Sinterklaas, the Pagan Saint

That the Dutch gift-giver Sinterklaas, Saint Nicolas, has little do with the historical Bishop of Myra may be well known. Why we do have the figure, or the related Santa Claus, is difficult to explain – it’s a rich stew of adopting, adapting, repressing, and resurrecting of traditions. If only the story was as clear as it was to the people of a century or so ago. The 19^th century saw great advances in the reconstructing of our oldest history, and with it an emerging interest in our pre-Christian past; in Germany, the Brothers Grimm were busy and in Friesland the antiquarians were mercilessly trolled with the Oera Linda book. Legends, traditions and celebrations were dissected and with a measure of factoids it was proven that Sinterklaas, too, was pagan. This is how a lecture from 1902, by Dr Koopmans van Boekeren, explained Sinterklaas. Is there truth in it? Sure, but it’s never such a straight line, and for each ‘match’ that he made with a Pagan Germanic god, there will also be characteristics of these gods that he’s conveniently skipping.

“But see my horn of plenty, how full of sweets and pretty things. I bring too my bundle of rods. The good get gifts, But he who is bad or doesn’t learn, unless he mends his ways, would need to know, feel my wrath!”

With the introduction of Christianity we have received Sinterklaas because the evangelists understood that the new teachings had to be made palatable, and that was why Christian celebrations were made to coincide with Heathen ones. In Germanic theology you can find the explanation of the customs surrounding the Sinterklaas feast. Wodan, god of the elements, of wind, sea and storm, was highly revered by the seafaring Germanics. Saint Nicolas was originally also the patron saint of sailors; what was easier than swapping one for the other?

During the Jul Feast (25 Dec-6 Jan) Wodan rides his horse Slypnir, accompanied by the loyal Eckhard, through the sky and wears a wide cloak. There we have our Sinterklaas. Wodan is also the god of fertility, because wind creates fertility, and as such the time at which he is celebrated is the time of gift giving. Maybe there’s a bit of the god Janus in Sinterklaas. With the Sinterklaas pastry we are thinking of the Germanic Sacrificial cakes. Thinking of Fro, the god of light and protector of lovers, Sinterklaas became the “hylickmacker”, “wedding maker”. The “vrijer” and “vrijster” of speculatius is explained. Fro’s wagon was pulled by wild pigs with golden tufts, hence the Sinterklaas Pig. Pepernoten (ginger nuts), instead of regular nuts, remind us of Donar. The chimney is the connection between the ghostly world and the human in the Germanic theology. Putting your shoe in front of the fireplace is also Germanic. The bundle of rods is possibly the rod of life of the Germanics, with which they would beat against trees to make them bear fruit. Salt is the sign of wisdom. The helper is the loyal Eckhardt; probably there’s thoughts of fairies, and he’s made black to denote the invisibility of fairies.

And why does he come from Spain? Old-Germanic folk belief has an important place for the commemoration of souls. A soul could for example leave the body in the evening, and return in the morning. When someone died, the soul left the body and if a child was born a soul would settle in it. When souls didn’t live in a body they lived in a land of light and sunshine, the Engelland. This glorious land was, when facts got muddled, transposed to Spain, known as a country of light and sun, rich with lovely flowers and fruits.
All attempts to banish Sinterklaas during the Reformation were doomed, as Sinterklaas is not a Catholic holy man, and the Sinterklaas feast not a Catholic celebration. The speaker ends by warning his audience never to replace the children’s feast of Sinterklaas with Christmas; the latter has a deep and holy meaning, but will never be a children’s feast in the sense of the first.

*Sinterklaas as a fierce crusader knight, published between 1840-50. He arrives on a flying horse, which has small wings on the lower legs.*

Decades later they’re still not done with the Pagan Past. Grimm and other folklorists are still quoted, and the (pseudo)mythology would get out of hand over the next decade; sources from the later ’30s and the ’40s are suspect because their primary function was propaganda. From a northern Dutch newspaper article from 1931:

A shoe is put underneath the chimney. Putting your shoe with someone meant, in earlier days, to beg something from someone. The Wild Hunter (Wodan) fills shoes and boots with gold. In one of his fairytales Grimm tells us that on order of the Wild Hunter, a farmer takes off his boots, which are then filled with the blood from a newly shot deer. When he comes home, the blood has turned into gold. In Mecklenburg the bride puts a piece of gold in each of her shoes before her wedding – she’ll never lack for money. A serpent’s tongue in each shoe will make one invulnerable, according to folk belief. Whoever, at night, pulls three strands of straw backwards from the roof and puts them in his shoe will not be barked at by the dog.

The shoe of Sint Nicolas is in the first place to put out fodder for the horse of Sinterklaas: grain, hay, straw, and bread will be put in the shoe in our province. Compare that with the many places in Germany and Scandinavia where a sheaf of corn is left on the land for Wodan’s horse. An offering for the God of fertility. And the shoe is chosen, as we could see, because a link with the magical world is found that way.

