Loránd Benkő, the scholar of Anonymus
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18349/MagyarNyelv.2022.1.28Keywords:
historical linguistic review of Anonymus’ Gesta, chronological value of toponyms, created anthroponyms, language in the Árpád Era, methods for studying remnantsAbstract
Loránd Benkő considered Gesta Hungarorum by Anonymus to be a key source in research on the Árpád Era. He argued that the scholarly findings about the work fundamentally shaped the view of historians about the Hungarian Conquest and the following centuries and also greatly influenced research on the language of the time. As history as a discipline builds its arguments about the Gesta partly on the results of historical linguistics, Benkő believed it was important to constantly renew the linguistic knowledge related to the work of Anonymus and adapt it to our evolving understanding of historical linguistics in general. He articulated the need for review in historical linguistics and onomastics already in the 1960s in his paper on the name Csepel in the Gesta and in the final one and a half decades of his career he put this issue in the centre of his own research endeavours. He published his findings in a series of studies, while the examination of the anthroponyms and toponyms of the Gesta played a central role in his books as well. His results confirm the fundamental argument that the toponyms of the Gesta may be considered to be authentic source data not with reference to the time of the Conquest but the era of the writing of the text. Based on historical and linguistic facts, Benkő argued that the Gesta was written in the 1210s. He considered some of the anthroponyms in it to be Anonymus’ invention, which he created based on contemporary toponyms and thus associated the deeds of the people thus named with the places in question. It was his important methodological innovation that the philological and historical linguistic review of the Gesta was also linked with the study of its unknown author, searching for his linguistic background, motivations, and network of connections that may be grasped in the writing of the work. Due to the numerous methodological novelties applied, the studies of Loránd Benkő on Anonymus initiated important new directions in the study of the language of the Árpád Era.
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