Supernatural Local Legends of Saxon and Szekely Transylvania. Louis J
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1972 Supernatural Local Legends of Saxon and Szekely Transylvania. Louis J. Elteto Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Elteto, Louis J., "Supernatural Local Legends of Saxon and Szekely Transylvania." (1972). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 2336. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/2336 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This dissertation was produced from a microfilm copy of the original document. 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Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 7 3 - 1 3 , 6 6 0 ELTETO, Louis J., 1938- ^ SUPERNATURAL LOCAL LEGENDS OF SAXON AND SZEKELY TRANSYLVANIA. The Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, Ph.D., 1972 Folklore University Microfilms, A XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan © 1973 uu'oiS J. .L,TiTü ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. SUPERNATURAL LOCAL LEGENDS OF SAXON AND SZEKELY TRANSYLVANIA A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Lousiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of Foreign Languages ■by Louis J. Elteto M.A., Kent State University, 1964 December, 1972 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. PLEASE NOTE: Some pages may have indistinct print. Filmed as received. University Microfilms, A Xerox Education Company Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Introduction 1 A. The Aims of the Study 2 B. The Local Legend 5 C. The Setting 10 D. The Collectors and their Works 17 E. Limitations and Scope 32 II. Mythical Local Legends 37 A. Giant Legends 41 B. Tunder Legends 74 C. Local Legends Based on Minor Mythical Characters 100 Ill, Superstitious Local Legends 109 A. Witch Legends 110 B. Sorcerer Legends 142 C. Ghost Legends 157 D. Treasure Legends 179 E. Devil Legends 218 F. God Legends 229 IV, Summary and Conclusions 246 Selected Bibliography 259 Appendix: Trilingual Glossary of Geographic Names Appearing in the Study 278 11 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT The dissertation is based on 285 local legends col lected by Friedrich Müller and Balazs Orban among the Saxon and Szekely villagers of nineteenth century Transylvania. Focusing on the supernatural characters that appear in the legends, the author discusses giants, tündérek (a Hungarian mythical figure), witches, sorcerers, ghosts, devils, di vine forces and other imaginary creatures of lesser impor tance as they existed in the traditions and beliefs of the two ethnic groups. Treasure and bell legends also receive attention with regard to their supernatural aspect. After examining supernatural local legends in gen eral, the author divides them into mythical and super stitious, according to whether or not the legends' car riers believed in the existence of the characters in ques tion. On the basis of the broad corpus presented he then shows that the Saxons favored superstitious legends while the Szekelys largely rejected them. He demonstrates fur ther that seven centuries of coexistence in the same geo- historical environment did not produce a mutual influence of the two groups on each other as far as their local leg ends are concerned, and attempts to give a partial expla nation for this fact by examining the exchange effect 111 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I v between Christianity and Saxon and Szekely folklore, re spectively. Thus, while the dissertation deals essential ly with folklore, with local legends, its focus is not only on the folkloristic material per se, but also on the cul tural groups that carried it. It is axiomatic to the study that it is erroneous to divorce local legends from the groups that bear them, or from the context in which they are found among such groups in time and in space. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I. INTRODUCTION The study of folklore has, in the twentieth century, become a well-established discipline in its own right, with a rather precisely defined sphere of interest and specific, scientific work methods. While not so long ago folklorist- ics was practiced only on the fringes of several other fields of inquiry, there are chairs, departments and insti tutes of folklore all over the world today which enjoy generous private and public support, including that of several national governments. The advances that have been made in method and in quantity of achievement in gathering, preserving, organ izing and analyzing the musical, decorative, behavioral and oral traditions of mankind in the last generation or two are very substantial. The greatest progress has been achieved in the study of the various sorts of oral tradition* these have been carefully hoarded, catalogued, indexed and reduced to a system of morphological and structural analysis, so that today it is possible to deal more or less efficiently with this vast amount of infor mation, at least from certain aspects. All this is as laudable as it was necessary, but the development of folkloristics into a specialty also has Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. produced a regrettable narrowness of focus, as all special ization is inclined to do. Scholars have become interested only in the tales per se and have treated them largely as if they were objects, as if they had an existence apart from the people that bore them. Attempts have been made to trace their courses spatially and chronologically in an effort to pinpoint their origins and to formulate laws according to which they allegedly behave. Nations have made them into their jealously guarded property and have quarreled about who stole what, from whom. And the ulti mate step toward their objectivization is about to be taken* the tales are to be transformed into numbers, electromagnetic pulses that can be stored on a ribbon of acetate. Such aims of scholarship are valid in themselves, but the researcher ought never to forget that with folk lore above all else "the proper study of mankind is man." A, The Aims of the Study A little over a century ago two Transylvanians be came interested in their homeland and the people inhab iting it. Working independently and without knowing each other, with similar methods but toward divergent goals in two separate, well-delimited, contiguous geographic areas and among two distinct ethnic groups, they recorded one of the most extensive collections of local legends there is on hand for their time, an age in which interest in Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. true folklore was just awakening and had hardly been heard of in their corner of the world. One was a Saxon, the other a Szekely; the one a preacher and teacher, the other a scientist and adventurer; the one a burgher, the other a baron. Both were to become statesmen, one of them a bishop. Fate made them enemies and time defeated both* the political causes they championed have been forgotten long ago, as they themselves have been, even in their own homeland* What they left behind is a treasury of the local legends of their peoples, a treasury that has become all but obliterated in the interim. Two terrible wars have thundered through the Transylvanian valleys since then, displacing borders and shifting populations, bringing new men, new ways and new legends, while chasing off the old.