Csodaszarvas

Also Known As: Hungarian, “wonder deer” or “miracle stag”; also csodafiúszarvas, “wonder boy-stag”, in the regös songs; the animal of the Hunor and Magor legend, called simply a hind, cerva, in the Latin chronicles
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Hungarian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: The Csodaszarvas is a deer that cannot be caught, that appears without warning, leads its hunters to a new country and vanishes, and in the midwinter songs carries lights on its antlers that kindle and go out by themselves.
Role in Mythos: It is the guide animal of the Hungarian origin legend, the hind whose flight draws the brothers Hunor and Magor out of their father’s land and into the marshes of Maeotis, where their peoples begin.
Relation to Humans: It never harms anyone and never speaks in the chronicle, yet a whole people dates its beginning from the day two hunters failed to kill it. In the regös songs it does speak, telling the hunter who aims at it that it is no game animal but a messenger sent from God.

The hunt is going well until the hind arrives. Two brothers have ridden out from their father’s country with their men, into a wilderness where the grass stands as high as a saddle girth and the only sound is harness leather and the dry tick of insects. Then a deer breaks cover in front of them, a female, close enough to count the breaths in her sides, and both brothers go after her at once.

That is how the story reaches the page in the 1280s, in the Latin chronicle of Simon of Kéza, a cleric at the court of King Ladislaus IV of Hungary. Simon’s book sets out to explain where the Hungarians came from, and it begins, as medieval histories liked to, at the Tower of Babel. After the confusion of tongues a giant named Menrot goes to the land of Evilath, which Simon places in Persia, and there his wife Eneth bears him two sons, Hunor and Magor. They are the firstborn, they live in tents apart from their father, and one day they go hunting.

The hind runs. She takes them out of the country they know and into the marshes of Maeotis, the great wetland around what is now the Sea of Azov, and there, among reed beds and standing water, she is gone. The brothers search for a long time. They find no track, no blood, no deer. What they find instead is the country itself: closed in by water on every side but one, rich in grass, full of fish and birds and game, hard to enter and harder to attack. They ride home, ask their father’s leave, and move their herds and households into the marsh.

The animal does not come back. Simon gives her one sentence of running and one of disappearing, and never says what she was. He does not call her white, or holy, or a wonder. He calls her a hind.

The sequel belongs to the brothers. In their sixth year in the marshes they ride out and come on a camp in the open steppe where the wives and children of the sons of Belar are keeping a festival with music, their menfolk away. Hunor and Magor’s riders carry off the lot. Among the captives are two daughters of Dula, prince of the Alans; Hunor marries one and Magor the other, and from those two marriages, Simon says, come the Huns and the Hungarians.

The shape of the tale is far older than Simon. In the sixth century the historian Jordanes, writing of the Goths, told how Hun hunters on the far shore of the same Maeotian marsh saw a doe step into the water and followed her as she walked ahead, stopped, and walked on, until she had shown them a way across to Scythia, whereupon she vanished. Jordanes gave the credit to unclean spirits who wished the Goths ill. The Hungarian chronicle keeps the marsh, the deer and the vanishing, and turns a story told against the Huns into a founding charter. Simon’s tale has a deer hidden in it a second time, too. The mother’s name, Eneth, is read as an old Hungarian word for a hind, the ancestor of modern ünő, and the usual conclusion is that an earlier version had the people descend from the deer herself, before a Christian chronicler made her a giant’s wife and moved the animal outside the family.

A different deer survives in a different place. In western Hungary and in the Székely country of Transylvania, on the nights between Saint Stephen’s Day and the New Year, groups of men and boys called regösök went from house to house in the cold, rattling chained staves and droning on a jug drum, singing good luck into each farm in exchange for food and coin. Their song opens beside a pool of fast clear water ringed with tender grass, where a wonder stag is grazing. He has a thousand branches to his antlers and a thousand candles on their tips, and the candles light unlit and go out unquenched. In some versions the rising sun sits on his brow, the moon on his side and the stars of heaven on his flank. A hunter draws on him, a king in several tellings, Saint Stephen himself, and the stag tells him to lower his bow: he is no quarry, but an envoy from God. The song was collected and studied from the nineteenth century onward, most thoroughly by the folklorist Gyula Sebestyén in 1902, and whether the candle-bearing stag and the chronicle’s hind are one animal or two that grew together is a question the record leaves open.

The picture most Hungarians carry is a third thing again. In 1863 the poet János Arany retold the hunt as a ballad, the sixth canto of his epic Buda halála, with the deer leading the brothers from sunrise to sunset over river after river, and the stolen women recast as fairy maidens dancing in the mist. Arany’s version is the one learned in school. The antlered white stag of modern statues and emblems owes more to him, and to the regös songs, than to Simon’s plain female deer, which as a hind would have carried no antlers at all.

What the creature can do is narrow and exact. It appears to hunters and to nobody else. It cannot be overtaken, wounded or tracked, and it chooses when to be seen: Jordanes has it pause to let the riders catch up. It knows the one safe way through water and bog. In the songs it carries the lights of the sky on its body and tends a fire that needs no flame. And its limits are as plain as its gifts. It gives nothing directly, founds nothing, rules nothing. It leaves at the moment of arrival, every time, and whatever happens on the new ground, the grazing or the raiding, is done by people. Nor does it work on anyone who will not chase. The entire miracle depends on two young men being unable to let a deer go.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Csodaszarvas?

The Csodaszarvas, or miracle stag, is the deer of the Hungarian origin legend. It appears to the brothers Hunor and Magor while they are hunting, leads them into the marshes of Maeotis and then vanishes, leaving them in the land where their peoples begin.

Where does the Csodaszarvas legend first appear?

The first Hungarian version is in the Latin chronicle of Simon of Kéza, written in the 1280s at the court of King Ladislaus IV. A much older form of the same story was recorded in the sixth century by Jordanes, who told of a doe leading Hun hunters across the Maeotian marsh into Scythia.

Was the Csodaszarvas a stag or a hind?

In Simon of Kéza’s chronicle the animal is a hind, a female deer, and it is given no special appearance. The antlered stag comes from the midwinter regös songs and from János Arany’s 1863 ballad, which together shaped the modern image.

What does the Csodaszarvas look like in the regös songs?

In the regös songs of western Hungary and the Székely country, the Csodaszarvas is a stag with thousand-branched antlers carrying a thousand candles that light and go out by themselves. Some versions add the sun on its forehead, the moon on its side and stars on its body. It tells the hunter aiming at it that it is a messenger from God.

Who were Hunor and Magor?

Hunor and Magor are the twin founders in the Hungarian chronicles, sons of the giant Menrot and his wife Eneth. After following the hind into the Maeotian marshes they settled there and married two daughters of Dula, prince of the Alans, and the Huns and Hungarians are said to descend from them.