Miklós Toldi

The native form of this personal name is Toldi Miklós. This article uses the Western name order.

Statue of Toldi in Budapest, Hungary

Miklós Toldi (c. 1320 – November 22, 1390) was a Hungarian nobleman from Bihar County of the Kingdom of Hungary, who is remembered as a legendary hero in Hungarian folklore. Hungarian poet János Arany based his famous Toldi trilogy on his legend.

Life

Toldi was long regarded as a fictive person as few data survived to the present about his life. It has been shown from charters that Miklós Toldi and György Toldi were real persons in the age of kings Charles Robert and Louis the Great.^[1] He is mentioned in 1354 as the alispán and várnagy of Pozsony County, in 1383 and 1385 as the főispán of Szabolcs County. He took part in the campaigns of Louis the Great in Italy as a mercenary leader. In 1359, on request of the king, he brought two lion cubs from Firenze. He had to flee his home because he killed a soldier of his brother, György.

Legacy

The earliest and most detailed source about him is Péter Ilosvai Selymes's Az híres nevezetes Toldi Miklósnak jeles cselekedeteiről és bajnokosodásáról való história (Story of the great deeds and braveries of the fabulous Miklós Toldi, Debrecen, 1574).

In folklore, Toldi has been remembered the longest in Nógrád and Bihar County and they emphasize his physical strength but place him to the age of King Matthias Corvinus, that is, a century later.

The most famous work about Miklós Toldi is the Toldi trilogy by János Arany. A motive for him to write about Toldi was that, according to the tradition, the Stumpy Tower (Csonka-torony) near his town of birth Nagyszalonta, had been owned by the Toldi family. Arany's trilogy was adapted into an animated film in the 1980s under the title Heroic Times.

References

1. ^ Bertalan Korompay: Adalékok és jegyzetek a Toldi-mondához (Datas and notes for Toldi's legend)(Irod. tört. Közl., 1956)

External links

• [1]

Persondata
Name	Toldi, Miklos
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth
Place of birth
Date of death	1390
Place of death