The traditional storyteller Lajos Erdös is living in Tyukod, a small village in North Eastern Hungary. He recited five of his tales to the folklore scholars Ágnes Kovács and Bertalan Andrásfalvy as early as 1956. Supplementary pieces of his narrative repertory were collected by Veronika Görög-Karády in the years 1984-1985. The same scholar completed the last phase of this work of preserving the precious rests of this still surviving Hungarian Gypsy oral literature some twenty years later, when Lajos Erdõs, now a lonely man, spoke of his life, his family and storytelling practice.

Veronika Görög-Karády was educated in Hungary before leaving for France in 1956.  She completed her studies at the Sorbonne, earning her doctorate in anthropology with a dissertation on the image of racial groups in African oral literature.  From 1968 till 2001 she was a research fellow of the French CNRS (National Center of Scientific Research) as a specialist of the comparative study of folk tales, more generally of traditional oral art. Since 1980 she has been engaged in investigations on Gypsy oral narratives in Hungary, illustrated in 1985 by the publication of the repertoire of a Romungro Gypsy storyteller   - Tales of János Berki told in Gypsy and Hungarian (texts in Gypsy with English and Hungarian translations). Her last book (The Children of Eve and the origin of inequality, Ethno-semiotical studies /Africa, Europe/, Budapest, L'Harmattan, 2006 - in Hungarian) offers a synthesis of her scholarly work.
Studien zur Literaturwissenschaft, Bd. 4
 

ISBN 9783933337597, Englisch Broschur, 13x 20 cm, 234 Seiten, 4 s/w Fotos