18th-century Latin-language Jesuit epics on the Magyars’ pre-history initially focused on Attila and his Huns, known from Latin writings, and followed the Classical model of Ovid and Virgil. Hungarian mythology was treated in terms of the Roman pantheon. Thus, in Imre Marotti’s Metamorphoses Seu Natales Poetici Submontanarum Superioris Hungariae Urbicum ac Vinearum (1728). László Nagy Peretseny’s 1802 epic Szakadár esthonnyai Magyar fejedelem’ bújdosása (“The roamings of Szakadár the Magyar prince of Estonia”), while linking Magyars to the Biblical Nimrod and adopting the recently discovered model of Finno-Baltic relations, also featured Venus and Amor as actors.

Interest in ancient Magyar religious ideas drew on the “Chinese Rites” controversy, in the course of which many Jesuits had asserted that the Chinese had received a pre-Christian revelation. András Dugonics’s popular novel Etelka (1788) suggested that the ancient Hungarians, like the Chinese, had developed their own (para-Christian) monotheism, worshipping a deity Dugonics called Magyarok Istene, “the God of the Magyars”. In his Commentatio de religione veterum Hungarorum (1791; “A treatise on the religion of ancient Hungarians”), the antiquary Daniel Cornides drew on Persian mythology to argue that the ancient Magyars adored the Sun as their God. This theory was picked up by Endre Horvát Pázmándi in his epic Árpád (1831).

Romantic epic gave fresh impetus to Hungarian mythologizing. Mihály Vörösmarty’s Zalán futása (1825; “Zalán’s Flight”) created an elaborate mythological apparatus, which was dualistic rather than monotheistic. Dualism had been presented as a characteristic of the old Hungarian belief system by János Horváth’s essay A régi magyaroknak vallásbéli s erkölcsi állapotjáról (1817; “On the religious and moral condition of the old Hungarians”.) Zalán’s Flight featured two main deities, Hadúr (“Warlord”) and Ármány (“Intrigue”). The name Hadúr had been coined by Sándor Aranyosrákosi Székely in his epic A székelyek Erdélyben (1822; “The Seklers in Transylvania”); Ármány, Hadúr’s evil counterpart, was calqued on Ahriman, the destructive force in Zoroastrianism. These two main deities were accompanied, in Vörösmarty’s epic, by a pantheon of divine figures. Hadúr’s subordinates were fairies (figures Vörösmarty adopted from popular fables); Ármány’s companions were allegorical figures such as Fear, Curse, and Disorder. During the next few years Vörösmarty continued to produce shorter epics in even more mythological (i.e. less historical) fashion. His 1829-30 A Rom (“Ruin”) presents the Ruin God as an allegory of decline and fall awaiting all nations.

The mythology of Zalán’s Flight was discussed by Ferenc Toldy/Schlegel in his Aesthetic Letters of 1826-27. While Toldy deplored its lack of historical foundation, he conceded that, since the genuine “mythology of the Scythian-Magyar nation” had been wiped out by their 11th-century conversion to Christianity, Vörösmarty had had no other option than to reinvent it by using Oriental philosophy. As a result, his Hungarian mythology had a “philosophical” if not a historical veracity.

Inspired by the Grimm brothers, Arnold Ipolyi’s Magyar Mythologia (1854; “Magyar Mythology”) aimed to reconstruct a myth-corpus from three types of sources: historical documents, oral traditions (proverbs, superstitions, folk songs and folk tales, etc.), and language itself (by way of creative etymologies). While other scholars, in the mode of Comparative Religion, studied ancient Magyar beliefs in order to provide a basis for a potentially supra-denominational national Christianity, Ipolyi, a Catholic priest, kept mythology at arm’s length as the belief system of paganism. Relying on contemporary German Catholic theology, he regarded monotheism as the natural state of man from which mythology appeared as an aberration. This theological parti pris exposed Ipolyi to harsh criticism. The leading folklorist Antal Csengery suggested that instead of Ipolyi’s hypothetical monotheism old Magyar religious ideas were based on shamanism.

In his (ultimately unsuccessful) venture to publish an epic trilogy of Hunnish–Magyar prehistory, János Arany heavily drew on Ipolyi. Ipolyi’s emphasis on folk sources coincided with Arany’s interest in what he called “epic credit” (eposzi hitel) hypothetically maintained by “folk consciousness”. While Arany followed Toldy in criticizing Vörösmarty for creating a Hungarian mythology “out of thin air” (and hence lacking “epic credit”), he was well aware of the limited possibilities for reconstructing one; he even made use of the mythological figures Ármány or Hadúr devised by Vörösmarty. In the only completed part of his Hunnish-Magyar trilogy, Buda halála (“Buda’s death”; 1863, depicting the rivalry between Attila and his brother), Arany borrowed thematic elements from the Nibelungenlied. The two sequels were to have dealt with Attila’s son, the mythical prince Csaba who, after having been defeated in battle by the Goths, left the Székelys in Transylvania and fled back to the East to join the Magyars. The ultimate aim of this design was to link Hungarian legends to Germanic sagas while reinforcing the continuity of the Magyars with the Huns through the Székelys.