Critical interest in Hungarian folk literature started from the mid-1700s. In 1782 the linguist Miklos Révai called for collecting folk songs of various dialects in order to study the Magyar language. In 1791 the Transylvanian Society for Language Improvement (headed by György Aranka) seconded Révai’s call and outlined a comprehensive programme for studying rural culture (dance, architecture, music). Responding to these calls the freemason Ádám Pálóczi Horváth (1760–1820) compiled a selection of popular songs Ötödfélszáz ének (“Four and a half hundred songs”, 1813-14). It remained unpublished, as did Miklós Jankovich’s ten-volume collection of National Songs. Reinforced by István Kultsár’s 1817 renewed call for collecting “national songs” (or, as he coined the term, népdal, i.e. folk song, after the German Volkslied) and wishing to emulate the fame of Serbian folk poetry, Franz Schedel (the future Ferenc Toldy) included fifteen folk song translations in his 1828 Handbuch der ungarischen Poesie. John Bowring’s similar collection, the 1830 Poetry of the Magyars, contained 64. Other early manifestations of folk interest include György Gaal’s 1822 collection Märchen der Magyaren; the novelist and mathematician András Dugonics’s (posthumously published) two-volume Magyar példabeszédek és jeles mondások (1“Hungarian proverbs and memorable sayings”, 1820), and Johann von Mailáth’s 1825 collection of Magyarische Sagen, Märchen und Erzählungen.

Whereas for the 18th-century literati folk culture remained by and large an exotic Other to the European high culture with which they identified, Romantic interest in Hungarian folk poetry invoked national authenticity. Two main strategies took shape. Toldy/Schedel’s 1827 essay on Serbian folk songs argued that folk poetry lacked literary merit and had to be lifted into high culture by the intervention of an educated poet (in the Serbian case, Vuk Karadžić) to reach the level of European high culture. Ferenc Kölcsey in his 1826 essay Nemzeti hagyományok (“National traditions”) suggested that folk poetry, however uncouth it appeared by classical standards, might have preserved genuine national traditions unalienated by the taint of cosmopolitan high culture.

Following their 1841 essay competition “What is national and folk-authentic (Volkstümlichkeit) in poetry?” the Kisfaludy Society called for public contributions to a comprehensive collection of Hungarian folk poetry (1843). The outcome was the three-volume Népdalok és mondák (“Folk songs and sagas”, 1846-48), which attempted to produce the Magyar equivalent of Karadžić’s collections. The editor János Erdélyi (1814–1868) paved the way for a new conception of folk poetry that would provide resources for an distinctive national literature. Radicalizing Kölcsey’s hint of folk poetry as an ambience of conservation, Erdélyi perceived it as a creative force on which national authenticity (as a means of collective cultural self-legitimization) should be based.

In 1844 Erdélyi paid a visit to Jacob Grimm in Berlin and received further inspiration to “cleanse” the supposedly authentic Hungarian material from Slav and German influences. (Grimm himself considered Mailáth’s German-language collection “impure”.) Erdélyi admitted to the lack of a Hungarian oral epic tradition (occasionally even lamenting the Magyar being a “second rate people”); nonetheless he insisted that folk poetry (“the divine revelation of the people’s spirit”, as he put it in his 1844 Népköltészetről, “On folk poetry") could, if collected and studied properly, make it possible to retrieve for the present what   had been historically lost. Whereas Imre Henszlmann’s 1847 comparative study on Hungarian folk tales took it for granted that “the Magyar nation had no archaic art”, Erdélyi thought that, however imperfect or fragmentary the available material was, it still represented the remnants of an original and organic culture, on the basis of which a national literature could be reactivated through a “reconstructive renewal”. What Erdélyi dreamed of was a linguistic, literary, psychological and existential continuity from Attila’s Huns to the present: “What would I not give for a song that millennia ago sounded on the lips of our forefathers? Would it not be a most profound union if we could sing what they sang? Perhaps we could feel what they felt!” (Népdalköltészetünkről, “On our folk poetry”, 1847).

In his ambitious 1846 call for subscriptions (under a motto by Herder: “Das Gesangbuch ist des Volkes Bibel”), Erdélyi claimed that his collection would be “the first book in our millennial existence” that would exclude everything that “did not stem from the blood of the people”, and which, as such, would “most accurately explain” the “genuine Hungarian sentiments”. However, Erdélyi in fact thoroughly reworked what was forwarded to him; he merged variants, dismissed certain dialects, and, in line with classicist decorum, cleansed the true “gold” of folk poetry proper from the vulgar and ugly dross of coarse “peasant songs”. Paying limited attention to the social backgrounds of his contributors, what Erdélyi eventually ended up with was a peculiar mix of hybrid material. As the early nineteenth century collections failed to distinguish between oral peasant poetry and popular professional poetry, Erdélyi also merged “popular” songs (regardless of folk origin), literary folk song imitations (under the label “From Authors”), and genuine oral poetry. As such, Erdélyi’s collection represented a peculiar stage in the trajectory of the concept of folk poetry. Whereas in the critical vocabulary of the early 1800s even Haydn’s anthem Gott erhalte was regarded as a “national” (i.e. popular) song, Erdélyi increasingly restricted the term to the production of the common people. Even so, portions of the material sent to him by amateur collectors (Petőfi himself among them) in fact belonged to the field of public poetry (közköltészet). A non-professional literary field of occasional lyrical pieces recited at social events, public poetry was cultivated by college students, village vicars, notaries and countryside schoolteachers. Flourishing from the 17th to the mid-19th century, public poetry circulated in handwritten collections often accompanied by musical notes. These private collections were usually multilingual, reflecting the diverse literary traditions of different ethnicities in the Kingdom of Hungary, which stood at odds with the Romantic notion of folk art being the authentic expression of a nation’s ethnic identity. They specified no designated authors, with texts existing in constant rewriting and collections circulating as permutations of one another; as such, public poetry was difficult to distinguish from folk poetry, also because their stock genres, topics and forms largely overlapped. As a territory of exchange and cross-fertilization between the realms of (professional) literature and collective authorship, public poetry also provided the medium through which folk song imitations (by, among others by Petőfi, Kisfaludy, Czuczor, and Bajza) were re-oralized to become actual parts of folklore.

