A székely írás emlékei: Corpus Monumentorum Alphabeto Siculico Exaratorum ed. by Elek Benkő; Klára Sándor and István Vásáry

Abstract

Reviewed by: A székely írás emlékei: Corpus Monumentorum Alphabeto Siculico Exaratorum ed. by Elek Benkő; Klára Sándor and István Vásáry George Gömöri Benkő, Elek; Sándor, Klára and Vásáry, István (eds). A székely írás emlékei: Corpus Monumentorum Alphabeto Siculico Exaratorum. Bölcsészettudományi Kutatóközpont, Budapest, 2021. 836 pp. Illustrations. Bibliography. Indexes. Ft8,900.00. This large collection of documents is the result of many years of meticulous research. It contains all the available relics of the Székely (Szekler) script, a runic writing system originally used by Transylvanian Hungarians who live to this day in South-Eastern Transylvania, Romania. The Szekler script (in Hungarian rovásírás) was first mentioned in the thirteenth-century chronicle, Gesta Hungarorum, but information about it reached the West only thanks to Johannes Thúróczy's Chronica Hungarorum two hundred years later. Originally the letters were carved into wooden sticks and gates, and only later on walls of (mainly Protestant) churches, and were used for personal messages or for the commemoration of those who built the churches. Most of the inscriptions have been discovered in the past seventy years, in the course of the restoration of medieval churches. With the renewed interest in antiquities, especially in Oriental languages and non-Latin scripts, Western scholars 'discovered' Szekler runic writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mainly thanks to Rudimenta, an oft-copied manuscript in Latin by Johannes Telegdi, but most scholarly writing on the subject was carried out in Hungary, with the first book gathering and classifying all the documents available at the time being published in 1915 by Gyula Sebestyén. The Corpus Monumentorum contains six chapters, each identified by a capital letter of the alphabet. 'A' covers all the historical information about the Szekler script; 'B' the relics known as of now, mostly carved into church walls in Szeklerland; 'C' introduces those relics extant in manuscripts from places as diverse as Bologna, Constantinople and Csíkszentmiklós (Nicolești in today's Romania). Chapter 'D', by far the longest in the book, lists all relics of the runic writing extant both in print and manuscripts from the so-called Nickolsburg (today Mikulov, Moravia) Alphabet to the nineteenth century. As for 'E', this contains three sub-chapters, amongst them Mátyás Bél (Matej Bel)'s informative essay (Leipzig, 1718) on runic script, both in the Latin original and in Hungarian translation. Finally, a brief Chapter 'F' deals with uncertain sources and forgeries. Many of the original texts about rovásírás were in Latin, intended not only for a Szekler but a Hungarian and foreign Humanist readership. Already in his preface to the Rudimenta János Baranyai Decsi, a Strasbourg-educated Transylvanian, proudly asserts that the existence of this runic script demonstrates both the ancient origins of the 'Scythian' Hungarians and, with [End Page 745] its thirty-four characters, the richness of their language, as well as its kinship with Hebrew, 'the language of God'. The latter claim intensified foreign interest in the Szekler runic script, mostly from Orientalists and scholars of the so-called 'sacred languages'. Amongst them a special place must be accorded to the Leiden professor Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn, whose Historia universalis (1652) played a seminal role in providing Western scholars with information about the existence of the Szekler script. It is partly through his work and partly through information provided by a Hungarian diplomat in Brandenburg, Jakab Harsányi Nagy, that a number of Oxford scholars began to show interest in this topic, an interest that culminated in the publication of a table of Szekler runic script in the first volume of George Hickes's Linguarum veterum septentrionalium… (1703–05). (Unfortunately facts about Harsányi Nagy's role — largely thanks to the research of the Oxford scholar William Poole — reached the editors only after the publication of this volume.) It is impossible to give a full account of the rich material assembled in this impressive volume, but let me mention some facts that will be new even to those who have followed recent research...