events. Arany sent in his work, and shortly afterwards was awarded the 25-gulden prize (7th of February 1846) by the society, which then advertised another prize for the best Magyar epic poem. Arany won this also with his Toldi (the first part of the present trilogy), and immediately found himself famous. All eyes were instantly turned towards the poor country notary, and Petöfi was the first to greet him as a brother. In February of the following year Arany was elected a member of the Kisfaludy Society. In the memorable year 1848 the people of Szalontá elected him their deputy to the Hungarian parliament. But neither now nor subsequently (1861, 1869) would he accept a parliamentary mandate. He wrote many articles, however, in the gazette Népbarátja, an organ of the Magyar government, and served in the field as a national guard for eight or ten weeks. In 1849 he was in the civil service of the revolutionary government, and after the final catastrophe returned to his native place, living as best he could on his small savings till 1850, when Lajos Tisza, the father of Kálmán Tisza, the future prime minister, invited him to his castle at Geszt to teach his son Domokos the art of poetry. In the following year Arany was elected professor of Hungarian literature and language at the Nagy-Körös gymnasium. He also attempted to write another epic poem, but the time was not favourable for such an undertaking. The miserable condition of his country, and his own very precarious situation, weighed heavily upon his sensitive soul, and he suffered severely both in mind and body. On the other hand reflection on past events made clear to him not only the sufferings but the defects and follies of the national heroes, and from henceforth, for the first time, we notice a bitterly humorous vein in his writings. Thus Bolond Istók, the first canto of which he completed in 1850, is full of sub-acrid merriment. During his nine years’ residence at Nagy-Körös, Arany first seriously turned his attention to the Magyar ballad, and not only composed some of the most beautiful ballads in the language, but wrote two priceless dissertations on the technique of the ballad in general: “Something concerning assonance” (1854), and “On Hungarian National Versification” (1856).
When the Hungarian Academy opened its doors again after a ten years’ cessation, Arany was elected a member (15th of December 1858). On the 15th of July 1860 he was elected director of the revived Kisfaludy Society, and went to Pest. In November, the same year, he started Szépirodalmi Figyelö, a monthly review better known by its later name, Koszeru, which did much for Magyar criticism and literature. He also edited the principal publications of the society, including its notable translation of Shakespeare’s Dramatic Works, to which he contributed the Midsummer Night’s Dream (1864), Hamlet and King John (1867). The same year he won the Nádasdy prize of the Academy with his poem “Death of Buda.” From 1865 to 1879 he was the secretary of the Hungarian Academy.
Domestic affliction, ill-health and his official duties made these years comparatively unproductive, but he issued an edition of his collected poems in 1867, and in 1880 won the Karácsonyi prize with his translation of the Comedies of Aristophanes (1880). In 1879 he completed his epic trilogy by publishing The Love of Toldi and Toldi’s Evening, which were received with universal enthusiasm. He died suddenly on the 24th of October 1882. The first edition of his collected works, in 8 volumes, was published in 1884–1885.
Arany reformed Hungarian literature. Hitherto classical and romantic successively, like other European literatures, he first gave it a national direction. He compelled the poetry of art to draw nearer to life and nature, extended its boundaries and made it more generally intelligible and popular. He wrote not for one class or school but for the whole nation. He introduced the popular element into literature, but at the same time elevated and ennobled it. What Petöfi had done for lyrical he did for epic poetry. Yet there were great differences between them. Petöfi was more subjective, more individual; Arany was more objective and national. As a lyric poet Petöfi naturally gave expression to present moods and feelings; as an epic poet Arany plunged into the past. He took his standpoint on tradition. His art was essentially rooted in the character of the whole nation and its glorious history. His genius was unusually rich and versatile; his artistic conscience always alert and sober. His taste was extraordinarily developed and absolutely sure. To say nothing of his other great qualities, he is certainly the most artistic of all the Magyar poets.
