Földvári Books

First Hungarian Edition of the “Tale of Igor’s Campaign”

[Слово о полку Игореве.] Szózat Igor hadjáratárul a palócok ellen. (Hösköltemény az oroszok öskorábul. / Hősköltemény az oroszok őskorábul.) Magyarította Riedl Szende. [The Tale of Igor's Campaign. Epic Poem From the Ancient Time of the Russians.]

Prága és Lipcse [Prague and Leipzig],. I. L. Kober. (On cover: Pest. Lampel Róbert.) [Printed in Prague by Friedrich Rohlíček.], 1858. First Hungarian edition. Lampel’s vignette on cover. In publisher’s wrappers, printed in green. (9), 6–42 p., (14 [pages of advertisement of the publisher, printed by Jaroslav Pospešil in Prague; and (8) p. advertisement of “Album. Bibliothek deutscher Originalromane”.]). Artistically restored. In very good condition.

First Hungarian edition, early translation of one of the earliest Slavonic language writings “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”.

Translated by the Hungarian historian and linguist Szende Riedl (1831–1873) after the German edition. Riedl was an expert on the historical connections between the Slavs and the Hungarians, thus he found the story of Igor’s campaign against the Polovtsians particularly important to be translated and introduced to the Hungarian public. The identity between the Polovtsians and the Cumans was recently proven by Riedl’s colleague János Jerney, who even stated that their language was Hungarian and were the ancestors of the Hungarians.

Riedl explains the importance of the text and its context in the ten-page foreword, that followed by the translation and the notes.

“The Tale of Igor's Campaign” is one of the oldest Slavonic language text, a medieval epic poem from the late 12th century about the unsuccessful campaign of Prince Igor Svyatoslavich, prince of the Russian lands of Novgorod-Seversky against the Polovtsians (or Cumans). The tale was written anonymously around 1185 and its only manuscript, dated to the 15th century, was discovered in 1795 by Aleksei Musin-Pushkin and burned during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812. Musin-Pushkin published the text in 1800 with the help of Alexei Malinovsky and Nikolai Bantysh-Kamensky, leading Russian paleographers of the time. It was first published in German in 1803 and in 1858 in Hungarian.

Scarce, we could trace only three copies in institutional holdings worldwide.

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Price: €600.00