REGULY, ANTAL (1819–1858) was a Hungarian traveler, linguist, and ethnographer and one of the founding fathers of Finno-Ugric studies. A typical romantic hero of his time, he was an extremely talented, persuasive, melancholic, and uneven person. As a talented nobleman he started to study law in Hungary, then he left for a "grand tour" to the North, and in Stockholm he met the Finnish-Swedish poet and politician A. I. Arwidsson (then in exile from his homeland), who called Reguly's attention to the national awakening in Finland (then a grand duchy in the Russian Empire). Reguly, who knew about the affinities of Hungarian, Finnish, and other Finno-Ugric languages, went to Finland, where between 1839 and 1841 he learned the Finnish language and made his first ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork trips (also among the Lapps, then in Estonia and Ingermanland, and among the Votes).

In Finland, Reguly was one of the...