The origins of folk- and fairy-tale collecting in Hungary are entwined with the beginning of Romanticism and the contacts between Hungarian writers and German Romantics. Friedrich Schlegel spent a few months in Buda in 1809; but Jacob Grimm and Gustav Büsching maintained Hungarian contacts, especially to the professor Ludwig Schedius, the Pest university librarian Martin Kovachich and the man of letters Count Johann Mailáth. Vienna was as important as Buda for these contacts: it was here that Friedrich Schlegel edited his Deutsches Museum, that the presence of Jacob Grimm inspired a Viennese Märchen collectors, and that Joseph Hormayr in the mid-1810s established a literary network. All these factors stimulated the development, not only of Austrian tale-collecting (Franz Ziska, Österreichische Volksmärchen, 1822) but also Hungarian ones.
Earlier calls to collect popular oral poetry and tales, by the likes of Mátyás Ráth, Miklós Révai, István Sándor and István Kultsár had appeared between 1781 and 1801 in periodicals such as Magyar Hírmondó, Sokféle, and Hazai s Külföldi Tudósítások; but the famous Grimm-inspired circular letter of the Viennese Wollzeiler Gesellschaft (1815) can be regarded as the true starting-point, spreading the example of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen also to other language communities – Serbian and Romanian as well as Hungarian.
A key role in the Hungarian developments was played by three intercultural mediators with a native knowledge of German: Georg von Gaal, Johann Mailáth and Alois Mednyánszky. They could make the Hungarian oral repertoire accessible to German readers and at the same time acquaint Hungarian literati with the genre. These three men were part of Hormayr’s Viennese circle. Accordingly, in their outlook, the role of the folk- and fairy tale was reinterpreted from its Romantic reputation (as the cultural cement of a national community) into a Reichspatriotic notion: as popular-cultural elements in palette of the Habsburg monarchy.
The field was opened up by Gaal’s collection Märchen der Magyaren (Vienna, 1822), which drew heavily on the repertoire of Hungarian soldiers stationed in Vienna and on the collection of Karóly Kisfaludy; it is generally accepted that Gaal’s collecting activities had been inspired by Grimm, whom he may have encountered in Vienna. For their part, the Grimms were aware of the work of Gaal (and also of Mailáth), and referred to it in the third edition of the Kinder– und Hausmärchen.
Mailáth and Mednyánszky followed in Gaal’s footsteps. The first sample by Mailáth, repeatedly given literary reworkings (by Therese Artner and others), appeared as Der Willi-Tanz in the Wiener Zeitschrift and was followed by the 1825 collection Magyarische Sagen und Märchen (Brno, 1825). What Mailáth offered to German-language readers were not straightforward translations but rather adaptations with a Hungarian recontextualization; among the Grimm originals he reworked in this way is the tale of Snow White. Although Mailáth asserted in his afterword that except for certain details he had added nothing of his own invention, we may safely assume that the tales did not live in oral tradition in the form in which he presented them; indeed only four tales in the anthology can count as folk tales proper.
Mailáth invoked unspecified informants, but in fact his main source (apart from the Grimms) was his brother-in-law and colleague Alajos Mednyánszky (e.g. for the legend of Péter Szapáry or of the walled-in woman). In 1820 Mednyánszky had started a series of Sagen und Legenden in the Taschenbuch für vaterländische Geschichte; these later appeared as Erzählungen, Sagen und Legenden aus Ungarns Vorzeit (Pest, 1829). Like Mailáth, Mednyánszky adapted popular legends and folktales into romantic tales.
Although the collections by Gaal, Mailáth and Medyánszky met with a positive response, oral literature collecting only really took off in Hungary by the middle of the century. In 1843, the Kisfaludy Society called for a collection effort of Hungarian fairy tales, legends and ballads. This formed the commencement of the collecting activities of the likes of Arnold Ipolyi (Magyar mythologia, “Hungarian mythology”, Pest 1854), János Kriza (Vadrózsák, “Wild roses”, Koloszvár 1863), and János Erdélyi (A nép költészete, “The poetry of the people”, Pest 1869). Even these later collections often drew on the “Vienna Three”.
