Boundaries

Today I wanted to continue on my theme of naming. As an ethnic Hungarian, I have always been fascinated by what I am told is a celebration equivalent to birthdays in Hungary, the name day. It is a celebration of all the people sharing the same name.  One of my Hungarian friends told me that since names are often used in different generations, it brought families together who were distantly related. This line of inquiry led me to an article from the Kazan Herald, “Retracing the fraternal steps of history, from Hungary to Tartary, by Yusha Kozakiewicz.  

 

In the article, Laszlo Vikar and Gabor Bereczki, two Hungarian ethnomusicologists journeyed in the late 1970s to the republic of Tartarstan in Russia to find a musical connection between the countries. The Hungarian people may have origins as tribal wanderers. Linguistically, Hungarian is Finno-Ugrian, derived from a mix of several languages including Finnish, Estonia, and Mordvins, and is not a Germanic, Slavic, or a Romance language.  So, these folklorists set out to answer the age old question of where do we come from?

Wars and crisis had kept the two countries apart for much of the early 1900s, but in 1956 an agreement was finally signed allowing the two countries to become reacquainted. Part of the re-acquainting process involves sharing beloved tales. The Hungarian origins tale Csodaszarvas, the Legend of the Stag, is taken directly from the article and ties the two countries together. It begins:

Two brothers named Hunor and Magor emerged, sons of a great hunter. Once, while on a hunt in the steppes bordering Persia, a luminous white stag appeared before them. The brothers followed it and were guided into the mists of the Great Marsh. There the stag, understood as a guide from the spirit world, vanished without a trace. For five years the brothers camped there, hunting its abundant game and enjoying the protection of its environs. One day they wandered out, and finding the daughters of King Belar, took the beautiful maidens as their brides, becoming the ancestors of all the Hunnish nations and their descendants, of which the Hungarians and Tatars both belong.

The story has many variations including one where two twin sons, Muager and Gorda, are born to the Hunnish king. Muager is a close approximation of Magyar, which is what the country of Hungary calls itself today.  Other similarities between the two countries can be found in the flags, embroidered with a tulip, the beautiful gypsy music, and architectural carved wooden entrance gates to homes. Both countries revere horses and the people see themselves as descents of fearless warriors.

What interests me most about the article is ethnic migration that occurred to bind two different countries together. For those of us who live in a large geographically defined country like the United States, this would be like traveling one thousand miles from Nebraska to Georgia. Our clearly defined boundaries and young history as a country does not lead to nearly the complex combination of stories and locals of other distant lands.  Perhaps if we had more divisions among us, names and naming would bring different people together in celebration of what we have in common rather than our differences.