s living conditions. As we wander around the world, we will see the many different forms that these stories (which have the same framework) appear in.

It is possible that while in one part of Europe, the ogre or the troll is the stupid monster who is being fooled, in another part (for example in Hungarian folktales) these follies most often happen to the devil, who becomes the dummy. In the same way, what the heroes of a tale eat, wear or live in will depend on the geographical location and the culture of specific places.

Hungarian folklore is European folklore and the Hungarian folktale is a European folktale, but there are also some interesting features and characteristics that give our small ‘island’ – which stands out from the neighbouring sea of Slavic and Latin peoples – a slightly different character. Furthermore, the characters and places in our folktales are sometimes similar, but sometimes very different from the characters or geographical locations of our historical legends and those of belief. For example, ‘Beyond the Endless Sea’, as we know from our introductory formula, is a typical magical tale place, but so is the ‘glass mountain’ or ‘the mountain of porridge’. These places are only found in tales.

In our volume’s tales, and thus in Hungarian folktales, there are many characters and folktale figures. And although rarer characters occur (such as giants or fairies, for example), in our current selection we have included a good number of examples containing these not-so-common characters. (For example, ‘The Invisible Shepherd Lad’, which mentions fairy youths, and also ‘The Three Princesses’, which deals with giants.)

Dragons

The dragon, however, is one of the most frequent villains of Hungarian fairy tales. A common feature of these figures is that the dragon is considered a malicious demon. In our current selection, five tales contain dragons (‘The Hunting Princes’, ‘Shepherd Paul’, ‘Fisher Joe’, ‘The Three Princes, The Three Dragons, and The Woman with The Iron Nose’ and ‘Mezőszárnyasi’), but in one tale the dragon does not appear as a classic enemy, but as a helpful figure (indeed, figures). This helpful dragon is a real rarity in Hungarian folktales, but we have an example here with ‘Fisher Joe’.

The Hungarian folktale’s dragon has completely different external and internal characteristics from, for example, the scaly, lizard-like dragon of the Western world, which loves money or treasure and often guards them. The dragon of the Hungarian folktale is an anthropomorphic figure, but at the same time it also has animal characteristics. He sits on horseback, eats at the table with a knife and fork, eats from a plate and drinks from a glass, uses tools, and can even wear a shirt (this happens, for example, in ‘Shepherd Paul’). In certain tales, the dragon calls the hero or the hero calls the dragon brother-in-law, thus indicating his human-like nature. At the same time, his sense of smell is well-developed (almost animal-like) and he also has superhuman strength, e.g., throwing his mace a great distance. The dragon kidnaps women, including princesses, as wives (so he doesn’t kill or eat them, but marries them). In certain types of tales, dragons appear with a single head, but more often with three, or even with an ever-increasing number of heads. Dragons with 3, 7 and 24, but also 3, 9 and 12 heads are common. In our selection dragons have the following numbers of heads: 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 14, 18, 24. The ‘multi-headed dragon’ took a special form in the Hungarian language area; our storytellers imagine him to be a monster in his shape and a malicious person in his qualities. Dragons can live on high, in the upper world, or on the same level as humans, i.e., in our world. They can also live in the underworld (this, in the world of Hungarian folktales, is not the same as hell). The upper-world dragon is the same as the underworld dragon, each with multiple heads, living in a castle and living with a kidnapped earthly woman, like a human. The difference is that the upper-world dragon can also fly. All three types of dragons appear in our selection. Let’s start from top to bottom! It is in the tale ‘Mezőszárnyasi’, where we first meet dragons who steal celestial bodies and also steal princesses:

‘A huge black cloud appeared in the sky, it was coming closer and closer, growing and growing, finally covering the sky, and there came a storm, lightning bolts were scraping the ground, and from the middle of that big black cloud, a dragon’s tail appeared, it swooped down, grabbed the princesses.’

