Régiségek a pusztaságban. Adalékok Henszlmann Imre mesetanulmányának kontextusához
Antiquities in the wasteland. Data to the contexts of Imre Henszlmann’s treatise on folktales

Author(s): Judit Gulyás
Subject(s): Customs / Folklore
Published by: Fórum Kisebbségkutató Intézet
Summary/Abstract: Imre Henszlmann (1813–1888), born in Košice, published his monumental treatise entitled A népmese Magyarországon (‘Folktales in Hungary’) in 1847, which was the first work in Hungarian culture to present the genre of folktales as a possible subject for academic study. Henszlmann presented the Slovak, Romanian, and Hungarian folktales based on the collections of Janko Rimauski/Ján Francisci, Arthur and Albert Schott, János Erdélyi, Georg von Gaal and Johann Grafen Mailáth. He evaluated them according to their relationship to the presumed primordial myth and the extent of their national character, categorized the corpus into genre groups, and interpreted the tales by introducing a symbolic mythological meaning—from an international, comparative perspective. The paper provides data and aspects on the contemporary contexts of this unprecedented study by Henszlmann, who was a renowned art historian, literary critic, and archaeologist. It presents passages related to tales found in Henszlmann’s writings on art theory and art history, his folk legends published in verse in Pesther Tageblatt in 1840, and discusses some connections between archaeology, art history and the 19th-century study of popular prose epics and oral narratives, relying on the concept of antiquity.

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