Black Pete carries a bundle of rods and a bell. The bell is for fertility. On Christmas Eve boys in a lot of German places walk round with belts full of cow bells; in the lower Inndal the youngsters cross in the spring through the fields with bells, “das Gras auslauten” to help the growing of grass.

Sinterklaas, Saint Martin, Ruprecht, all who give gifts are also armed with a bundle of rods. On 10th November, the Bayern shepherd gives his farmer, his boss, a green twig (Martinus Gerte) to stick behind the cribs or the stable door, to protect the cattle against disaster during the winter, and in the spring it’s used to drive the cows to the meadow. So, the twig also is connected with fertility, as with Saint Nicolas. In Switzerland Saint Nicolas has a decorated tree in his hand, in Hamburg a green branch.

But we spoil the twig, symbol of fertility, by turning it into an instrument of punishment.

From a ‘cents print’ from between 1870-1890. 1)”Och, little Kees gives me so much sorrow. He’s always naughty. Where is the rascal? I’ll give him with my bundle of rods.” 2) “Children, tomorrow is Saint-Nicolas. Set your shoes under the chimney, and put some flowers and hay in them.” 3) “Let’s visit little Marie, who I love so much because she learns so well. I will give her a lot of toys and sweets.” No Black Pete here; Sinterklaas’ helper is closer to Ruprecht. He carries the bundle of rods to punish bad children, but not a bell but a lamp; like Diogenes looking for a honest child? The children put their shoes at the fireplace, with flowers for Saint Nic and hay for his horse.

A Visit from Sint and Piet

My father was bashful when Sinterklaas, Saint Nicolas, came visiting. I don’t know who is playing the Good Holy Man and who Black Pete is underneath the shoe polish. What I do know is that it’s a home visit; the portraits on the wall are of my great-grandparents and that the photo was taken on the 5^th of December 1945, not long after the war.

While in the northern Netherlands the exact appearance of Sinterklaas, let alone his helper, were not chrystalised for a long time, by this time it was the ‘national’ Sinterklaas: he’d arrive in the country a few weeks before his birthday. The village where I and many of my forefathers were born, and where my dad grew up, Houwerzijl, usefully has a harbour, so he’d have arrived by boat, and be welcomed by the local dignitary (and the local children, of course). There may be a festive reception in the local town hall.

Sinterklaas visiting homes isn’t really a thing; maybe they decided to ‘go big’ in 1945, after the war. Usually on the evening of the 5^th, his birthday, a helpful neighbour would leave the laundry basket with gifts outside, and knock on the window, sending the children into a frenzy. When I was young, a great aunt would don an arm-length black glove, creep in the house and, with only her arm visible, throw hands full of candy into the room. Smickelmik, it’s called in Groninger dialect, literally throw candy. “Black Pete! Black Pete!” my brothers would shout (they were a bit older, and in on it), and I was probably looking the other way. Ah well.

When I was about 10, one of my brothers and a friend borrowed some Black Pete costumes; they were made by the lady across the road, who also rented the costumes out to the schools – they were very well made. They had a plan to go round the houses in the street where there were little children, armed with a big book, masquerading as Sinterklaas’ big book of who’s naughty and nice, and a big bag of candy to dole out. I was also allowed to come, so my mom cobbled a costume together for me too. Dressed up we visited the half a dozen families with children; and we knew these children of course, so could ‘read’ what Sint had written: (“So, Berend, I read that you ride your bicycle awfully hard through the street? Will you be a bit more careful?”)

I’m sure that we made an impression on those children, who were young enough to believe that we were the real deal. It would’ve been an experience that far surpassed a 10 second photo-op with a Santa in a grotto in the shopping mall, amidst hordes of screaming children, herded along by bored elves. But here’s the thing: the costumes were those of a ‘Golden Age’ page boy, and came with wigs of curly black hair and big hoop ear rings. My mom had thoroughly blacked us up with shoe polish, and had not been sparing with her reddest lipstick. And we did our Black Pete act in a broken Dutch accent, an attempt at and parody of a colonial accent. This, for us, was Black Pete.

Let’s back up some years. My oldest brother was 6. It was summer; my mom was busy when the doorbell rang, so little Kees opened. “Mom! Black Pete is at the door!” he came running into the kitchen, leaving my mother to apologise to the Black door-to-door salesman. When we grew up, our comics and children’s books had taught us that Black people lived in Africa, and wore grass skirts. There were definitely no Black people in the villages where we grew up. For little Kees, a Black man showing up at the front door was, by definition, Black Pete. And that still was the case a decade later; we had some Black people on television, and in films, but they were never part of our reality, and we didn’t equate our racist portrayal of Black Pete with the real lives and experiences of Black people.

This, however, is 2020, and Black people in the Netherlands have been very vocal about their experiences. Each year sees children being bullied, being called Black Pete, and each year they are reminded of the country’s past, in which their forefathers were abducted and used for forced labour in our colonies. That’s a history that Dutch society still has to reconcile itself with, and would rather skim over. “If they don’t like Black Pete, let them go back to their own country,” they hear, while the Netherlands is their country. Or they’ve got to like being called Black Pete because “it’s an honour, really,” though giving them no choice in the matter still shows them who is the master. And what you often hear: “It’s not a Black person! It’s soot, from the chimney!” Why then the page boy costumes, and the curly wigs and the caricature lips? When we rounded our consonants and mangled our grammar, we knew full well it was no chimney sweep we were impersonating.

