Tóth Arnold: Vőfélykönyvek és vőfélyversek a 19. században - Officina Musei 22. (Miskolc, 2015)
Summary
poetry at colleges and noblemen’s poesy, the neoclassical style relies on two main elements. One of the two is the biblical style, showing direct influence of baroque preachings and congregational prayers. Biblical themes and characters, as well as the presence in wedding usher verses of stories from the Old Testament indicate the religious/ecclesiastical origins of the genre. Similar to this is the frequent occurrence of classical mythological themes, mainly those of the Trojan saga; the difference being a better integration of biblical themes into the body of wedding usher verses. In this dissertation, a separate chapter is devoted to the description of verse forms, mainly focussing on rhyming, on top of metric and rhythmic aspects. Four-line monorhymes and couplets do not only determine versification, but also variation and the spreading of verses. The main question that arises regarding the variation of vőfély verses is to what extent such variation resembles variation in other genres of folk poetry. Minor variations were due to mishearing, ‘slips of the pen’ and textual corruptions that occurred in the course of copying/writing down texts. A break-up into stanzas and the consequential phenomena of contamination and migrant stanzas are, however, much more prominent in the texts, clearly bearing witness to the process of adopting them into folklore. Research Findings 1) Wedding usher books as a part of folk writings The special role of vőfély books in the sphere of folk writings is typified by a duality resulting from their being transitional between manuscript and print. There exist multiple genres and types of manuscript and print materials that occupy a clear position in the complex system of relations between folklore and writings. Most types of folk manuscript books (e.g. accounts statements, economic journals, battlefield diaries, prisoner of war diaries, peacetime soldier’s book, biography and memoirs) never saw print or made their way into the print realm of popular culture. With certain limitations, miscellaneous collections, song books, poetry collections, church- ale books and prayer books fall into this category, as they retained the complexity and diversity of repertoire typical of manuscript works — despite having ‘chapbook equivalents’. Similarly, some types of print materials (mostly almanacs) were never reproduced in handwriting, with only some texts or other parts (e.g. perpetual calendars) being copied from them by authors of folk manuscripts. In contrast with these, vőfély books simultaneously and equiponderantly exist in the forms of both manuscript and printed materials, and the resulting permanent interaction between the two spheres exerts a crucial influence on the entire genre. As an outcome of the review of wedding usher chapbooks, a classification was drawn up, placing nationally distributed 19th-century publications into eight basic categories from A to H. This review showed to what extent some vőfély books, 535
