Hungarian Academy of Sciences

The Hungarian Academy of Sciences is presented in the preface to the Kalevala as a scholarly venue for evidence used to argue for connections between Hungarian and Finnish traditions. Its documented role is specific: it received a group of old Hungarian deeds and published a study comparing folk incantations, placing the institution within the book’s account of the epic’s comparative reception rather than its original collection or composition.

Documentary and Scholarly Role

In 1868, twenty-two Hungarian deeds dated from 1616 to 1660 were sent to the Academy after being found in Hegyalja, the region associated in the preface with Tokay wine. The documents concerned vineyard sales, and each reportedly recorded that the contracting parties had emptied a customary cup of wine. The account names that cup as Ukkon's cup, connecting the documents’ wording with Ukko, the chief god in Finnish mythology.

The Academy also appears as the publication venue for a study by Ferdinand Barna. His extended treatise on Hungarian and Finnish incantations was published in the Transactions of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Philological Department, for 1870. The preface thus associates the institution both with documentary material and with philological discussion of that material’s possible cultural significance.

Comparative Evidence for the Kalevala

Barna’s comparison drew on a Hungarian book by Peter Bornemissza, printed in 1578, which collected incantations used by Hungarian country people to drive away disease and misfortune. The preface reports that these spells closely resemble incantations in the Kalevala used for comparable purposes. It presents the parallel as evidence of a shared stock of traditions among Ugrian peoples, of whom Finns and Hungarians are described as branches.

The Academy’s relevance to the epic therefore lies in the scholarly circulation of evidence, not in a claim that it collected or edited the Kalevala. Its Transactions provided a venue for Barna’s argument, while the deeds sent to it supplied a separate historical example: the resemblance between the name Ukkon and Finnish Ukko. Together, these references show how the preface uses philological comparison and archival documents to support its account of cultural connections.