When many people think of runes, they think of the Elder Futhark runes of Scandinavian origin, but there were many other runic alphabets in circulation in ancient times. Hungarian runes are one of the nation's forgotten cultural treasures. The honfoglaló (settler) ancestors were already using them, so their use preceded even Hungary's foundations.
The alphabet got is name from the runes being carved into wood or sticks; the word for carving was "rovás". They were angular so were easier to carve into sticks than curved symbols. To make the time-consuming job of carving easier, people developed symbols for letter groupings and took various shortcuts with the rules of the language. The reason the runes are read right to left is because most people found it easier to hold the stick with the left hand and carve from right to left with the right hand.
With the arrival of Christianity, Pagan rituals and traditions were outlawed, and runes were lumped into the Pagan category. Many writings from earlier days were destroyed. At the same time, the newly Christian government peititioned the Pope to aid the Hungarian people in creating a Latin-based alphabet for the Magyar language. This process took decades, however, and even then it took another two centuries until the new alphabet was widespread. During this time, the royal courts used Latin for their writings. The commoners, skirting the official mandates, continued to use runes for their written records.
There were two major forms of runes - "székely-magyar" and "pálos". The pálos form developed into more curved forms, where the Szekler remained very angular. Other scholars claim that the pálos runes were a development from the very different Turkic alphabet instead. Regardless of its origins, the pálos designation comes from the fact that the pálos monks used it the longest. (These monks, incidentally, were the sole Christian order founded in Hungary.)
In an odd twist of history, the pálos runes remained prominent the longest in South America. Both the Spanish and Portugal monarchies had good relationship with the Pálos monks and sent them as missionaries to South America to explore the inner regions and convert the natives. The monks often lived in caves there, similar to the cave-dwelling monks in the Pilis mountains in Hungary. On the walls of the caves, explorers often found traces of their ancient Hungarian runes. Later, Jesuits replaced the Pálos monks on their South American missions, but the Jesuit priests from Hungary still understood the runes for several generations onwards. At some point, the runes switched the direction to read as Latin alphabets do, from left to right, and this continues to today. The newly re-created pálos monk's order is researching the runes of its earlier traditions.
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The other type of Hungarian runic alphabet was the székely-magyar, or Szekler, rune. The Szeklers were a Hungarian population who live in what is now eastern Transylvania. They made many important cultural contributions to the national heritage, the runes being one of them. Their alphabet was much more wide-spread in ancient times than the Pálos runes. A number of them were borrowed from or were lent to runic systems of other neighboring cultures of the times. During its heyday, it was called the szittya-szkíta writing. It is only in modern times that we call it the Szekler alphabet.
In the 13th century, the laws prohibiting runic expression were apparently relaxed somewhat, because various runic systems - including the Szekler - became popular once again. Unfortunately, by this time few people remembered the proper rules of writing and grammar, and the runic revival didn't succeed in completely replacing the by then more-common Latin alphabet. However, it did gain enough popularity that from the sixteenth century it was taught in schools in certain regions (like Transylvania) all the way up until the beginning of the 18th century.
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