The White Stag

Seredy retells a legend of Hungary's founding, following the warrior peoples she calls the Huns and the Magyars as they migrate west out of Asia across generations, led at key moments by a mysterious white stag that appears, vanishes, and reappears whenever the people need direction most. The story follows the brothers Hunor and Magyar, sons of the legendary Nimrod, who chase the stag for seven months before it leads them, and the peoples who follow them, toward the land that becomes their new home; their descendants later split into two related but separate groups, the Magyars settling first while Hunor's line, the Huns under Attila, presses on further west into conflict with the Roman world. Seredy renders Attila not as history usually remembers him but as a chosen leader guided by prophecy and omen, the white stag and a red eagle recurring as signs marking his path, and the narrative climaxes with a blinding mountain snowstorm that threatens to scatter the migrating peoples entirely until the stag reappears one final time to guide them safely through the pass into the land promised to them from the start.

Seredy tells the story in sweeping, almost incantatory prose closer to myth and legend than to history, and she is direct with readers that this is legend rather than a documented historical account, drawn from stories her own father told her as a child in Hungary before she emigrated to the United States. She both wrote and illustrated the book, and her bold, dramatic black and white drawings carry as much of the story's mood as the text itself.