And yet, now the Black Pete is increasingly turning into Pete, and full black or brown face paint is replaced with smudges of black, like soot, this won’t do at all for the Pete apologists; when all their arguments have been wiped off the table, they insist that “It’s tradition. End of.” There’s hope, though: Prime Minister Mark Rutte, defending the image of Black Pete just a few years ago has now reconsidered, and is fine with the Soot Pete. It’s also been relatively quiet on Facebook and in regards to “Pro Pete” demonstrations (though this also due to Covid restrictions). It may be that for a lot of people the George Floyd protests have brought a measure of understanding and empathy. As for the hardline agitators – the country’s Concerned Citizens seem to have moved on to anti-mask and Q-Anon activism…

Frankenstein’s Monster, the Great Belzoni

This one was destined for Fortean Times, but remained on the shelf. Perhaps it was too… Fortean. In any case, we blow off the dust, and provide some speculation on what may have inspired Mary Shelley’s monster…

“I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature; that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionately large.”

In 1818 Mary Shelley, daughter of the philosopher William Godwin and proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, wife of superstar poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, unleashed on the world the book that would immortalise her: Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley as a young girl

The basic plot has left such a footprint on popular culture that it needs no introduction, and its genesis too is oft related. According to Mary’s preface to the 1831 edition of the book, it was all invigorating intellectual discussion and cosy night-time reading at Lake Geneva. Contemporary diaries however give a darker sheen to her memories, divulging one-upmanship between Percy Shelley and Byron, a highly dysfunctional Claire Clairmont chasing both their tails, with Mary in a post-natal depression, comforted by Dr. Polidori and his laudanum.

Of course, by 1831 she was the only surviving member of that group, sanctifying the memories of Byron and especially Shelley, while all but erasing Clairmont and Polidori. She rehashed the convenient dream she had, of a ‘pale student of hallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together’, but did not mention the one she had a year earlier, after the Shelleys had lost their baby daughter: ‘Dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived.’

Early illustration of Frankenstein’s creature

From the results of Byron’s famous story writing contest, Mary’s tale is the only one to really stand the test of time. It’s full of evocative descriptions and high drama, benefiting from Percy’s literary experience, their shared travels across the Alps, Mary’s heritage and the scientific and philosophical theories entertained by the Romantics. And yet, in this patchwork of influences something seems to be missing: where did the central image of Frankenstein’s larger-than-life creature come from? Consider this:

In early 1803 the Italian Giovanni Battista Belzoni arrived in London, aged 24, having spent the preceding years wandering Bonaparte-harried Europe. He’d been working as a barber and peddler, and utilised his skills as an hydraulics engineer wherever he could, but it was his imposing physical appearance that would first bring him fame. For a man of his size, 6’7″, Sir Walter Scott thought him ‘the handsomest man I ever saw’; Belzoni looked like a Greek god and hefted weights like a Titan.

He got his break in the Sadler’s Wells theatre, playing the parts you would expect – giant, cannibal chief, wild man of the woods. He also made audiences gasp by donning an iron apparatus which allowed him to stride around the arena carrying a human pyramid of up to a dozen men, earning instant fame as “The Patagonian Sampson”. In the next seven years he appeared at Bartholomew’s Fair and schlepped his act the length and breadth of the country.

Theatre, circuses and fairs were important entertainment for the growing middle class, but the literati were not averse to it. Belzoni was name-checked by Scott, seen by Charles and Mary Lamb and inspired poetry by William Wordsworth. Did they mention him as a fine specimen of a man while discussing philosophy, nature and politics at the Godwins’ house? They were part of the circle into which fanboy Percy Bysshe Shelley sought to ingratiate himself, before whisking the teenage Mary off to the continent.

Bartholomew’s Fair, drawn by George Cruikshank

As Victor Frankenstein brings a creature to life only to abandon it and see it turn against him, the creature’s progress echoes the debates of its day: Rousseau’s Natural Man versus Locke’s belief in children learning by example. The creature’s abandonment and self-education in the mid-European forest is foreshadowed in the medieval play Valentine and Orson, recast in the Romantic mode. Belzoni played the part of the lost Orson, raised by a bear before being reunited with his twin brother. For Frankenstein’s monster there is no such happy reconciliation.

Like the creature, Belzoni was no mere brute. As a younger man he had attempted to become a monk, perhaps the only means to an education for someone from his humble background. He grew increasingly disenchanted with performing as strongman before, and indeed carrying, the nation’s unwashed, and began diversifying, incorporating fire, hydraulic effects and phantasmagorias in his shows. In 1812, after Galvani, Aldini and others made corpses jump with electricity, a playbill promised that Belzoni would “CUT A Man’s Head OFF! AND PUT IT BACK ON AGAIN”.

