Notes taken from folklorist Linda Dégh’s speech at the 22nd Annual Conference of the American Hungarian Educators’ Association, April 17–19, 1997, University of Maryland University College, College Park, MD, USA.

What are folklorists doing? Without boring you with trying to define folkloristics, an academic discipline positioned between the humanities and the social sciences, I want to tell you briefly that it is a knowledge — what “the folk” knows, as antiquarian William Thoms suggested in 1846, replacing the term “popular antiquities,” that is, pleasing, simple old things. Folklore as a discipline is as old as linguistics, composition, literature, history, classics, anthropology and the study of religion, mythology, genetics, and psychology. These disciplines were interrelated and have interacted through their long history while developing differently as social and political conditions required. Folklore is a knowledge — artistic, philosophical, technical, or scientific — that is acquired by informal and unofficial learning by every human being while growing up. Unlike official education, endowed by national institutions, this learning is based on the cultural traditions inherited locally and transmitted from generation to generation within families, small communities, and regions, and spread in time and space nationwide, parallel to the knowledge we acquire in school and specific professional training institutions. This means that folklore is a segment of the culture of everyman, and goes hand-in-hand with the other part of culture we officially learn. Folklore is not some sort of exoticism or trivia; although it often seems naïve, simple, obvious, fantastic, and controversial, it is a part of being human, it is with us here and now. It is not only beautiful stories, sweet melodies, witchcraft, palm reading, and spectacular street festivals — it is also talking about encounters with UFOs, visions of the Virgin Mary in the picture window, obscene jokes, and magic medicine that cures incurable diseases as communicated by word of mouth, the press, TV, radio, and the internet. They are all integral to modern Hungarian culture.

To give you a personal example: as a child, growing up in Budapest, I have always heard the story of the four lions at the abutment of the Lánchíd, built in 1837 by Adam Clark, a British engineer. As a folklore informant, I cannot recall who told me this story, when and where, but I heard it all my life, like everyone else. It is commonly known, remembered by naïve Hungarians wherever they happened to settle in the world. According to the story: at the opening ceremony, when the bridge was dedicated and all the distinguished people assembled, speeches were delivered and the band played, the celebration was interrupted by a little boy who passed by, delivering boots to customers of his boss, a cobbler. “But the lions have no tongues,” the boy yelled. The embarrassed architect jumped into the Danube and drowned — here the story ends. Other stories were also told about the bridge, but this one I never forgot. Later I learned that the same story is known to scholars as a legend type, “The Little Blemish,” in connection with other famous European bridges. However, the version as told about the first bridge connecting Pest and Buda is unique in its own right.

Any local experience may be turned into folklore and passed on by people. Folklore is not necessarily the peculiar songs and strange customs and tales, romantically claimed to be the poetry of savages and illiterate peasants, as in the 19th century when folklore studies began. Folklore is expressive of people’s way of life worldwide, ethnos, religious beliefs of a community, shaped to fit social life, everydays and holidays, helping to interpret the state of things and make life livable — that is, to maintain the existing social order. It may also help express dissatisfaction and be used as a tool to change the existing order. Folklore is not stable, but consistently in flux, as individuals keep passing it on to each other, changing its meaning to bring it up to date, necessarily emerging from current conditions. In Hungary, like in other countries, folklore was different among 19th-century peasant villagers, early 20th-century lumber camp workers, sharecroppers, railroaders, miners, urban housewives, school children, and office workers between the two wars, and is considerably different today among modern folk groups, post-peasant commercial farmworkers, politicians, businessmen, computer technicians, hospital staff, parish members, and vacationers at a resort. Not only are the occasions to perform folklore of diverse nature, so are its contents and purposes. Hungarian folktales are known as the world’s most beautiful product of oral poetry, matching only the artistry of Irish and Russian storytellers, but their appeal was limited to archaic agricultural conditions and a self-contained lifestyle that could not survive in the industrialized world. Short witty anecdotes, horror stories, and ghost stories replaced the all-night recital of magic tales in the mid-20th century. During Communist rule, office workers formed a conduit passing on forbidden political jokes. Recently, a group of young artists joined in revitalizing shamanistic rituals: the revival of a hypothetical religion of pre-conquest Hungarians is an expression of the fear that national identity will succumb in the sea of strangers, refugees, exiles, the homeless who seek shelter in their land. In an age of new mass migration resulting from multicultural conflicts, persecution, and brutal suppression of nationality in post-Communist Europe, once more ardent nationalism is on the rise. In Hungary this concern characterizes folklore that emerges with the support of the public, including the intellectual elite, academic and lay folklorists included. And because folklore is a part of national culture, the folklorist collects and publishes data, thereby promoting folklore and influencing its future formation. Folklore is old wine in new bottles — it may be age-old, but in order to stay alive, it must be emergent from current conditions and relevant in the service of current needs. Associations that stage and perform 19th-century folklore items are like archeologists, arranging a museum display of something that is not a part of their culture. Folklore is a spontaneous, creative act ingrained in given social conditions, not a decontextualized reconstruction.

