Dalibor Dobiáš
"Pouhé Lumíra jmě přešlo na potomky": The Bards in the Manuscripts and Debates on National Literature
From its discovery in 1817 to Julius Feifalik's criticism in 1860, and even into the
late 19th and 20th century, the Ossianic Manuscript of Dvůr Králové brought unique
impulses to the development of modern national Czech culture. The paper argues
that the discussion on its alleged medieval editor and bardic authors, forerunners of
modern authors of the period of Romantic nationalism, deserves attention also from
the point of view of contemporary literature and its autonomization which found in
the Middle Ages both a possible source of inspiration and - especially in later social
practice - a limit. The paper examines the constants of this discourse, such as the
Herderian conviction about the origin of poetry in the heart of the nation ("Záboj,
you sing heart to heart [...] like Lumír"), and on the other hand, the gradual,
multi-layered shift from the older ideas of the bards associated with the genius of
Homer or Ossian to the national song as a collective, newly cultivated and adapted
heritage and the corresponding transformation of roles in the literary system. The
emerging culture of comparison, in the work of Pavel Josef Šafařík and others, proves to be
a crucial moment, which situated the Manuscript and its authors through analogies
as a Slavic monument in dialectical developmental concepts and turned attention
also to its shape specifics. On the other hand, it reinforced the isolation of the
Ossianic hoax within the medieval studies and folkloristics and, in the crucial period
of the late 1850s and early 1860s, the isolation of it from new literary currents.
Keywords: Romantic nationalism - national poetry - authorship - Ossian -
Manuscripts of Králův Dvůr and Zelená Hora
design by Bedřich Vémola
