Zsuzsanna Erdélyi was one of the leading figures of Hungarian folklore studies and religious ethnography in the past decades. She has gained great professional prestige in Hungary and abroad primarily by the genre description of archaic folk prayers, their analysis in a cultural, literary and folklore context and by her humane personality. Her achievements in the field of research were recognised by numerous professional awards and honours at home and abroad.
Zsuzsanna Erdélyi was born on 10 January 1921 in Komárom (Komárno, Slovakia), annexed to Czechoslovakia [in 1920]. Her father was Pál Erdélyi, literary historian, library director and university professor (1868-1936), her mother Hedvig Remisovszky (1893-1980). His grandfather János Erdélyi was a writer, literary historian and philosopher (1814-1868). He married Elemér Dobozy (1902-1986), an internist, cardiologist and university lecturer, in 1948. They had four children: Miklós (1949) is a secondary school teacher of history and Latin, Dániel (1951) is a lawyer, Zsófia (1952) music teacher, performer, Borbála (1955) a harpsichord performer.
Zsuzsanna Erdélyi graduated from the Veres Pálné Girls' Grammar School (1939), and at the same time studied piano at the Budapest Music School. She studied economics for one year at the Faculty of Economics of the József Nádor University of Economics and Technology, then in 1945 she graduated with a degree in Hungarian, Italian, and Philosophy at the Pázmány Péter University, and in 1945 she received a doctorate in Humanities. Between 1972 and 1974 she completed a course in critical studies of religion at the Marxism–Leninism Evening University.
Between 1944 and 1948 she worked as a diplomat in the press department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs but was dismissed for political reasons. Afterwards, between 1953 and 1964, she was a member of the Folk Music Collecting Group of the Ministry of Culture, a research group lead by László Lajtha (composer, folklorist, 1892-1963). After László Lajtha's death, she worked at the Ethnographic Department of the Museum of Ethnography from 1964 to 1971, and at the Ethnographic Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 1971 to 1986. She retired in 1987. From 1987 to 1990, he was an external collaborator at the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Her work and her public engagement played a major role in enabling religious ethnography to function as a tolerated, later accepted scientific discipline in Hungary from the 1970s onwards. Although she lectured only occasionally at our universities (ELTE, JATE), her influential publications and lectures launched a series of followers and students on their research careers.
From the 1980s she was involved in the Szent István Society, the Association of Christian Intellectuals, where she headed the Hungarian Studies section named after Sándor Bálint (folklorist, 1904-1980). In 1999, she was elected a member of the Szent István Academy. In 2002, she became a member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts, heading the Folk Art section.
*
In the research group led by László Lajtha, she recorded the texts of religious folk poetry and folk songs. In her first independent folklore study, encouraged by László Lajtha, she discussed the colour symbolism of Hungarian folk poetry. She consciously followed the poetic understanding of his father and grandfather, Pál Erdélyi and János Erdélyi in this study, on the symbolic system of folk poetry. Zsuzsanna Erdélyi examined folk lyrics and their historical changes.
In 1968-1969 Zsuzsanna Erdélyi, who was engaged in ethnographic research in the Lajtha team, entered a new phase of her research career: she came upon Rozália Jánosné Babos in Nagyberén, Somogy County, and recorded on a tape her special prayers that carry long-standing motifs, which prompted her to discover an unknown narrative world. Similar prayer texts had already been recorded by Lajos Kálmány, Sándor Bálint and Nándor Fettich, but Zsuzsanna Erdélyi deserves the credit for having discovered, defined and described the genre, the spiritual and psychological function, the possible historical and spiritual-historical aspects, the origin and European context of the archaic folk prayer.
Zsuzsanna Erdélyi initially described the group of texts as an archaic apocryphal folk prayer. Later, the term archaic prayer became established in professional terminology. The popular names of the texts were primarily based on the time of prayer (morning, evening, dawn, Friday, fasting, bedtime, etc.), the nature of the text (passionate, painful, rooster as symbol, without a priest, etc.) or the effect produced (recommended, efficacious, salutary, and powerful prayer, etc.).
She concluded that those texts that are still used in popular practice today as prayer texts are, due to their central theme (the death of Christ), primarily linked to the Franciscan-inspired and free-winged poetic genres of the late Middle Ages, the Passion Epic and the Marian Lament poetry. The texts of the prayers focusing on the Passion, suffering, mourning, and the mystery of the Holy Eucharist conceived in Grail-like terms, elevated human suffering to the status of a grace-giver through the spiritual processes of substitution and projection, of imitation, united with the suffering and pain of Christ and Mary. She found such expressions of emotional religiousness in Franciscan spirituality. These 'mixed-consciousness' texts also preserve, or may preserve, other epic-dramatic genre elements (mystery dramas) and even pre-Christian or non-Christian faith elements (ancient cosmogonic imagery, spells, charming prayers, apotropaic formula).