In 1815, with Napoleon exiled on St Helena and the borders opened, Belzoni travelled to then near-mythical Egypt, aiming to sell the Pasha a hydraulic system to raise the level of the Nile. When this didn’t work out he found a lucrative occupation hunting for Egyptian artefacts, until the British Consul General charged him with retrieving the massive stone head of the Younger Memnon, as the statue is still known, for the British Museum. Once more the Great Belzoni made headlines, this time as one of the pioneers of archaeology. It was an era of adventure and treasure hunting. And looting.

It is these reports that inspired Percy Shelley to write his Ozymandias in 1817, just about the same time as Mary, under his expert but patronising guidance, laid the last hand on Frankenstein. They wrote side by side in a cottage in Marlowe, and the discussions that the couple must have had surrounding the book’s construction echo in the sonnet, and in the “shattered visage” we read of, “whose frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,” are those of Frankenstein’s creature, and is the creator of this giant statue, whose work now lies in ruin, is not too different from Frankenstein, Mary’s modern Prometheus.

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

The house in Marlowe, in which Mary and Percy wrote side by side

And with those lines we can cast the monster: on the giant, well-proportioned frame of Belzoni we find the features of one of the mummies he uncovered: “Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath.” Mary wrote of “his watery eyes that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips.”

The Shelleys certainly knew of Belzoni when sonnet and book were written,and it’s reasonable to suppose that Mary or Percy saw him perform or at least knew about him as a popular entertainer. Did they then remember him, when Mary began crafting her book and needed a protagonist who was formidable of shape, sharp of mind, but still an outsider? And the necessary question: why haven’t we heard about this Belzoni fellow in Mary’s writing about her most famous work?

The creative process is not a mere mechanical assembling of elements. There is a visceral core to the novel which depends on both conscious and unconscious influences. While Mary’s novel was carefully plotted and constructed, influences from daily life and culture would have added to its fabric. Besides, Belzoni completely omitted his former existence from his autobiography, so when Mary listed Milton, Darwin and Shakespeare as her influences, the name of a circus strongman would hardly have fit in.

But whether she intended it or not, Belzoni’s impressive shadow still falls heavily across Mary Shelley’s page.

Main sources:
Stanley Mayes, “The Great Belzoni”, Touris Parkes Paperbacks, London 2003
Anne K. Mellor, “Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters”, Routledge, Chapman & Hall, New York 1988
Mary Shelley, “Frankenstein, or: The Modern Prometheus”, 1818 and 1831 editions

The Hidden Graveyard of Ol Weem

In the mid-19^th century, folklorist Marten Douwes Teenstra versed:

Borries too, the dreaded hound,
With glowing eyes here roams round
And lets his tail hang just a little
He comes from Weem or is just going
You see the Plague dog always alone
It keeps to itself and to its own.

Like other ghostly apparitions, the northern Dutch hell-hound Borries is found in the vicinity of wierden, the man-made hills on which many farms and villages in the area are built. One wierde, now a national monument, is called Ol Weem, close to the villages of Houwerzijl and Niekerk. Ol Weem is Gronings for The Old Rectory, which was the last building to disappear from the village of Vliedorp. Nowadays, nothing more than a score of grave stones remains of the village.

The wierde was built in the early centuries CE. The first building we know of is a stone church, built around 1200, but it’s assumed that the wierde had a pagan chapel in its first centuries, before the area was christianised around 800 by the missionary Liudger. The village of Vliedorp is first mentioned in 1418 as ‘to Fleghum’, from the old-Frisian for ‘refuge place’, the place where people could flee at times of high water. Vliedorp never was much of a village, and by the mid-17^th century most of the people lived in the adjoining harbour place Houwerzijl. The church remained in use, until the church was in such a state of disrepair, in the late 1600s, that it was abandoned (source: Zijlma)

A tax list from 1702 notes 22 families living in the parish of Vliedorp, and it can be assumed that there were 22 houses, mainly in Houwerzijl. While the wierde had been built as a refuge place against floods, the Christmas Flood of 1717 was so bad that it even washed over the mound. The already dilapidated church turned into a ruin, and 17 houses in the parish were lost, along with 40 lives. While the houses were rebuilt, the last remnants of the church were finally torn down in 1830. On the mound only the old rectory-farm remained, which was used as labourer’s dwelling for a while, until it too was demolished in 1850.

From that time comes Teenstra’s poem; he’ll have seen the old rectory, after which the mound was then called; Ol from ‘old’, Weem from the Old-Frisian ‘wetheme’, church possession. Rectory isn’t actually quite the right word; these were troubling times, so the rectory was more like a fortified stonehouse, and it came with a barn and stables (source: Pieterman) Only the churchyard now was in use, the last grave dating from 1894. it was a cumbersome last voyage too, especially in autum and winter; when the clay paths were too difficult to traverse, the coffin would travel by boat from Houwerzijl, then carried by 6 bearers along the waterside, and over the small wooden bridge, then up the mound, before finding its resting place .

