Századok – 2019
2019 / 6. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Katona Csete: A viking, aki magyar királyt ölt. Egy középkori izlandi saga magyar vonatkozásai
A VIKING, AKI MAGYAR KIRÁLYT ÖLT 1232 Hér um kvað Oddr þessa vísu: ’Unþak eige, áþr Ungara, lofþunga tvá líta knáttak; réþk meþ öþrom arfs at kveþja, veittak jöfre vilt ofsinne.’ Kap. XXXVI. Oddr hefir þar nú verit svá, at nökkurum misserum hefir skipt, ok þá gerir honum svá leitt, at hann má þar með engu móti lengr dveljaz. Konungr býðr honum lið mikit, en hann kvez þat með engu móti vilja. THE VIKING WHO KILLED A KING OF HUNGARY Hungarian Connections with a Medieval Icelandic Saga by Csete Katona SUMMARY The paper explores a Hungarian episode in an old Icelandic story, the Örvar Odds saga , written down in the fourteenth century, and the information it contains relating to Hungarian history. It seeks to answer the question of how this scene, so unusual for a saga, was inserted into the narrative. While it is possible that the section of the text that contains the Hungarian events was derived from the saga of Sigurd Jerusalem Farer, the hypothesis that it was due to the oral reports of Scandinavian warriors who had served in Hungary that the “S” version of the saga contained the events of the stormy civil wars of the mid-eleventh century cannot be excluded either. A hint in that direction may be the fact that the memory of Scandinavian warriors serving in eleventh-century Hungary may have been preserved by a Hungarian source as well. The fourteenth-century chronicle compilation reports on soldiers with foreign names participating in the wars of King Andrew I. In the case of two of them, Zotmund and Vilongard, it can reasonably be proposed that the names they bore were of ancient Nordic origin.