To give you an example of how forms of folklore change, let me mention the traditional Hungarian folk wedding. You cannot trace it to a mythic folk-original but to the mixture of folk and elite tradition. This life-cycle ritual has been known since the Middle Ages. Royal and aristocratic weddings in Hungary established an elaborate, structured scheme of festivities with great splendor and set the charter for the rest of the population. Over the centuries the ritualization of marriage became common and socially sanctioned while the economic burden on the family rose. By the 18th century, economic authors Tessedik and Berzeviczy observed that wedding expenses are the main threat to peasant welfare — farm, cattle, house are mortgaged to pay for a daughter’s marriage; indeed, paying for several daughters’ outfits causes total bankruptcy for farmers. The poor instituted “elopement” to survive. During the Communist era, when church weddings were discouraged but peasant entrepreneurship was tolerated, the farmer’s traditional wedding became the showcase of agricultural success. This never-before-experienced display of wealth expenditure, to the extent of prodigality, appeared as a competition between families for getting on to higher status.

Another example to mention is the Strawberry Harvest Festival of Árpádhon settlers in Louisiana, which I researched. This 1896 settlement was composed of emigrants of diverse national ancestries from Hungary who became strawberry farmers after factory work in midwestern towns. Living together, they became proud Hungarians by constructing a dance suite modeled after the traditional Hungarian wine harvest ritual that became the symbol of their Hungarian folk identity. The miscellany of operetta, popular and folk songs, the costumes, and the instruments compared to Hungarian folk ensembles seems phony, yet 80 years of traditionalizing makes it a genuine creation. In my conversation with the people, they told me that they are the real Hungarians, they preserve heritage from the 16th century, and what the “Russian visitors” do (meaning the folk-dance ensembles from Hungary whom they met at the Washington celebration of the bicentennial show) is hopscotch.

Since the early 19th century, folklore was an important political tool in the hands of Hungarian intellectuals; appreciation and use of folklore had been shown much earlier: in the 13th century the legend of St. Gellért, who baptized pagan Magyars and who suffered martyrdom by their hands, tells about the bishop’s admiration of the song he heard from a girl who sang while grinding corn on a handmill. “This is the symphony of the Magyars,” he told Walter, his aide. In the 16th century János Erdősi Szilveszter praises the exquisite poetry of folksongs in the introduction to his translation of the New Testament. “They are pearls in the manure,” he wrote, hinting at the rough speech of the folk. When Ferenc Rákóczi, Duke of Transylvania, led insurgents to liberate Hungary from Habsburg rule in the early 18th century, he was captured and jailed in Wienerneustadt. Aided by patriots who smuggled tools in a loaf of bread into his cell, Rákóczi escaped on horseback, in peasant clothes. The guards let him through, as he writes in his memoirs: “I was staggering like a drunk, singing Hungarian folksongs in rustic dialect.” It has been said that the Marseillaise was worth a squadron of soldiers in the French Revolution — so was the Kossuth-song inspiring insurgents in the struggle for independence in 1848. Originally it was a love song, rephrased into a recruitment song (verbunk). After the defeat, the song became the melodic signal of illegal patriotic conspirators, and after the Ausgleich, it became the motto of liberal political interest groups fighting for the ideas of Kossuth and 1848.

The awareness of folklore and its worth for Magyars was particularly manifested in their struggle for independence from Austria. Like other national minorities within powerful nations, or nations invaded by other nations between the late 18th and 20th century, Hungarians — like other German principalities, Serbians, Bulgarians, the Scots, Welsh, Irish, Finnish, the Baltic nations — used their national folklore as powerful documents for their right to independence. They fought a war, but intellectually the war also used the rhetoric of folklore. Folk speech, wisdom in proverbs and riddles, folk dance, pieces of costume (boot, spur, cap with crane feather), textiles and pottery, betlehemes játék, Easter sprinkling, storytelling, Whitsun youth games, ballad singing, and magic healing were used as evidence of distinction (Dugonics András: Etelka Karjelben). Like elsewhere, Hungarian intellectuals, poets, and artists were the ideological leaders of the political movement — Petőfi’s poetry was inspired by folksongs; he expressed that folk poetry is superior to art poetry. Killed in the battle of defeat, Petőfi himself became a legend. Like King Arthur, he never died, but wanders among the folk in disguise, helping the poor. According to folk knowledge, Petőfi read his poem “Nemzeti dal” on the steps of the National Museum, from where the crowd joined the uprising. In truth he read the poem to his friends at the Pilvax coffeehouse. Legend is more powerful than reality.