The dragons closest to our world are in ‘The Hunting Princes’ and ‘The Three Princes, The Three Dragons, and The Woman with The Iron Nose’. Although there is a hint in the former that these are aquatic dragons, they do not abduct princesses or celestial bodies. In other tales, such earthly dragons living near water often block the city’s water supply, and women and girls must be sacrificed by the community so that they can get water again. In the tale ‘The Three Princes, The Three Dragons, and The Woman with The Iron Nose’, the dragons clearly only feed on bachelor-meat. ‘…Every Friday he had to send ninety-nine men to the dragons, who were the pest of the place, and who slew and devoured the ninety-nine human beings sent to them.’

‘Shepherd Paul’ is one of our most popular and beautiful folktale types. Certain researchers believe that this, as well as the ‘Three Brothers Steal Back the Sun, Moon and Stars’ type (for example ‘Mezőszárnyasi’ in this volume), is characteristically Hungarian, and occurs almost exclusively in Hungarian culture. But let’s go back to ‘Shepherd Paul’! The powerful hero, born from an animal mother, finds strong helpers, and then, following a small dwarf, reaches a hole in the ground. However, as I mentioned earlier, the underworld does not mean hell. Here the grass is green, the landscapes are pleasant and beautiful. This is how the descent is mentioned in ‘Shepherd Paul’: ‘So they lowered Paul, and deep below in the earth, among beautiful valleys he found a splendid castle, which he at once entered…’ It is in this landscape that the powerful dragons who steal beautiful women from our world can be found.

Helpers

In Hungarian folktales we often not only meet dragons and enemies, but also helpers. One of the most frequent hero-helpers in Hungarian fairy tales is the táltos paripa (this is also translated as little magic pony or stallion). The hero has to choose the colt, despite what it looks like. So, our hero – the later owner of the colt – recognizes its hidden strength, pulls it out of the mess it is in, feels sorry for it, feeds it – thus he disregards the prejudices of his environment, and either chooses the colt as his own, or helps it. It is an important fact that you don’t just receive the táltos and his aid as a gift – you have to do something for it first, you have to ‘serve’ it, such as show yourself to be humane, or in some way different from the others; someone who recognizes the strength that will later emerge from its weakness or a not-so-attractive appearance. Another way to earn its help is by cleaning it or feeding it with embers.

The táltos horse, which at first appears to be a rickety, weak, sick horse, turns into a creature of miraculous strength after the first communication and contact with the hero. Such a horse can usually fly – it flies as fast as the wind or thought itself. It can also speak, and often saves the hero and helps him on his way with wonderful gifts. In many of the tales in our volume, we can encounter the táltos horse or táltos paripa. In ‘Prince Mirkó’, for example, the old witch beautifully describes for the protagonist what kind of horse he must choose from the golden herd of his father, the king: ‘…but at the very last moment there will come a mare with crooked legs and a shaggy coat; you will know her by the fact that when the herd passes through the gates of the royal fortress the mare will come last…’

Witches

The character of the witch appears in several tales in our volume, even though in ‘Prince Csihan’ she is called Vasfogu Bába (Iron-toothed Hag), or in ‘The Little Magic Pony’ she only appears with the epithet ‘woman with iron nose’, but we know that these characters are actually witches within the Hungarian folktale world. The witch of folktales is a female figure, a creature with magical powers who, most of the time, lives far away from other people. Some of the witches in Hungarian folktales are benevolent, others are malicious demons. The witch appearing in legends of belief has different qualities. She is no longer mystical, but a real being (could be someone from the village), a person with supernatural abilities. They can be either a man or a woman (although more often a woman) who lives in the community and keeps her science a secret. A flesh-and-blood figure whom the community could usually name. This witch can be an oppressive creature (she drives people out at night, saddles them and harasses them), rarely (only in northern areas, where there is a trace of Slavic influence) she can also suck blood, but most of the time she casts evil spells, damages animals, makes the cows unwell, she can change into animal form and is malevolent. From my fieldwork experience, I know that the name-taboo, the taboo regarding speaking the witch’s name aloud, existed even in the twenty-first century in some places where there was a belief in witches. So the members of the community would not say who the witch was out loud or identify her (even when she was dead), because they feared her power. Rather, they would write it down on a piece of paper or just describe the given person. The witch appearing in the tale ‘The Lover’s Ghost’ is the witch of folk beliefs. She is someone’s relative, she helps people, gives advice and knows magic.

