Tóth Arnold: Vőfélykönyvek és vőfélyversek a 19. században - Officina Musei 22. (Miskolc, 2015)
Summary
marked as “brand new” or “the newest”, drew on previously published booklets of the same kind, and whether they actually introduced any novelty. Several vőfély verses survived unchanged for two centuries (e.g. Vajda, hegedűknek álljon meg zengése... [50.] or Szívvidámításra Isten a bort adta... [149.]), with the well-tried texts of the first chapbooks types A, B, C and D being carried over into publications of the 1920s and 1930s. As a result, numerous late-18th-century wedding usher verses have survived to date and integrated into the ‘revival-type’ folklorism of wedding events. It was, of course, not by chance that certain texts would survive the era of chapbooks and found their way into later publications. Saleability was the main driving force behind chapbook publication: it was financially worthwhile to include fashionable, well-known, current and popular wedding celebration verses (i.e. the ones adopted into folklore and generally accepted by public taste) in sets of new ones. The best-tried rhymes that could be made good use of by wedding ushers and were enjoyed by wedding guests would be reinforced by publishing houses, and their going into print ensured distribution at a national level and adoption into local community folklore. Three transitional phenomena were discovered in relation to chapbooks. a) Printed vőfély books show signs of printers/typesetters sometimes using the creative methods of verbal communication in producing the booklets. Indicative of this are several small variations introduced by people who might be more keen on how the texts sounded than what they looked like. A review of the resulting discrepancies (in make-up, spelling, updating and textual corruption) shows that even chapbooks exist in different versions and such versions are, to some extent, the products of an education based on oral traditions. A closer identification of the extent of this would require a comparative analysis of a high number of different types of chapbooks. b) Authors of vőfély chapbooks come from two different social classes and represent two distinct levels of education. The first group includes the authors who probably pursued wedding usherhsip themselves and had the texts they actively used published in print. They might be either members of the rural intellectual elite, or individuals gifted enough to become, through self-teaching, ‘peasant poets’ or folk rhymers in their communities. For them, chapbooks meant a means of achieving a higher social status. The other group is made up of intellectuals (men of letters, editors of papers and journals, priests, artists) of aristocratic descent or, later, of the upper middle-class, who had an education that was level with European standards. They were motivated to write verses either by a good intention of educating people or simply by pecuniary needs. For them, publication in chapbooks meant a way of entering the sphere of popular literature and mass demand. Therefore, being transitional in this respect also constitutes intermediary function — the phenomenon of vőfély chapbooks was one of the very first signs of unification into a single mass culture. c) An examination of the use of chapbooks reveals that wedding ushers tried to make them as personal as possible. To this end, they annotated printed texts with handwritten notes, additions and guidelines, eventually causing chapbooks to shift in form towards manuscript vőfély books. Further study of the resulting transitional 536
