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• The Saddle: Our Eastern Cultural Heritage

  149-193

  Imre Gráfik

  Views:

  288

  The study summarizes the most important knowledge about the saddle, the eastern heritage of Hungarian culture, based on the results of the research and an exhibition. Animal husbandry, especially keeping horses, has always played a very important part in Hungarians life. Saddling horses was significant up until the middle of the 20th century in Hungary, we have information about it from noblemen, the aristocracy, the upper social stratas, as well as from peasants and market town inhabitants. Objects and memories connected to riding culture, riding as a way of life, were present in the memory of the upper social classes and in folklore. There were different types, varieties of saddles, just as there were varieties of almost all the objects in our culture, depending on who used them and for what purposes. In general we can say that as the terms and conditions of life changed so objects were transformed and developed. The same is true for saddles, they belong to a group of objects which gained their final, almost perfect shape very early in time, so very few changes were made to them. The saddles used by Hungarians were very suited to riding. The big advantage of wooden saddles is that they spare horses. There are two basic types of saddles usually known as the western and eastern types. From a professional point of view, on the basis of examined material, we speak of the pommel-sole/panel type and the fork-side panel/bar type. The Hungarian saddle belongs to the Eastern type. A unique and famous variety of the Hungarian saddle is the Tiszafüred saddle. Light cavalry equipped with Hungarian harness spread around Europe, so Hungarian type saddles (Hussar saddle ) were an essential part of military equipment. Nowadays there is an increased interest in the riding tradition, and the historical past, and attention is focused on the Hungarian wooden saddle that has been used successfully over the centuries.

• Hannā Diyāb’s “A Sultan of Samarcand”, an Eleventh-Century Old Georgian St. George Legend, and the Construction of an Early Modern Fairy Tale

  7-22

  Ruth B. Bottigheimer

  Views:

  325

  Of the sixteen stories Hannā Diyāb told Antoine Galland to help the elderly scholar complete his 12-volume Mille et Une Nuits (1704–1717) six were omitted. This article examines one of the six discarded tales, “A Sultan of Samarcand”. Rediscovered by Hermann Zotenberg in the late 1880s, translated soon there­after into English by Richard Burton, it was contextualized historically as a product of Eastern Christian narrative tradition by Joseph Szövérffy in 1956 and categorized typologically by him within the Aarne–Thompson tale-type index, as it then existed. Kevin Tuite’s recent research and translation of an eleventh-century Georgian religious legend supports my hypothesis that the Christian St. George legend supplied the story’s core episode. The role of reference works is introduced inter alia to illuminate their role within knowledge creation in general and in the discontinuities of “A Sultan of Samarcand” research in particular.