Vargyas Lajos: Hungarian ballads and the European ballad tradition 1. (Budapest, 1983)
The folk ballad as a genre receives a novel clarification from the side of Hungarian balladry, a field that has rather been neglected by foreign scholarship. Insight into the socialhistorical evolution of mediaeval Hungary, its geographical position and connections with other nations allows to infer .certain very important relationships, the threads of which interwove the European (American) ballad areas in their entire complexity. First and foremost it has been made clear in this book, preceded by a number of preliminary studies by the author, that the Hungarians had become acquainted with the ballad genre from direct Walloon and Northern-French sources through the very intensive ties which existed between the former and the latter nations in those times. Next, that the original place of birth of the genre has to be looked for in the Walloon —Northern-French territories where the peasantry stood in the lead of contemporary rural development. Further, that the period of its generation should be fixed — with a higher degree of certainty - around the turn of the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries and the extent of its dissemination at the end of the fiddle Ages. These time-limits seem the more likely since the process of the great peasant transformation lasted from the mid-thirteenth to the midfourteenth century; each typical representative of the genre that appears in more or less reshaped forms and with local inventions added deals with problems of this transformation in the balladry of the various peoples. Anything that diverges in theme, approach or style demonstrably belongs in the sphere of some other genre (mythic heroic song, tale, legend, late-feudal epic, bella istoria, etc.), coming up singularly in the poetry of one or another nation only. Songs so contaminated have found their way in large numbers into the western summary publications, mainly from written sources (English, German and especially Danish). The author has carefully delimited such poems from genuine ballads. Where no summary publication was available, e.g. in the