The shepherd was a very frequent motif in eighteenth century Hungarian popular literature
in both anonymous songs and authored works. Compared to the earlier centuries, we
can determine that different types of shepherds are present in Hungarian poetry in
a higher proportion in this period. This was related to the consolidation of agriculture
after the Turkish occupation (1690s) and the rich shepherd culture of the multi-ethnic
land, such as a higher awareness of Slovakian and Romanian mountain shepherding. The
shepherd motifs were enriched in three fields which were interconnected: 1. ancient
Roman, bucolic shepherd figures after the eclogues of Virgil; 2. Rococo pastoral characters
of the Christmas dramatic plays and popular songs; 3. genre figures of realistic shepherds
in the 18th century. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, Hungarian broadside
literature, consisting of very popular chapbooks,27 helped to spread these motifs,
especially by genre songs and later by the puszta poems of Sándor Petőfi (1823–1849).
The protagonists of the early Hungarian outlaw ballads were initially shepherds who
were criminalized only later. This paper would like to give a nuanced image of shepherds
in early modern Hungarian literature by analysing the motif of the shepherd.
