Abstract Any scholarly approach to ancient, pre-Christian Hungarian performance culture wrestles with reaching across the thousand years that separate researcher from subject matter. To uncover any traces of such subject matter across such immense temporality, this project looks to linguistic fabulation as a tool of cultural retrieval. In the late 18th century the language revival movement (nyelvújítás), among other efforts, reintroduced significant ancient lexica to modernize Hungarian. Such revitalized vocabulary often appear in games, limericks, and tales, even if their daily use has waned. The constellation of games, limericks, and tales isn’t solely a potent site for linguistic analysis, their trifecta may also evidence performative practices. At this linguistic-performative intersection emerge methodologies of fabulation that work against the empiric academic model of archival verification and factuality. In this project I access select Hungarian games, limericks, and tales through the framework of fabulation to argue that their lengthy cultural presence reiterates remnants of ancient, pre-Christian Hungarian performance.