>>42140
So, getting back to your question. Making legends is an unavoidable process, magnifying the importance of certain events, shifting attention to one participant from others, people rationalizing certain infos they heard but don't know the background or the circumstances, etc. etc. all add up. In Hungary's case too, ofc. But we have to differentiate between certain things.
The folk memory will always diverge form what historians establish about an event (eg. a battle) since they rely on different sources (and/or historians use additional sources besides the tales/memoirs of the participants), and the folk memory also influenced by literary, or other artistic works.
Hungarian historiography is in a weird situation, in a dissociative identity disorder if you will. At it's birth Western European (Bri'ish, French, German) ones were already established, they all had professional authorities with established ways of telling history (hugely influenced by 19th century nationalism) with strong opinions, and forming dogmas. Hungarian historians not just had to meet expectations they thought they had to, but this remained a continuous pressure since then - again it isn't an expressed pressure from Westerners, I think they couldn't care less. On top of it Hungarian historians also had to meet expectations of foreign lords in most of the last 200 years (ie. Wien and Moscow). And even when "free" politics always had it's pressure on what to write and how the events have to be interpreted and presented (and mostly our politics always had some foreign power's opinion to worry about). So these guys got used to it to be extremely suspicious and skeptical about Hungarian sources (or anything that says "nice" things about us; great contrast - for example - how Anglos treat northern sagas) and very permissive toward foreign sources - often labeling them objective -, and placid and servile toward foreign scientific(?) authority.
On the late Krautchan I often saw Bernds' opinion that every nation's history writing is biased toward that nation, and sometimes saw Hungarobernds (and me) getting accused by heavy nationalist/chauvinistic bias during certain discussions (for example arguments vs Northern Hungarians or Romanians) but the truth is, if our arguments are based on scientific Hungarian historical works then we do not argue from the other extreme but we are at the halfway point (or even more towards the opponents' extremes).
If you want an example of a non-nationalistic historiography, the Hungarian one is the prototype of that.