“Dreams always speak in Welsh” – Fictional Realities in Antal Szerb’s The Pendragon Legend
“Dreams always speak in Welsh” – Fictional Realities in Antal Szerb’s The Pendragon Legend

Summary/Abstract: My essay focuses on the interconnection between the Welsh setting and narratology in The Pendragon Legend by Antal Szerb. Szerb experimented with several prose genres and combined different narrative styles to create a text that blends science with occultism, history with bogus history, and dream visions with reality. To achieve this, he adopted the Welsh theme of the novel in which stories with varying degrees of authenticity are fused. I argue that the Welsh setting in the novel reveals considerable confusion concerning the nations that make up the United Kingdom. At the same time, it also provided an opportunity for Szerb to set the plot in a space which Hungarian readers would have been familiar with thanks to “The Bards ofWales” (“A velszi bárdok”) by János Arany, yet probably had very few real-life associations of, and which thus could accommodate the fantastical plotline.

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