The idea of making folk poetry the foundation of national literature served an intellectual political goal. To learn the language and style of folksongs meant, for poets, a great enhancement of their own art. The first appeal to collect folksongs came from the philosopher Herder to German poets in 1770. Two years later Mátyás Ráth urged fellow Hungarian patriots to do what “more advanced nations” were already doing: collect the songs of the common folk. The appeal was followed by others and grew into a movement in the 19th century. Later, architects, textile designers, potters, and painters joined and used folk art for the decoration of urban homes; musicians like Bartók and Kodály were inspired by the first recordings of folksongs at the millennial exhibition in 1896 and began collecting trips in 1905 in the archaic regions of Hungary with the same purpose: to make folk music the foundation of national music.

The national independence movement in Europe benefited from using folklore as a resource to help formulate a national cultural identity. What happened in Hungary in the 19th century continues to be repeated in independence movements around the world, in the post-colonial nations of Asia and Africa, and lately in new post-Communist nations in formation.

All along, while folklore was and is being used, popularized, and manipulated by the urban elite for diverse purposes, it is also romanticized and falsified, corrupted and constructed. Namely, the usable folklore (good for the culture industry, tourism, education, politics, entertainment, etc.) is not the folklore emerging from current reality, but the lore of an archaic folk, the illiterate villager of the past. This folklore-producing folk is fictional, yet a part of the Hungarian cultural illusion.

What is the self-image of Hungarians, the folk character devised by folklore — that is, by folklorism, a nostalgic constructed folklore? (To study forgeries, impaled folklore, is also the task of folklorists.)

Hungarian national mythology dramatizes its ethnogenesis and geographical situation with a pessimistic outlook on the future. Opinion leaders for centuries featured the Magyar as an Asian nation, speaking a non-Indo-European language, bearing relics of nomadic Turkic customs and beliefs, alone among a sea of strangers. “We are alone,” between east and west, uprooted from our Asian kin, rejected by neighboring nations — so sounded the complaint. Folklorists were busy showing indicators of Asian ancestry, seeking parallels among preliterate Ural-Altaic language-speaking cognates. Nevertheless, it may be closer to the truth that, as Central Europeans, Hungarian culture shared more with Slavic and Germanic neighbors and was more influenced by peoples found in the Carpathian Basin in the 8th century, and its political and cultural allies in Southern and Western Europe, than with the far-removed language kin. It is closest to the truth, as János Csaplovics wrote in his 1829 survey Sketches of Hungary, that “Hungary is Europe in miniature,” stressing multiculturalism. As a matter of fact, Hungarian folklore in every aspect displays Central European-ness, great ethnic diversity, and continuity in exposure to historic events in Europe. Folk religion, worldview, balladry, calendar, and life-cycle customs, narratives, and musical styles bear the earmark of Western European Christianity, prominently influenced by Roman Catholicism, the European Enlightenment, and popular vernacular literature spread by chapbook and broadside-selling itinerant market entertainers. The “we are alone” culture pessimism has many ramifications and goes beyond folklore, but it is worth mentioning some often-quoted national features that Hungarians accept as national curses: They do not hold together; their mood changes fast, flares up fast, and turns to ashes fast like kindled straw. They cry when they drink, and dance the fiery csárdás when the Gypsy fiddler plays the tunes. They are brave soldiers in wars, great horsemen. If these are national characteristics, they apply to the 19th-century nobility that squandered away its inherited land and fortune (which benefited money-lenders, small merchants, and the building of Hungarian capitalism, eventually helping Hungary to change its status from the bread basket of Austria into a modern industrial nation). But these characteristics I have often heard from villagers — these “vices” seem to be attractive, classy. Other features of self-image are manufactured for tourism: folklore shops are plentiful, with mass-produced replicas of classic folk art or imitations thereof, to ornament the clothing or the parlor of urban consumers with the practical objects of the self-contained villages of the past. This past is amply reconstructed for the tourist: wild gulyás parties at expensive restaurants (camouflaged as a peasant cottage) conclude with cattlemen kidnapping the ladies on horseback; moody horseherds play the flute under a weeping willow at a brook in the Hortobágy when the buggy slides by with tourists. There are museumized villages (Hollókő) where residents teach tourists to milk the cow, spin and weave, make palacsinta and gulyás, carve Easter eggs, and have a photo taken of you in local costume. Some villages stage weddings (Sárköz: Decs wedding with Christmas mummers from the neighboring Bukovina settlement). The romanticizing is not without dangers — it might reinforce an old reputation that Hungarians are Gypsies, that they are outlaws and related to Count Dracula and the vampire Countess Erzsébet Báthory. Even Communism was taken lightly by Hungarians, as Newsweek and Time reported, that “gulyás communism” was easy to bear.

Dr. Linda Dégh