# Historical Legends

The kern of the historical legend (történeti monda) is actually always realistic and has some foundation in truth. However, this kern of reality is coloured generally, often by tale-like elements. The kern of the legend is usually as old as the central historical fact, but in the course of time more and more recent elements, such as folk-story motifs, and even new historical facts, become attached to certain legends. It also happens that during the passing of time a legend becomes attached to new heroes of new times, without any significant change in its action. Some of the legends attached to Ladislas I (11th century) seem to have developed from the legends of an earlier folk hero, and we also know a Kossuth legend (19th century), the seed of which corresponds in all its important features to a well-known tale about King Matthias (15th century).

The first written survival of Hungarian legends is preserved for us by medieval Hungarian chronicles, but a good part of them supposedly originated from before the Conquest. One is the dream of Emese (Emese álma), a totemic myth of the Árpád clan. The founding mother Emese sees an eagle and a glorious river flows from her womb, the family of rulers from the House of Árpád; first among them is Álmos, the one dreamed of and whose coming has been foretold. The totemic ancestor of the clan and the woman Emese herself appear to preserve traditions dating back to the time of matriarchal society. The Magyar myth of origin, the Legend of the White Stag (Csodaszarvas monda), is related to the history of the Árpád clan, which was preserved by a 13th-century chronicle, although most likely its source was an 11th-century ancient geste.

The giant Ménrót moved to the land of Eviláth following the (Babylonian) confusion of tongues... and here he had two sons, namely Hunor and Mogor, born to him from his wife Ene, and from these descend the Huns and Magyars. However, the giant Ménrót also had other wives, and from these many sons and daughters descended. And because Hunor and Mogor were his first born sons, they lived in a tent separate from their father’s. And it happened on one occasion that they went hunting. A deer [roe] rose in front of them, and as she fled from them they chased her into the bog’s of Maeotis. There they lost her completely and could not find her even after much searching. Finally, after they had wandered back and forth through the bog, they decided that it was suitable for the grazing of {584.} animals. They then returned to their father, and as soon as they gained his consent, they went on together with all their stock, to the bogs of Maeotis, in order to settle there. The region of Maeotis borders on the province of Persia; except for a narrow crossing, it is surrounded on all sides by the sea. It has no flowing waters, but it is abundant in grass, trees, birds, fish, and wild beasts. Getting in and out was difficult. When they settled down in the bogs of Maeotis, they did not budge from there for five years. But when they ventured out once in the sixth year, they met, purely by chance, with the children and wives of the sons of Belár, as they were camping in the puszta without their husbands; and, riding fast, they carried them off with all their belongings to the bogs of Maeotis. It so happened that they had caught the two daughters of Dula, the chieftain of the Alans, among these children; Hunor married one of them, Mogor the other. From these women descend the Huns and Magyars, everyone of them.

The mythical stag that showed the new homeland seems to be connected with an ancient totemic animal. The pursuit of an enticing animal belongs among the known mythic, legend-type stories, and, for example, is an important tale in the Persian collection titled A Thousand and One Nights. The motif of abducting women, on the other hand, reflects the connection of the Árpáds’ ancestors, the clan of the “Gyulák”, with the famous Bulgarian dynasty (Belár–Bolgár), and in general the historical contacts of Magyars and Bulgaro-Turks.

The final source of the Botond legend can be found in the wars waged by the Hungarians against Byzantium, and from a closer view, it preserves memories of the ancient Magyar ceremonies of declaring war, which began with nicking a spear of pickaxe into the enemy’s gate. The hero of the Lél (Lehel) legend had fallen captive to the German emperor. Knowing that the emperor would condemn him to death, he hit the emperor on the head with his bugle and said: “You go ahead of me and be my servant in the other world.” This is connected with one of the historical episodes in the Magyars’ roaming after the Conquest, and its action preserves the belief that existed among the ancient Magyars, namely, that the hero is served after his death by those he had killed in battle during his lifetime. Here let us mention the legendary text of the battles fought for the new homeland. The “Myth of the White Horse” (Fehér ló mondája) preserves the peace-making ceremonies of the Magyars, which consisted of an animal sacrifice, pouring water on the ground, touching the earth, turning a saddle around, and lifting a handful of soil toward the sky.

The oldest legends, therefore, give interesting and, from the point of view of their final kern, historically authentic pictures of ancient Magyar history; we learn from them the heroic fight waged in conquering the new homeland.