In the words of Sándor Bálint, the "originally obviously more eloquent texts have become worn out over the centuries [...], sometimes vague, their fragmented presentation ballad-like, and their content lyrically inspired. [...] They cannot be considered prayers in the glorifying or supplicatory sense, but rather an enumeration, an evocation, almost an enchantment, a passionate readiness to identify with and share in the suffering of the Son, a soothing of the anxious human existence” (Sándor Bálint: Népi imádságaink világából. [lit. From the World of Our Folk Prayers.] Új Ember, 5 March 1978, 4). Besides the reliance on God, the desire of man to influence Providence by magic with the self-confidence of the creature is also in them. And the compassionate love with which the praying person experienced and contemplated the pain of the Saviour, who also accepted death on the cross for the sake of humanity, and of the ‘Blessed Virgin Mary’ who bore the sufferings of her Son as Mother. She suffered with them, and in this compassion, she resolved her own pain in a cosmic context. Here the creature could become one with his creator God. And they could also trust in the promise, expressed in the clauses of the prayer texts, that all who fulfilled the conditions laid down would be saved.
The structure of the prayer texts is usually threefold: it begins with a lyrical nature scene, in which elements of the Christian cult of light often appear, followed by an epic section with dramatic (dialogue) passages, presenting one or another episode of the story of Jesus' passion, and concluding with a short factual conclusion. Theologically, this clause is the most problematic section of the archaic prayer texts, but it may refer to the early stages of the development of the doctrine of repentance: the recitation of the prayer promises grace, salvation, redemption itself. This clause form is the most important genre feature of archaic prayer.
The texts of the prayers show most of the stylistic and poetic characteristics of Hungarian lyrics: personification, the use of metaphors, the use of formulaic epithets, exaggerations, the variety of word forms (repetition, rhetorical accumulation, alliteration). They make ample use of surreal exaggerations, unusual and seemingly ancient verb forms. They take the form of free-verse prayer texts, with no fixed syllable count or metrical constraints.
And all this in the spoken word, not in written, textual relics. They were handed down mainly as oral tradition within the family.
Zsuzsanna Erdélyi's analyses sketch the genre’s history: she provides detailed description of the history of archaic prayers, the genre’s linguistic and poetic peculiarities, the relationship between medieval codex literature and the vernacular, and their European context. She established that the tradition of prayer, which is primarily oral, is in contact with several branches of both Hungarian and European folklore: rhyming poetry, folk songs, legendary ballads, ritual songs, religious drama, several groups of texts of the Marian lyric and the Marian epic, and several genres of customary poetry. They are linked to the intermediate field between literature and folk poetry, the medieval popular fiction. Fragments of lyrics from Baroque songs and even 19th century folk songs appear in them. Several prayer texts were printed in tarpaulin booklets, which ensured a wide geographical distribution. The prayers were prayed according to an archaic vocal performance style: singing-declamation-recitation. (For a concise but illustrated summary analysis, see Archaikus népi imádságok. [lit. Archaic Folk Prayers] In: Magyar Néprajz. Volume 5 Folk Poetry. ed.: Lajos Vargyas. Budapest, 1988:692-742.])
She spent many years, decades, intensive research and organising research. She published numerous calls for collections in Új Ember, the Kincses Kalendárium, and other ecclesiastical and secular press, to which she has received prayer texts accompanied by confessional letters from all over the world. The analysis of these helped her draw the psychological background of the prayer genre. (Múltunk íratlan lírája. Az archaikus népi imádságműfaj háttérvilága. [lit. Lyrics of Our Past. The Background of the Archaic Folk Prayer Genre.] Kalligram, 2015)
She has collected many texts at home and abroad, especially in Italy. Her archive of prayers can be found in the repository of the Institute of Ethnography of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA). Her research inspired the publication of similar collections of prayers in Poland (1976) and Slovenia (1983). She has published a separate volume on the prayer material of our local nationalities and European peoples, which she needed for comparative analysis across Europe. (Aki ezt az imádságot… Élő passiók. [lit. Those Who Pray This… Living Passion.] Kalligram, 2011.)
Through intensive fieldwork, Zsuzsanna Erdélyi has saved and recorded what the memory of the elders still preserved from a rich oral poetry at a time of generational and epochal change. With the passing of this generation, this genre of prayer has died out as a living textual tradition or is dying out today. In the second half of the 20th century, the social conditions, needs and opportunities for transmission changed radically. The deep layers of popular oral culture have become a source material for literary and cultural history. In doing so, she gave priority to the informative-documentative role of community memory.
Her research interests include archaic prayers, the wider field of religious folklore, the folk cult of Mary, and the relationship between the oral and the written forms. Her monograph on Marian worship that remained in manuscript is awaiting continuation and completion. During her research, she has found several manuscript hymnbooks, some of whose material she has processed. The rich collection, dating from the 18th to the 20th centuries, records the local chant material and organises it functionally according to the local religious occasions (processions, vigils, prayer houses, feasts, etc.).