In our folktales, the evil witch usually doesn’t live in the community, but in the forest, and turns the hero into stone, for example. Hungarian folktales have another, benevolent type of witch character, who is a kind old woman, who generously provides accommodation and directions to the hero who knocks on her door. In the tale of ‘The Three Oranges’, the hero receives the oranges from such a ‘good witch’. And although she is not called a witch, based on her attributes – a helpful, kind old woman – in this version of this tale, she can clearly be identified as the good witch of folktales.

Heroes and Secondary Characters

What other characters can we meet in our book’s tales? What do we know about heroes or heroines? The main role in our real mythic tales (for example, ‘Shepherd Paul’ or ‘Mezőszárnyasi’) is always played by men. The hero fights, stands bravely, goes on adventures, battles the dragons and saves the community or the princesses. Female protagonists are rarer in fairy tales. Even in those fairy tales where the title refers to a female protagonist (for example, ‘The Girl with the Golden Hair’ or ‘Fairy Elizabeth’), we can follow the fate and adventures of the male protagonist, and the famous and beautiful lady turns out to be a less serious, secondary character, whose role is as love interest for the male character. Of course, it would be a mistake if we asked for equal opportunities or equal proportions in the magical tales of olden times. Fortunately, there are also fairy tales in our volume in which gentle and good-natured (‘The Wonderful Frog’), lazy but resourceful (‘The Lazy Spinning-girl who became a Queen’) or brave and reckless (‘The Count’s Daughter’) ladies play the leading role.

To conclude this section, let’s take a look at the characters in the anecdotes and jokes which appear in this book! Our funny tales are characterized by the fact that they do not contain any miracles. Miraculous characters, actions and objects cannot be found in this subgenre. However, jokes, simple-minded people, ordinary characters and plain but funny situations are abundantly present. The figures and characters of everyday life – whom we could have met on the street in a village community – are the most frequent characters within such tales. Such figures include the priest, the cantor, the bell ringer, the woman who cheats on her husband, the simpleton husband or the simpleton wife. ‘The Children of Two Rich Men’ and ‘The Hussar and the Servant Girl’ are both such stories.

A Bouquet of Stories

In the last part of my introduction, I would like to note that in order to please the readers, the chapters of this volume have been divided in such a way as to provide a bundle of exciting tales of a great variety. The four chapters separate the tales not on the basis of a scholarly division, but in order to fit well with the reader’s or audience’s imagination. Each chapter contains a magical tale, but the different genres are mixed with religious tales and joke tales or even a beautiful realistic tale bound together in one big unit. It feels like the reader can choose from among many colourful bouquets of flowers. One thing is certain: whoever reads it will not be bored!

Boglárka Klitsie-Szabad

Co-author: Maja Bumberák

Official translation of the introduction by Gábor Csillag

Boglárka Klitsie-Szabad is a Hungarian ethnographer and storyteller. In 2019, she was awarded the ‘Young Master of Folk Arts’ state prize and in the same year she won the Prima Junior prize in the category of Folk Art and Public Education for her activities in the field of storytelling and achievements for teaching this traditional art. She published a book, with the title Seven Years and Seven Blinks of an Eye: The Tales of Vilmos Csipkés and Other Storytellers from Arló. In this work she introduced the traditional art of a Hungarian Roma storyteller. It was published in Hungarian, in 2022, and co-authored by Norbert Varga.