These legends were probably spread and kept alive for long centuries by professional singers. The texts of these minstrels must have seemed to the writers of the chronicles to be evidence, and with the help of the chronicles’ text it is even possible to ascertain that the heroic legends were sung as if the hero himself were giving an account of his deeds in the first person. The tale-type legend form developed early. The already mentioned opinion of Anonymus about “the idle talk” of minstrels and {585.} jokers, and the “false tales of the peasants”, therefore, refers to the story-like genres as well.

Otherwise, in absence of records, we know little of the folk legends from the centuries following the Conquest, since at this time only distinguished clerical men were literate. Songs and tales that gave form to complaints and desires of the oppressed were persecuted. But no matter how much the church persecuted folk poetry with iron and fire, the songs passed from mouth to mouth. Telling such tales made heavy peasant work more tolerable and related the deeds of conquering heroes. Besides the old songs, legends and tales, new ones also arose about heroes, personifying the virtues and desires of the people, especially those who excelled in beating back enemy intervention that endangered the entire country. One of the most popular figures of heroic songs is King Ladislas (11th century), hero of battles against foreign invaders, whose person and deeds are mingled in the imagination of the people with what seem to be the deeds and the characters of a heroic epic originating in the earlier homeland.

It seems that conflicts within the feudal ruling class played a large role also in legends of the Hungarian folk. Feudal rebels who rose against the king appear, in the imagination of the people, as heroes of a rebellion against the entire feudal society. The murderous attempt of Felicián Zách against the royal family in the time of the Hungarian king Charles Robert (14th century), and the consequent punishment of the Zách family, their total extermination, were suitable events for the emergence of a legend.

The legend of “Lőrinc Tar’s Descent to Hell’ (Tar Lőrinc pokoljárása) belongs to the class that came into existence around the 14th–15th centuries and was later worked up by the famous minstrel of the 16th century, Sebestyén Tinódi Lantos. Tinódi himself reveals that he heard the story in a song. Although some motifs of the song are not of folk origin, it seems that the story of Lőrinc Tar, who met the king in hell, as well as the archbishop who had collected false tithes, the bishop and the noble lords who ravaged the property of the peasants, must have been popular for a long time throughout the country. The international parallels of the story can be traced quite far.

Today this old material barely survives in the Hungarian wealth of legends, or only fragments are being related at some places. A part of the historical legends still living on the lips of the people is not connected with popularly known historical persons, and perhaps these myths reflect most authentically the national catastrophes that primarily troubled the suffering, working peasants. The oldest of the legends belonging to this group are the myths of the Mongol invasion. These are often identical with the myths of the Turkish occupation, a fact that permits the assumption that one or two myths belonging to this category are connected not with the Mongol invasion of the 13th century but rather with the intrusions of the Mongols frequent during the wars with the Turks. At any rate, the legends of the Mongol invasion and the Turkish occupation resemble each other in many respects. The following similar type of legend, recorded in Karcsa (Zemplén county), also proves this contention:

{586.} “... Then once the Turks came, but they did not call them Turks, they called them the dogheaded Mongols. What shall we do? They will eat us! People took food with them, everything that will last so that they shouldn’t starve to death. And there was kotorca [the floury stem of the rush], and there were roots, and later they opened up the rush and ate it. So they had food.

They had little horses no bigger than a cat or a dog. They lay low on their backs and the horses carried them to the top of the sandy hill of grapes. They started to shout:

“Sári, Zsuzsi, Borcsa, Mari, come on out! The dogheaded Mongols are no longer here. They have gone, come on home. The dogheaded Mongols are not here!”

But they did not stir, so one of them says:

“You just wait, I know where you are. You are in the rushes. I am going in there, going to ride in with my horse. Here is the way, here they are. Come on boys, it is not deep, not deep.”

The others stopped at the edge of the water, along the sedge. He then rode in, until even the foam disappeared after him. He was not seen anywhere.

Then a long time passed, and when the waters had subsided and left, the lake dried out. Well, a great, enormous walnut tree grew out of the Turk’s pocket. Beautiful. That tree may have been even two hundred years old. Nobody harmed it. But the Jews and the barons moved here and they got tired of it, did not like it on their land. It was on the boundary or some such place, so they cut down the walnut tree. And the folks of Karcsa wept for it bitterly, because it has been preserved from father to son that this tree and these nuts had come from the pocket of the Turk and had grown out of there.

The story in most of these legends is about the successful flight of the populace from a superior force. However, it is their cunning and resourcefulness that is responsible for their great success. Other legends that belong to this group tell about brave heroes who triumph over superior forces; the legends also tell about cowards and traitors with contempt.