Nation-Religion in Nineteenth-Century Hungarian Poetry

Szili, József (2002) Nation-Religion in Nineteenth-Century Hungarian Poetry. Hungarian Studies, 16 (1). pp. 3-28. ISSN 0236-6568

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Abstract

Nation-religion is a term for a national myth and rhetoric formed in Hungary from the 15th century in a quest for national identity. A part of it was the myth of the prehistoric genealogy of the nation and the chroniclers’ accounts of the occupation of the area surrounded by the Carpathians in the 9th century. In the 16th century the country was occupied by the Turkish Empire, and the Hungarians parallelled their fate with that of the Lord’s chosen people. In the 18th and early 19th centuries this semi-mythical, semi-religious compound, supplemented by a set of “intellectual emotions” (also retraceable in poems by Schiller, Shelley and Keats), was adapted to a romantic ideology of national history and codified in verse and prose by Ferenc Kölcsey, author of the national anthem. It influenced poetry in the Age of Reforms, and culminated in an apocalyptic imagery and visions of a demonic world when the War of Independence was defeated in 1849.

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