Tóth Arnold: Vőfélykönyvek és vőfélyversek a 19. században - Officina Musei 22. (Miskolc, 2015)
Summary
SUMMARY Wedding Usher Books and Verses in the 19th Century Manuscript Wedding Usher Books on North-Eastern Hungary Topic and Scope This book aims to investigate 19th-century wedding usher books and wedding usher verses in terms of text linguistics, as well as textual history and history of the genre. The prime reason for the selection of this topic was the peculiar, dual nature of the area of scholarly research that these folkloric texts represent. On the one hand, the presence of a wedding usher, called vőfély [v0:fe:j] and acting as a sort of ’master of ceremonies’ at rural weddings, is a widely known and amply documented fact of ethnography in almost the entire Carpathian Basin. Such wedding ushers recite rhymes while directing the wedding proceedings and entertaining participants. Distributed in chapbooks or manuscripts, vőfély verses have been known since the late 18th century as a common, indispensible and characteristic part of any wedding celebration. They are mostly rhymed in form and recited, closely and functionally following the various stages of the wedding. Over the past 180 to 200 years, this custom has been extensively written about in very diverse bodies of literature, giving descriptions of varying complexity and quality. Collections of usher verses which have been published in print include thousands of titles, added to which are at least the same number of unpublished collections and handwritten sources held in public archives. Wedding ushers and usher verses maintained their presence in folk culture, and then, popular culture through the 19th and 20th centuries, and survive to date. Though there have been some alterations due to changes in the customs of wedding celebrations, the texts discussed herein represent one of the most stable and longest-lived elements of Hungarian popular culture. The 21st century seems to see a renaissance of this, mainly as a ‘survival’ or ‘revival’ phenomenon of folklorism and a conscious preservation of cultural heritage. Despite all this, researchers have shown, over the past decades, rather little interest in vőfély books and vőfély verses, a topic that has, until now, been lying outside of the purview of mainstream research into folklore or poetic and cultural history. While some aspects of this field of wedding poetics are covered in various works (mostly 529