*The path and waterway to Ol Weem, with the wierde in the background.*

Part of Ol Weem was dug away in the late 19^th and early 20^th century for its fertile soil. “Now the graveyard is so much abandoned that nettles and thistles cover the graves, while several times stones have been vandalised,” Rev. Noordhuis- van ‘t Land wrote in 1970(note) . This would be around the time my parents lived in Houwerzijl, while on the other side of Ol Weem, at a farm on the road that lead to Ulrum, my grandfather lived. My parents would send my brothers as toddlers to grandpa; they could watch them from the edge of the village, and my he could see them coming from the other side.

That path was renewed towards the end of the 20^th century, when Ol Weem too was cleaned up. It’s a really nice path too, and only slightly marred by the concrete farm road that sprung up parallel to it. Ramblers and cyclists can start off the little village of Houwerzijl after a cup of tea at the Tea Museum, or start at the village of Niekerk after a look at the little whitewashed church, and a peek at the graves at its back. It’s easy to miss the little brick path that leads from Niekerk to Ol Weem, hidden as its entrance is between two houses. Zwarteweg is its name, Black Road, and it must be the path over which Borries roamed.

*Zwarteweg, Black Road, with Niekerk in the background.*

Sources:
– Enkele bizonderheden over het kerspel Vliedorp (I.H.Zijlma, Hogelandster, 1964)
– Enkele bijzonderheden uit de geschiedenis van het Kerspel Vliedorp (ds. F.A.W.Noordhuis-van ’t Land, Hogelanster 17-12-1970)
– Wemen en hun bewoners (Lecture by ds. Klaas G. Pieterman, 20 oktober 2015)

X Marks The Spot

As a special “Talk Like A Pirate Day” treat, here’s an article about Treasure Island, which we wrote some years ago for the Books for Keeps website.

Robert Louis Stevenson and the Long Shadow of John Silver

For those wanting something different for Christmas than the usual panto fayre, the National Theatre stages a new adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Children and adults will be familiar with its sunny climes and dark hearts, hidden loot, one-legged sea dogs with a parrot on one shoulder, walking the plank and hoisting the Jolly Roger.

Without Treasure Island’s Long John Silver we wouldn’t have Captain Hook in panto, and certainly no Jack Sparrow! But the original Seven Seas bad boy was no pantomime villain like his offspring; Stevenson looked for inspiration not to the Caribbean, but to wet and draughty Edinburgh.

Stevenson was born in 1850, into a devout Edinburgh household. He was a sickly but precocious child who possessed the spirit of adventure – adventures that mostly played out in his head. Later, when not absent due to tuberculosis, he only attended his University lectures when the weather was bad: like other students from Edinburgh’s modern, spacious New Town, Stevenson spent plenty of time in the crowded slums.

But where most of his well-heeled schoolfellows used and abused Old Town and its residents for their drunken gambling forays, Stevenson was considerate towards people of all classes, realising that an invalid beggar he encountered on the street was once a young man like himself, with hopes and dreams. He mingled with chimney sweeps, seamen and thieves and became well-liked by them.

Though he passed the Bar in 1875, he’d never practice law: it was literature that obsessed Stevenson. His first published works were travelogues documenting the trips he took for his health. They are full of anecdotes from various journeys, even to America. On one of these trips he met his future wife, Fanny Osbourne, and her children Belle and Lloyd.

It was for his stepson Lloyd that Stevenson drew the map of an imaginary island that was the genesis of Treasure Island. The book is dedicated to Lloyd, but could equally have been written for the sick child that Stevenson himself once was. All young readers can identify with Jim Hawkins who encounters an old sea-dog on a mysterious errand and finds himself on a treasure hunt.

Stevenson knew the value of terseness and economy of style and wrote in a persuasive, journalistic style mixing fact and fiction. His characters reflections of people Stevenson knew in both Old Town and New Town. When he describes “A blind man, with a voice so cruel, cold and ugly,” it is not a caricature but drawn from life.

Treasure Island first appeared as a serial in the magazine “Young Folks”, but it is with its 1883 publication in book form that Stevenson became a celebrated author. While it offers a rollicking adventure, the book has a surprisingly dark core: it’s about going from civilisation to barbarism, and whether one can survive. Young Jim Hawkins does, and grows up in the process.

Treasure Island is so embedded in our culture and has inspired so many imitators, that what many hold for a traditional sea shanty is Stevenson’s invention: “Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest – Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!” Yet for all the vistas of foaming sea, creaking masts and tropical islands these lines conjure, they underline an intentionally sober message: Stevenson had witnessed drunks in Old Town, old before their time, destitute and degraded, but he didn’t denounce them from the literary pulpit. Blind Billy Bones from Treasure Island may be a drunk and a rabble rouser, but we still feel some sympathy for him.

Stevenson shows an endless fascination with characters who are morally dubious, with both pirates and good guys motivated by greed for the buried treasure. Focal point of the book is the ship’s hearty cook, who reveals himself as Long John Silver, the bloodthirsty mutineer. Loyalties are tested and betrayed throughout the story, but trough his friendship with Jim and the courage he displays, Silver earns our respect, and he is allowed to escape at the end of the book.