Upheld by romantic literati as a programme for cultural regeneration, interest in folk culture was increasingly accompanied by political aspirations. As Petőfi put it in 1847, “If the people become dominant in poetry, they will not be far from dominating in politics as well.” In parallel with the ambivalent semantic transitions the term “folk poetry” was going through, the notion of “the people” also remained ambiguous. The natio hungarica was the body politic of the gentry in the Kingdom of Hungary; “the people” represented something different altogether: they were perceived in feudal terms as the descendants of those whom the Magyar conquerors had defeated and made their servants. This conception was still vivid in the 1830s; but from the late 1840s onwards “the people” were increasingly seen as providing ethnic continuity with the genuine Magyar community. (In addition, Petőfi’s use of the word nép mixed its reference to the peasantry with the more social notion of le peuple which derived from the French Revolution.)

In 1847 Petőfi could insist that “Folk poetry is undeniably the genuine form of poetry”; but after 1849, folk imitations in professional poetry were critically disparaged as superficial, vulgar, and politically uncomfortable. In the face of the immensely popular Petőfi imitators of the 1850s, Erdélyi himself came to insist that literary standards should be adopted from foreign civilizations. While in his 1847 essay Népköltészetünk Erdélyi had argued that the collective “self-knowledge” embedded in folk poetry outweighed literary cavils, in his 1859 essay “On recent Hungarian lyrical poetry” he claimed that “folk sources” had been “depleted” and could not provide sufficient basis for a “Hungarian aesthetic ideal”.

The importance of oral traditions, however, lived on in the criticism of the national epic. The poet and critic János Arany followed current opinion when he described folk inspirations in lyrical poetry as a “fashion that would pass”, but he insisted that historical epics should be based on the “credit” of collective remembrance maintained by oral traditions. In his Naiv eposzunk (“On our naïve epic”, 1858), Arany also argued for a connection between oral transmission and aesthetic form: for epic poetry to be passed on without the help of writing, oral traditions had to be structured in a poetic form (i.e. rhythm and composition) in order to become memorizable.

From the 1860s scholarly research in folklore gained new momentum. The series of Magyar Népköltési Gyűjtemény (“Hungarian folk poetry collection”) was launched in 1872, each volume dealing with a respective region. A new aspect of these collections was their competitive positioning vis-à-vis similar ventures of other national movements in the region. When János Kriza’s (1812-1875) Vadrózsa (“Wild Rose”) appeared in 1863, a collection of ballads and folktales of the (mainly Transylvania-based) Székely (Szeklers), it sparked a heated debate as to their originality. Julian Grocescu argued that some ballads Kriza had published were in fact translations from Romanian originals already published in the collections by Vasile Alecsandri. An early example of ethno-cultural wars on cultural property, the Vadrózsa controversy revealed that in the multi-ethnic and multicultural Kingdom of Hungary folk verse could hardly be collected and studied on exclusively national grounds; what they attested to instead was a dynamic of exchange between different ethno-cultural contexts. In his contribution to the debate, László Arany, the son of the poet (who by then had already published his collection of Eredeti népmesék, “Original folktales”, 1862) stressed that folk motifs were in constant exchange among peoples mutually re-appropriating one another’s products. Therefore, it is not the origin that should be of scholarly interest but the ways that “the people” refashions the forms in exchange according to their own “national character”.

Apart from folk literature, the other major oral source of 19th-century Hungarian literature was the anecdotal tradition. It came to inform the Hungarian novel to a considerable extent from the mid-century on. Mór Jókai, who claimed to have received suggestions of plot, scene and character from his readership on a daily basis, entertained the notion of being a late successor to the ancient Greek rhapsode who collects and redistributes the oral histories of the people. As the editor of the humorous weekly Üstökös (“Comet”), Jókai asked for input from his readers in the form of anecdotes, which he subsequently published in the volumes of A magyar nép adomái (“The anecdotes of the Hungarian people”, 1856 ff.; 14 editions until 1914). In the Hungarian anecdotal tradition, which he also incorporated into the fragmented narrative structure of his novels, Jókai saw the expression of a genuine national humour. The role of oral story-telling also loomed large in the fiction of Kálmán Mikszáth (1847–1910). The communicative patterns of the anecdotal form as practised by Mikszáth resembled those of oral poetry; the setting of his novels and short stories was not, however, confined to village communities; the structures of oral communication were evoked for any small community (like a restaurant table company). Signalling the overwhelming popularity of the genre in late-19th-century Hungary, Béla Tóth’s Thesaurus of Hungarian Anecdotes (heavily drawing on both Jókai and Mikszáth, but also presenting historical examples of national humour from much earlier periods) appeared between 1898 and 1903 in six volumes.