Tóth Arnold: Vőfélykönyvek és vőfélyversek a 19. században - Officina Musei 22. (Miskolc, 2015)
Summary
published in literature (The Makó Song Book 1826, The Csepreg Wedding Usher Book 1865, The Pacsér Wedding Usher Book around 1880, and The Szék Wedding Usher Book 1896). Chapbooks represented the third large group of sources, which were not only compared to primary manuscripts but also to each other; hence a separate chapter on them. The methods of critical text linguistics and comparative textual philology were used to explore and analyse the texts. The research process was made up of three successive and logically connected stages. In the first stage, manuscript texts were explored using the same methods as those used by István CSÖRSZ RUMEN and Imola KÜLLÖS in interpreting and publishing handwritten public poetry from the 17th and 18th centuries over the past ten years. An interpretive reading of manuscripts were followed first by a literal and then a modernised transcription. Efforts were made to create a textually faithful, but not literal transcription (for ease of reading), which reflects historical and dialectical characteristics of the original text while complying with modern spelling and punctuation rules. This method of textology partially corresponds to the usual practice of publishing old Hungarian literary texts, a difference lying in the fact that researchers of old Hungarian literature prefer a more literal transcription than folklorists do, who, having been accustomed to the varying quality of manuscripts from uneducated authors, more readily use a modernised transcription of folk poetry. The second stage was about ‘delimiting’ and numbering stanzas and individual texts, followed by a definition of content and function. Finally, texts were grouped according to the stages of wedding scenarios described in studies of folk customs. Guidance was primarily taken from Volume 2 Public Poetry of the Repository of Old Hungarian Poetry (RMKT XVIII/8); and, of course, from the structure of the manuscripts studied; the autochthonous titling and sequencing practices used by authors’; and the scenario-based structuring of chapbooks. The Collection of Texts attached hereto was structured on that basis. In the third stage of research, comparative textual philology was used to identify the origin, variants and changes of texts. As a first step, related variants were identified in the texts explored by myself, before they were grouped based on textual similarities. Then, the most comprehensive possible comparison was made with the above- mentioned secondary sources and preceding examples of public poetry. Using the method of comparative philology, an analysis of verses was carried out stanza by stanza, or often even line by line or couplet by couplet, to identify relationship and linkage between the texts. 532