Stevenson found his very own Treasure Island when he travelled to the Tropics at the insistence of his doctors. He spent the last half-decade of his life on the Samoan island of Upolu with his family, taking an active interest in the indigenous people: he assisted in their politics and in fought for their civil rights. Among them, he found affection and esteem, and they called him Tusi-Tala, Teller of Tales.

Robert Louis Stevenson passed away in 1894 at the age of 44, having been dying most of his life. He was buried on the very top of the Vaea Mountain, overlooking the sea.

X marks the spot.

The Wuthering Heights of Down

We wrote this a decade a go for Northern Ireland’s much-missed Verbal Magazine, when Twilight was all the rage.

Wuthering Heights is back in the book shops! Clad in the black, red and white of supernatural teen novels like Twilight, with a sticker proclaiming it “Bella and Edward’s favourite book”. Perhaps not altogether coincidentally, a new film adaptation is in the making of what has been hailed as the greatest love story ever told. It’s been filmed before, most notably in 1939 with Laurence Olivier and in 1992 with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche.

*Solomon Glave and Shannon Beer in Andrea Arnold’s “Wuthering Heights” (2011)*

The latter version opens with Emily Brontë striding over the moors. She’s got the requisite period bonnet and voluminous dress, but as played by Irish dilettante pop artist Sinead O’Connor, we can imagine a pair of Doc Martins underneath. She is everything we expect, all wild eyed and in a world of her own, haunted by the spectres she sees amongst the standing stones. And if we hear a faint trace of the Irish in the prologue narrative, well… the Irish accent of the Brontë sisters has been commented upon!

Their father, Patrick Brontë, didn’t always go by that name, but was born as Patrick Branty (or Prunty; spelling was fast and loose) in Rathriland, County Down. When he moved to Cambridge to study theology in 1802 he Anglicised his name and added an extra flourish, the umlaut on the ‘e’, to make sure people would pronounce it with two syllables. This schoolmaster’s precision stayed with him through life; before escorting his daughters to Brussels he compiled a notebook of “conversational terms, suitable for a traveler” which, he admonished himself, “must be fully mastered”.

Patrick married and became a parson, moving his family to Haworth in 1820. When he lost his wife to cancer, he was faced with not only tending to his flock but also to his 6 small children. He thought to have the perfect solution in a recently opened boarding school for poor clergy children, but living conditions turned out to be poor and when his eldest daughters died there of tuberculosis Patrick decided to tutor the surviving children himself. And, being the peculiar man that he was, he had his own ideas about this.

Unusually, he taught them to think for themselves and he instilled in them a love for literature. Where other girls embroidered and learnt to become good wives, the Brontë sisters, with their brother Branwell, read Wordsworth, Byron and Scott. Their unusual education, lack of family roots in Yorkshire and their social position as parson’s children resulted in them growing up with a sense of themselves as strangers. Charlotte sought social acceptance and instigated the publication of first their poems and later their books, but Emily was happy enough to be on her own and keep her poetry to herself.

Ironically, when the name of Brontë is mentioned, what springs to mind first is not Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, not even Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, but Emily’s Wuthering Heights. And it is the most powerful of the books, dealing with the obsessive bond between the spoilt Cathy Earnshaw and the unkempt Heathcliff, broken when Cathy rejects him for a genteel marriage. Heathcliff then embarks on a generation-spanning campaign for Cathy and for the house of Wuthering Heights itself; beating, kidnapping, manipulating and disinheriting all who stand between him and his desires. This is a story of revenge, not love.

Critics were impressed by the novel’s power, its morals and structure merely raising some eyebrows, though some female writers of a certain standing found it “too odious and abominably pagan”. Emily didn’t care. She had not sought publication, did not depend on the opinion of others, and in any case, she died soon afterwards. Charlotte however wanted to be one of the ‘worthy women’ and believed that her society would never accept a female author calculatedly producing a character as wild and coarse as Heathcliff. It reflected badly on her sister, and by association on herself.

*Sinéad* *O’Connor* as Emily Brontë (1992)

Her introduction to the second edition of Wuthering Heights reads like pre-emptive damage control and emphasizes its flaws. She attributed the book to “fate or inspiration”, with Emily as the “Mystic of the Moors”, a sort of literary shaman who had unconsciously channeled the primal energies of that bleak landscape and its inhabitants onto the page. After Charlotte’s death, her friend and biographer Elizabeth Gaskell went one further, launching the image of Emily as a savage, beating her dog to a pulp and communicating in grunts.

This view was probably inspired by Heathcliff’s brutality, and though much of his character was rooted in hers, Emily kept the parsonage going, and tended to her almost blind father, the elderly servant and her wastrel brother who slowly drank himself into his grave. Wuthering Heights exposes her buried urges, the needs that are rejected by circumstance and society. Emily’s displaced identity is in Heathcliff too; it has been theorised that he was an Irish Traveller, and the unknown language he spoke could have been a homage to the accent that marked Patrick Brontë and his children as outsiders in Haworth.

