There are few peoples the origin of which has been the subject of so many fanciful theories and so much idle speculation as the Hungarians. Perhaps because they have no known relatives, or not very close ones, at any rate, and are a strange race in the heart of Europe, the Magyars have at times excited hostile feelings among the surrounding nations and this hostility has often clouded the judgment of historians and ethnic theorists dealing with their origins and early history. Indeed, this proud and talented race had a ‘hostile press’ from the moment of its appearance on the fringes of the West, probably due to its military superiority, and the prejudices implanted in western minds by the contemporary news media lingered long in historical literature. It was thus with some glee that western writers of the Age of Enlightenment began to assign some extremely primitive and backward tribes to the ancestry of the Hungarians, in much the same way as their mediaeval predecessors made them descend from devils and ogres. All this was diametrically opposed to the traditions of the Hungarians but they protested in vain against the strange relations foisted of them, for the ‘objectivity’ of western writers soon found support in Hungary itself and was firmly embraced by the Hungarian Academy. It so happened then that Hungarians were officially declared to be a Finno-Ugrian people, related to the remotest and least-developed branch of that group, and their ancestors were identified as hunters and fishermen of a low degree of development, inhabiting the forest regions of Russia until they were conquered and civilised by a more advanced people of Turkic race. The writer was brought up on this ‘official’ theory and duly believed it until well into middle age when he started to have doubts and resolved to investigate matters afresh. He approached the subject with an open mind and, being a lawyer by training, took pains in sifting facts from fiction. As he went along, an xi