A nemzet történészéből tudományos csaló – a magyar Osszián-történet

Translated title of the contribution: From the Historian of the Nation to a Fraud in Academics: the Hungarian Ossian

Research output: Contribution to Book/Report typesChapterpeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

To the Literary History of the Tököly and Rákóczi Era (1872) and Studies in Literary and Cultural History in the Rákóczi Era (1885) were two famous studies on ’kuruc’ poetry. Both were written by Kálmán Waly, the celebrated Hungarian historian and politician. Waly and the poems published in the appendices of these books acquired fame in a relatively short span of time, and occupied an esteemed posi-tion in the Hungarian national canon. However, a,er Waly’s death in 1913, the philological analyses of Frigyes Riedl and Vilmos Tolnai proved that a consid-erable number of these poems, and on top of that, all the most highly esteemed pieces, are fakes, and, in fact, they were Waly’s own works. Although philological criticism was not confuted, the controversy about the origins of the poems re-mained unresolved for a long time, and several interpretations of Waly’s fraud prevailed at the same time. By the 1950s, the deliberate violation of the scienti)c norms became the dominant explanation for Waly’s ’inverse plagiarism’, therefore the Hungarian Ossian story ended with the discreditation of the historian’s com-plete oeuvre.We purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the knowledge produced by violating scienti)c norms lived on, because it conformed to the national historical narrative. Waly’s texts were utilized in school books, moreover, from time to time, even decades later, they appeared in scholarly works – especially in historical and literary – as genuine sources of the ‘kuruc’ era. We knowledge created by fraud was kept alive and perpetuated by further trans-gressions of norms in successive decades.
Translated title of the contributionFrom the Historian of the Nation to a Fraud in Academics: the Hungarian Ossian
Original languageHungarian
Title of host publicationA normán innen és túl
Subtitle of host publicationTanulmányok a Történeti Kollégium konferenciájának előadásaiból
EditorsJanka Kovács, Zsófia Kiss-Kökényessy, Viola Lászlófi
Place of PublicationBudapest
PublisherELTE BTK Történeti Kollégium
Pages181-200
Number of pages20
ISBN (Print)9789632848822
StatePublished - 2017

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