László Merényi
1837–1907
Biography
László Merényi was a Hungarian county official and a collector of folk tales. He was born at Pomáz on 18 August 1837 and died in Budapest on 30 April 1907. He studied law at the university in Pest for a year and a half, and then the Hungarian Academy of Sciences commissioned him to spend six years collecting Székely dialect words and folk tales in Transylvania. That material was never printed.
He returned to his parents at Kecskemét in 1867. From 1871 he worked for four years as a clerk in the Ministry of Finance, and he left the post with a severance payment because of ill health. He went on collecting tales, and in 1882 he sent the Academy a report on his collection of folk legends, with seven appendices. From 1887 he served Pest county in its health department. His published work consists of three collections of tales: Eredeti népmesék (two volumes, Pest, 1861), which János Arany reviewed; Sajóvölgyi eredeti népmesék (Pest, 1862); and Dunamelléki eredeti népmesék (Pest, 1863–64). Hungarian reference works note that he reshaped and stylised the tales as he wrote them down, so his texts are as much literary adaptations as records, though they remain valuable sources.
The book on this site is Dunamelléki eredeti népmesék, volume one of the third of these collections, which came out in Pest in two volumes in 1863–64. Read it knowing that much of the wording is the collector's own.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
Dunamelléki eredeti népmesék (1. kötet)
by László Merényi
The first volume of the folk tales László Merényi collected along the Danube in the 1860s: three gold rings, the water of eternal youth, twelve black ravens, a proud princess and the tricks of gypsies, soldiers and priests.
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.