A magyarországi hun hagyomány legkorábbi írott forrásai és európai kapcsolatuk

Abstract

The author tries to collect the written sources from the eleventh till the early thirteenth century which connect the Huns and especially their king, Attila with Hungary and the Hungarians. The most important source is the chronicle of Lampert of Hersfeld describing the story how the sword of Attila was given to the Bavarian duke, Ottó of Northeim in 1063. Though the historical authenticity of this story is rather obscure, it seems important that a representative circle of Germán ecclesiastical intellectuals entered Hungary either during the great pilgrimage of 1064-65 or with the Germán armies, e.g. in 1063. An outstanding figure of this circle was Gunther, the fifth bishop of Bamberg (1057-1065), himself a poet and a fan of the contemporary Attila stories. It is still an unsolved problem how to reconstruct the would be content of a pre-1000 Hungárián Attila tradition, if there was any. But it is sure that the close German/Bavarian-Hungarian connections of the eleventh century gave a decisive impetus to the formation of a tradition that the seat of Attila was somewhere in Hungary either in Esztergom or in Óbuda (Old Buda), alsó told by the Nibelungelied in the late twelfth century. By the beginning of the thirteenth century it was accepted in the royal court that Attila belonged to the ancestors of the Hungárián kings. The final conclusion of the present study is that the possibility of a discontinuity of the Hun tradition in Hungary is much higher than a continuous belief in the place of Attila in the family tree of the Hungárián kings. Though we have no surviving sources in Hungary from the twelfth century, that century was the formation of the stories that were written down by the chroniclers of the next century.