See Posthumous Writings and Correspondence of Arany, edited by László Arany (Hung.), (Budapest, 1887–1889); article “Arany,” in A Pallas Nagy Lexikona, Köt 2 (Budapest, 1893); Mór Gaal, Life of János Arany (Hung.), (Budapest, 1898); L. Gyöngyösy, János Arany’s Life and Works (Hung.), (Budapest, 1901). Translations from Arany: The Legend of the Wondrous Hunt (canto 6 of Buda’s Death), by D. Butler (London, 1881); Toldi, poème en 12 chants (Paris, 1895); Dichtungen (Leipzig, 1880); König Buda’s Tod (Leipzig, 1879); Balladen (Vienna, 1886). (R. N. B.)
ARAPAHO (possibly from the Pawnee for “trader”), a tribe of North American Indians of Algonquian stock. They formerly ranged over the central portion of the plains between the Platte and Arkansas. They were a brave, warlike, predatory tribe. With the Sioux and Cheyennes they waged unremitting warfare upon the Utes. The southern divisions of the tribe were placed (1867) on a reservation in the west of Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), while the northern are in western Wyoming. The southern section sold their reservations in 1892 and became American citizens. The Arapahos number in all some 2000.
See Indians, North American; H. R. Schoolcraft, History of the Indian Tribes of the United States (1851–1857, 6 vols.); Handbook of American Indians, ed. F. W. Hodge (Washington, 1907).
ARARAT (Armen. Massis, Turk. Egri Dagh, i.e. “Painful Mountain,” Pers. Koh-i-Nuh, i.e. “Mountain of Noah,”), the name given to the culminating point of the Armenian plateau which rises to a height of 17,000 ft. above the sea. The massif of Ararat rises on the north and east out of the alluvial plain of the Aras, here from 2500 ft. to 3000 ft. above the sea, and on the south-west sinks into the plateau of Bayezid, about 4500 ft. It is thus isolated on all sides but the north-west, where a col about 6900 ft. high connects it with a long ridge of volcanic mountains. Out of the massif rise two peaks, “their bases confluent at a height of 8800 ft., their summits about 7 m. apart.” The higher, Great Ararat, is “a huge broad-shouldered mass, more of a dome than a cone”; the lower, Little Ararat, 12,840 ft. on which the territories of the tsar, the sultan, and the shah meet, is “an elegant cone or pyramid, rising with steep, smooth, regular sides into a comparatively sharp peak” (Bryce). On the north and west the slopes of Great Ararat are covered with glittering fields of unbroken névé. The only true glacier is on the north-east side, at the bottom of a large chasm which runs into the heart of the mountain. The great height of the snow-line, 14,000 ft., is due to the small rainfall and the upward rush of dry air from the plain of the Araxes. The middle zone of Ararat, 5000–11,500 ft., is covered with good pasture, the upper and lower zones are for the most part sterile. Whether the tradition which makes Ararat the resting-place of Noah’s Ark is of any historical value or not, there is at least poetical fitness in the hypothesis, inasmuch as this mountain is about equally distant from the Black Sea and the Caspian, from the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. Another tradition—accepted by the Kurds, Syrians and Nestorians—fixes on Mount Judi, in the south of Armenia, on the left bank of the Tigris, near Jezire, as the Ark’s resting-place. There so-called genuine relics of the ark were exhibited, and a monastery and mosque of commemoration were built; but the monastery was destroyed by lightning in 776 A.D., and the tradition has declined in credit. Round Mount Ararat, however, gather many traditions connected with the Deluge. The garden of Eden is placed in the valley of the Araxes; Marand is the burial-place of Noah’s wife; at Arghuri, a village near the great chasm, was the spot where Noah planted the first vineyard, and here were shown Noah’s vine and the monastery of St James, until village and monastery were overwhelmed by a fall of rock, ice and snow, shaken down by an earthquake in 1840. According to the Babylonian account, the resting-place of the Ark was “on the Mountain of Nizir,” which some writers have identified with Mount Rowanduz, and others with Mount Elburz, near Teheran.
