The Folk-Tales of the Magyars (Hungarian Folk Tales)

Off-the wall folk tales from the Carpathian Basin featuring princes, paupers, anthropomorphic animals, devils, and a whole lot of weird.

The relatively small, Central European country of Hungary has a rich tradition of folklore stemming from its colorful history of occupation by Celts, Romans, Slavs, and Ottomans before a brief period of rule under the Austrian Hapsburgs. The Kingdom of Hungary itself once stretched from the Adriatic Sea to parts of modern Czech Republic and Moldavia. While the land this country occupies is now just a fraction of what it used to be, the Hungarian (Magyar) language is one of the most difficult in the world (stemming from the Finn-Ugric language family shared only by speakers of Finnish). This made widespread literary access to these stories quite rare before the 20th century.

In the late 1890s, a group of scholars led by the Rev. W. Henry Jones and Lewis L. Kropf translated over fifty Hungarian folk tales into English and published it in 1899 by the Folk-Lore Society, London. This collection - one per week over the course of 2018 - will be posted to Wattpad thanks to digitization by Project Gutenberg.