The crude, uneducated Heathcliff also represents a more personal rejection, and it doesn’t take much to find in the dark halls of Wuthering Heights the unhappy, uncultured life that the former Patrick Branty escaped. Oddly, the dialect spoken by the zealous servant Joseph isn’t quite Yorkshire but owes more to Ulster vowels, and it seems that for this pious character Emily has reached back for the words of her father’s boyhood.

By 1855, Patrick had outlived all his children. He’d always been active on behalf of the community, instigating the building of a Sunday School and fighting against laws that would replace local charity with the dreaded workhouse. The health of his children had been undermined when the adjoining graveyard poisoned their well, and their death now sparked off a new crusade; thanks to his efforts the people of Haworth finally had clean water in 1856. He died at the parsonage 6 years later at the age of 84, to the intense grief of his parishioners.

Patrick was born in a hovel and grew up as a peasant without shoes. He got a rudimentary education but had a passion for poetry, and knew Paradise Lost by heart as a boy. He had a variety of odd-jobs, until his intelligence earned him an appointment as schoolmaster, and when Patrick was asked to go to Cambridge, he jumped at the chance. If his 1811 Cottage Poems romanticized the rough cottages and hand-to-mouth existence of his childhood, it was in the manner of one who enjoys a peek but would not choose to live like that. Patrick himself only returned to Ulster once, upon his ordination, and only briefly at that.

Heathcliff’s brutality in Wuthering Heights may disturb us, but we do admire his infiltration of a class-bound world, his rise from a pauper background to a man of standing. The same admiration we owe this shoeless County Down peasant who became a pillar of Yorkshire society. The 7th of June this year will mark the 150th anniversary of Patrick’s death – perhaps the perfect opportunity to embrace this prodigal son again and visit the Brontë Homeland in County Down.

More information on the Brontë Interpretative Center and the Brontë Homeland trail can be found here.

No Retro-Hugo for Ira Yarbrough?

This year’s Retro-Hugo (1945) for Best Graphic Story or Comic went to Superman: “The Mysterious Mr. Mxyztplk” by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Just imagine them on the podium, if it had been a real Hugo ceremony, receiving the prestigious award from Fritz Leiber, the previous year’s Best Novel winner. The War is over, a new world seems to be building, and this Hugo gives Siegel and Shuster the recognition they so sorely crave: they’ve sold the rights for Superman to their publisher for a mere $130, split between the two of them, and have since then produced Superman stories as work-for-hire, while DC Comics get rich off the increasingly popular comicbooks, newspaper strip, radio show and cinema serials. Perhaps this Hugo win and its publicity will give them enough leverage even to have their contract annulled and regain the rights to Superman!

*Superman 30: introduction of Mr. Mxyztplk (1944)*

The 2020 Hugo ceremony was mired by controversy, partially due to the mispronounciation of nominees’ names. Getting names right at an event like this is important. It gives nominees and winners the respect due to them; it shows them – especially minority nominees – that they deserve to be there; and names can even be integral to the identity of the nominee: not pronouncing FIYAH magazine’s name correctly means not being aware of its roots in the 1926 magazine FIRE!! which was published to combat marginalisation of and strictures on Black writers and artists.

How embarrassing, then, that in awarding the Best Graphic Story or comic, the Hugo committee’s sloppiness isn’t in failing to ensure a correct pronounciation of the winners’ names. It’s worse: the Retro-Hugo has been awarded to the wrong person! While the story in Superman #30 is signed by Siegel and Shuster, the art was by Ira Yarbrough and not Joe Shuster.

*A captive audience, and a captive* Siegel and Shuster doing PR in the ’50s

In the ’40s and ’50s it was common practice for comics to be produced in art studios, so-called ‘shops’, sometimes by assemby line. Will Eisner (from The Spirit) had a shop with Jerry Iger where they produced a whole slate of forgotten comics and launched the careers of artists like Bob Kane, Jules Feiffer and Jack Kirby. After Kirby left Eisner/Iger he started his own ‘shop’ with Joe Simon, where they thought up Captain America. Then there were break-out talents like the Black and gay artist Matt Baker who worked in relative obscurity (now there’s someone not recognised during his lifetime!), while his style became much copied; so much, that that ‘hea dlights‘ Phantom Lady cover was likely n ot his.

Joe Shuster also ran an art shop in the ’40s to deal with the high demand for Superman product, as well as the other comics his name appeared on. The artists working for him worked in anonymity and uncredited. It’s only by examining the details of their work, like the way they drew Superman’s “S”, and comparing with art they did under their own name, that comics historians have puzzled together who did what. Over time, the art drifted further away from Shuster’s, and Wayne Boring’s barrel chested and lantern-jawed Superman from the 1960s is instantly recognisable.