In 1980, with the support of Sándor Bálint and Cardinal Archbishop László Lékai (1910-1986), she established the Collection of Popular Religiousness in Esztergom to save the material relics of popular religiousness. The collection, which had been neglected for a long time, is now being renewed within the framework of the Esztergom Christian Museum, with the support of the Hungarian Academy of Arts, and the collection was named after Zsuzsanna Erdélyi (2015).
Her first analysis of prayers was published in the 1971 in Ethnographia, together with reflections by linguists and literary historians (Dezső Pais, László Mezey, Béla Holl). The literary world (Új Írás, other literary journals) enthusiastically welcomed this peculiar poetic text. The political authorities could not ignore the enthusiastic reception by Ferenc Juhász, Sándor Csoóri, Ágnes Gergely, Dezső Tandori and other poets and literary figures, so she could continue her research. In the 1970s and 1980s, this also provided Zsuzsanna Erdélyi with a kind of protection for her collection of these religious texts. Many poets (Ferenc Szabó, Zoltán Polner, Sándor Tóth, Lajos Major-Zala, Gáspár Nagy, Laura Iancu and others) were inspired by these prayers with their old-fashioned sound and specific imagery. Miklós Kocsár, the composer, arranged six prayers in a choral work. Tünde Jámborné Balog created dramatically expressive batik images based on his prayers.
Erdélyi spoke about her research results at lectures accompanied by Hungarian performers Erzsi Török, Adrienne Jancsó, Irén Lovász and Éva Ferencz, thus fulfilling a special mission in an anti-religious era. She launched a grassroots collection movement, both within and outside our borders, with the support of the church leaders, the religious and the secular press, irrespective of denomination. The vast correspondence of this movement still needs to be processed.
In 1974 she published texts about Somogy County in the Somogy Almanac, and in 1977 her book Hegyet hágék, lőtőt lépék (lit. I Climbed Mountains, I Stepped Through Valleys) was published by Magvető Publishers. The third, enlarged edition, which almost doubled in size, was published in 1999 by Kalligram Publishing House in Bratislava. Several of her original recordings and CDs have been released with the participation of the above-mentioned performers.
Zsuzsanna Erdélyi played a significant role in thawing the atmosphere around religious topics that had been frozen by the past regime, and the landmark works of Sándor Bálint, Pál Péter Domokos (ethnographer, 1901-1992) or István Volly (composer, folklorist, 1907-1992) could be published, so that religious ethnography could be shaped and it can function as a scientific discipline in Hungary from the 1970s onwards, tolerated by the authorities.
On her seventieth, eightieth and ninetieth birthdays, she was greeted by colleagues and admirers with celebratory volumes. She received many honours for her work, but professional recognition in the form of scientific degrees was withheld for ideological reasons and because of human envy. Her work is complementary to that of her great colleagues László Lajtha, Pál Péter Domokos and Sándor Bálint.
Zsuzsanna Erdélyi (1921-2015), an inescapable figure in Hungarian scientific and cultural life of the past fifty years, who has gained professional prestige for herself and Hungarian science at home and abroad by her genre descriptions, cultural, literary and folkloristic analyses and publications of archaic folk prayers. She is a great person and a scholar who humbly continued the work of her great predecessors, Sándor Bálint and Pál Péter Domokos: the exploration of Hungarian religious culture. Without her archaic collection of prayers, I Climbed Mountains, I Stepped Through Valleys (1976), it would be difficult to imagine not only the history of Hungarian ethnography, but also the history of Hungarian culture. It must be emphasised: all three of them could be role models in terms of humility, humanity, loyalty and helpfulness. She took on her duties with great commitment and fulfilled them in an exemplary manner, the benchmark role she inherited soon after the death of Sándor Bálint. She was a good judge of character. And her loyalty and helpfulness were exemplary.
Zsuzsanna Erdélyi knew that the prayer material she collected and analysed was more than a valuable textual tradition: "Texts that strengthen the heart, lighten the soul, lift the soul to God." In them, behind them, we see the man seeking God, striving to God, hoping for rest in Him.
Zsuzsanna Erdélyi passed away on Friday 13 February 2015. She was buried by Bishop László Bíró on 12 March 2015, according to the rite of the Roman Catholic Church. On behalf of the professional community, Professor Vilmos Voigt paid his last respects.
She left behind a completed oeuvre. Her vast collection of correspondence, devotional popular literature, manuscript hymnals and the prepared material on the Marian lyric still awaits their future curator. In her last volume, entitled Múltunk íratlan lírája (lit. The Unwritten Lyrics of Our Past), she collected her writings from various places. This book contains the scholarly studies of Zsuzsanna Erdélyi, her reminiscences on the collection, editions and her colleagues. Together with her book "...Századokon át paptalanúl..." (lit. Without a Priest for Hundreds of Years), she shows the reader today "how this seemingly small text, belonging to the spiritual world of the simplest people, became a movement that influenced the whole of Hungarian culture. A festive manifestation of the Hungarian people's soul [...]" (Vilmos Voigt)
[2016]