Tóth Arnold: Vőfélykönyvek és vőfélyversek a 19. században - Officina Musei 22. (Miskolc, 2015)
Summary
describing the customary scenarios of wedding celebrations), no monographic, comprehensive treatise has been written on this subject using a historical perspective and methods of comparative philology. In this book, an attempt is made to alleviate the symptoms of the contradictory duality of the subject and give an insight into the origin, history and variations of these commonly-known folkloric texts, as well as their important role as a link between written records and oral communication. The secondary reason for the selection of this topic is the fact that the collection and publication, in works of varying scope and quality, of wedding usher rhymes only gained momentum in the second half of the 20th century and primarily focussed on the textual traditions of the 20th century. Verses dating from earlier periods, though they are abundant in archival collections and manuscript sources, were covered and published to a very small extent only. The Collection of Texts attached hereto and related annotations are intended to make up for this deficit. Directly preceding my work was a research carried out from 2006 to 2009 by the Folklore Department of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, and titled Folklore Text Research, Philology, Historical Poetics. The 19th Century Corpus and Interpretation of Folklore Genres. Under that research programme, I worked over, interpreted, digested and commented on the 19th-century wedding usher books which provide the source material for this dissertation. Therefore, my study is bolstered by basic research, aimed at exploring sources, and the resulting publication of over 200 texts from 19th-century primary manuscript sources is intended to somewhat balance the dominance of 20th-century vőfély verses in existing topical publications. The term 19th century in the title of this treatise does not accurately denote the period actually studied, for around one decade has been added to both the beginning and the end of the century to extend the timeframe studied to 120 years. This extension is because of the nature of the source material, as the first, and, in many respects, very uniform historical period of vőfély books and verses extends from the publication, around 1790, of the first chapbooks to World War I. According to the current state of knowledge, the earliest printed wedding usher books were produced between 1789 and 1793 in the printing house of Vác, a town north of Budapest. Out of these, Péter Mátyus’s Wedding Usher Duties [ Vőfények kötelessége.. .] and the one titled Brand New Wedding Usher Duties [Üjdonnan új vőfény kötelesség^ by an anonymous author, became prototypes for later authors in the genre to follow. The fact that no handwritten wedding usher book dating from the 18th century has been unearthed to date shows the crucial importance of chapbooks in the history of the genre and, consequently, for the periodisation of the subject. The 1826 Makó Song Book is deemed to be the earliest. Early manuscripts include János Pántzél’s Song Book from the late 1830s and its contemporary, The Kisgyör Manuscript (1841—1843). The lack of folk manuscripts dating from before 1800 (and now apparently before 1825) seems to suggest that these texts were produced and distributed more in the form of chapbooks than of manuscripts. 530
