Sermon to Zrínyi

Hungarian Literature

Course 1 · Chapter 2 · From the Funeral Sermon to Zrínyi

The story of written Hungarian begins with a short prayer-like text from around 1200, copied into a Latin manuscript. Over the following centuries, Hungarian writing was shaped by the Church, the Reformation, the Ottoman wars and the Habsburg monarchy, and a few writers stand out: a lyric poet who was also a soldier, and a soldier-statesman who wrote an epic. This chapter follows that early period, from the Funeral Sermon to Miklós Zrínyi, and asks what survives and why. Names and dates are from general knowledge and flagged "check".

The Oldest Texts

The Funeral Sermon

The Halotti beszéd és könyörgés (Funeral Sermon and Prayer) is the oldest surviving continuous text in Hungarian, dated to around 1192 to 1195 (check). It is a short address over a dead person, followed by a prayer, and was written into a Latin manuscript known as the Pray Codex (check).

Earlier scraps

A few Hungarian words and phrases appear earlier, in Latin documents, such as the foundation charter of Tihany Abbey from 1055 (check). These are place names and phrases, not a continuous text.

The Lamentations of Mary

The Ómagyar Mária-siralom (Old Hungarian Lamentations of Mary), from around 1300, is the oldest surviving Hungarian poem (check). It is a lament in the voice of Mary at the cross, in verse form, and survives in a manuscript now in Leuven in Belgium (check).

Why so little? Latin was the language of the Church, the court and the law, and manuscripts were lost in wars and fires, so what survives is a small part of what existed (check).
The Mongol invasion. The invasion of 1241 to 1242 devastated the kingdom and is often cited as one reason for lost records (check how heavily).
Oral tradition. Songs, chronicles and tales were no doubt told aloud, but little is recorded, and later chronicles preserve traces (check).

The Reformation and Print

Development (check each)	Detail
Bible translation	Parts of the Bible were translated into Hungarian in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the first full printed translation is Gáspár Károli's Bible of 1590 (the Vizsoly Bible).
Printing	The first book printed in Hungary dates from 1473 (a Latin chronicle, printed in Buda); printing in Hungarian grew after 1530 (check).
Protestant writers	The Reformation encouraged writing in Hungarian for preaching, schooling and hymns, and spread literacy in the language.
Historical verse	Chroniclers and poets put the events of the Ottoman wars into verse, often in a plain narrative style (check).

Balassi

The man. Bálint Balassi (1554 to 1594) was a nobleman, soldier and poet, who lived in a time of Ottoman threat and personal turmoil, including debts, exile and lawsuits (check).
The poetry. He is regarded as the first major Hungarian lyric poet, writing love poems, religious verse and poems about soldiers' life in the border fortresses (check). He drew on European Renaissance models and also on Hungarian song.
The Balassi stanza. A nine-line stanza form he often used is named after him, with a particular rhyme scheme (check the details).
The legacy. His poems circulated in manuscript and were published long after his death, and later poets rediscovered him as a founding figure.

Zrínyi

A soldier's epic Miklós Zrínyi (1620 to 1664) was a Croatian-Hungarian nobleman, military commander and statesman who wrote in Hungarian. His epic Szigeti veszedelem (The Peril of Sziget, 1651) tells of his great-grandfather's defence of the fortress of Szigetvár against the Ottoman army in 1566 (check). It is modelled on Italian Renaissance epics, and he published it with other poems. He also wrote prose on military and political matters, arguing for a standing army and for Hungarian independence from Habsburg control (check). He died in a hunting accident, which some at the time suspected was an assassination (check).

The significance. The poem treats a defeat as a heroic stand, a pattern that recurs in Hungarian national memory (check, and Chapter 3).
Language. Writing a Renaissance-style epic in Hungarian showed that the language could carry a long poem of high style.
Two peoples. The Zrínyi family was Croatian, and he wrote in Hungarian and also had a Croatian-language tradition in his family, so his case shows the overlap of cultures in the kingdom (check).

A British comparison Compare the Old English poem Beowulf and the later Elizabethan poets, or the Scottish Makars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (check). Hungarian shows a similar pattern of a few precious early survivals, followed by a Renaissance flowering that relied on foreign models.

Check the details Dates, locations of manuscripts and the exact wording of early texts are from general knowledge, and Old Hungarian is hard to read without specialist help. Verify against scholarly editions and the National Széchényi Library before quoting.

Exercises

Exercise 1

Explain why the Funeral Sermon is important even though it is short and religious, and why so little earlier Hungarian writing survives.

→ Solution

Exercise 2

Describe the roles of the Reformation and of printing in the development of Hungarian as a literary language.

→ Solution

Exercise 3

Compare Balassi and Zrínyi: their backgrounds, their forms and what each shows about writing in Hungarian in the age of the Ottoman wars.

→ Solution

Quick Reference

Oldest texts: Funeral Sermon (c. 1192 to 1195); Lamentations of Mary (c. 1300) (check)
Print and religion: Vizsoly Bible, 1590 (check)
Balassi: 1554 to 1594; the first major lyric poet (check)
Zrínyi: 1620 to 1664; Szigeti veszedelem, 1651 (check)
The caution: what survives is a small, chance-shaped part of what was written