Poetry
The Folk-Tales of the Magyars
Vadrózsák
János Kriza · 1863
Synopsis
Folk poetry collected in the Székely villages of eastern Transylvania: a great many ballads and songs, then dance couplets, riddles, sayings and place names, and finally some twenty tales, among them Szép Palkó, the journey of Truth and Falsehood, the hunter princes, the lazy spinner who becomes queen and the lamb with the golden fleece. A glossary of the regional dialect closes the volume.
Context
The texts are given as the singers and storytellers pronounced them, with a study of the Székely dialect; the collection is regarded as the first modern publication of Hungarian folk poetry, and the discovery of the Székely ballads is credited to it. In 1864, Iulian Grozescu attacked in the Fővárosi Lapok two ballads of the volume, Kőmíves Kelemenné and Molnár Anna, which he said were made after Romanian originals; János Arany gave the quarrel the name of the Wild Roses trial, and later research confirmed the authenticity of the collecting. The manuscripts left by Kriza were published after his death.
Who it is for
Short texts, sung or told, transcribed in the regional dialect; the language of the region accounts for part of the interest.
Prizes and reception
Awarded a prize by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in the year of its publication; its prose part appeared in English in London in 1889.
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