You can find a great history of the Shuster Shop on the DC Comics Artists pages on Shuster & Assis tants 1939-40, the Shuste r Shop 41-42, and the W ar Years. On Ira Yarbrough (1911-1983) it writes: Yarbrough’s style was heavily comical, vaguely reminiscent of Al Capp’s stuff from “L’il Abner”. It fit in with the lighter tone being pushed, possibly as an antidote to sombre war news. He was the perfect artist to entrust with the introduction of Mr Mxyztplk. Notice Yarbrough’s unique flying stance with both of Superman’s arms curled above his head.

*Yarbrough’s Superman – dynamic and cartoonish*

Cora Buhlert is doing a lot of work on the Retro-Hugos to break through the ‘received wis dom‘ idea: she’d like to see the Retro-Hugos go to people who have really been forgotten; people who may not be white, and male, and straight. Received wisdom is also that Siegel and Shuster were robbed, while their colleague Bob Kane was a crook: not only did Kane take credit for the creation of Batman (while Bill Finger had a major input), he had a whole army of artists drawing the Batman comics, while he himself did little more than supplying the signature! Artists like Jerry Robinson toiled in anonymity, while designing such memorable characters as T he Joker.

But, if we honour artists like Jerry Robinson, then we also need to acknowledge the artists who worked under Shuster’s name. Siegel and Shuster definitely sold Superman down the river (don’t “they signed the contract!” me) and DC could have been far more gracious much earlier: Siegel and Shuster only received an allowance under the threat of bad publicity when Superman: The Movie came out. We need to learn from this, and actively seek to honour the artists who anonymously contributed to Superman’s mythology, like Ira Yarbrough.

*Siegel and Shuster’s credit, Ira Yarbrough’s art*

And here’s another thought: when looking at the Retro-Hugo winning Superman comic, I immediately saw that it wasn’t drawn by Joe Shuster. The DC Fan dom Wiki immediately gave me Yarbrough as artist. That a lot of ghost artists (and writers) were used for comics is also fairly well known. How is it then that the Retro-Hugo committee, who administer the Best Graphic Story or Comic category can not do the most basic due diligence? Is that a sign of how comics are still being viewed by “tru-fans”, as gru dgingly tolerated bastard children of real fantastic fiction?

(RvS)

The Carrickfergus Lughnasa Fair

(We wrote this years ago for Culture Northern Ireland. It seems that the festival was last held in 2014 and then axed over funding issues.)

Nowadays, most of us get our food from the supermarket, but in the Ireland from before the industrial revolution the harvest would have been the pivotal moment in the yearly calendar: a good harvest meant that the people had what they needed for the coming year, whereas failed crops could mean ruin and the worst fears for a cold winter. The first of August traditionally saw a harvest festival, Lughnasa, a word that still survives in the Irish word for the month August, Lúnese. When the Irish went abroad, they took Lughnasa with them, and all over the world August is still chosen as the time for family reunions, fairs and year markets, while Lughnasa finds its echoes in the United States both in Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July celebrations.

Carrickfergus Castle will play host to a traditional Lughnasa harvest festival on the eve of August, the 30th July to be exact. We spoke to the festival’s organiser, Jenny O’Rawe, who is enthusiastic about the festivities to come: “Well, it’s a medieval fair, and we’ve got living history, including sword fighting recreations. There will be magicians and other entertainers; we’ve got a blacksmith, traditional crafts and food – as you may expect at a harvest fair.” With an atmospheric array of Medievally-themed activities and traditional food stalls, visitors will be able to re-awaken to that age-old connection with the soil and the food grown in it, which was so important for our ancestors. Craft demonstrations, too, evoke a connection with the land, and visitors to the Lughnasa Fair will be able to see how natural materials can be made into beautiful things.

The Carrickfergus Lughnasa harvest festival fits into a grand old historical tradition with very deep roots, that go back to before medieval times, straight into the pre-Christian history. According to Irish mythology, the festival was initiated by the sun-god Lugh as a funeral commemoration of his foster-mother Tailtiu. It was she who had cleared the plains of Ireland so they could be used for agricultural purposes, but the effort had exhausted her so much that she died from it. Tailtiu’s death was commemorated with funereal games, traditionally contests of skill and strength. Visitors to Carrickfergus Castle themselves can take part in one of these skill tests. O’Rawe: “We’ve got workshops; there’ll be medieval archery so people can come along and learn archery if they want to.”

Traditionally, Lughnasa was also characterised by dancing and the wearing of berries and fruits, but it’s not all pagan ceremony and Celtic heritage, for in Medieval times the Christian church embraced Lughnasa wholeheartedly, making it the day on which the fields were blessed in order to ensure a fruitful year after the winter’s retreat. It is in fact very likely that Carrickfergus Castle and its grounds already hosted harvest festivals hundreds of years ago in it’s checkered. It’s rumoured that King John, infamous brother of Richard Lionheart, visited the castle, and one can imagine him presiding over, if not quite enjoying, such festivities.

Built in 1177 by John de Courcy, Norman knight and (for the next 27 years) petty king of eastern Ulster, Carrickfergus Castle was to have a tempestuous history due to its strategic significance. Besieged, expanded and reconfigured over the centuries, it also has a claim to fame as the spot where King William III arrived in Ireland in 1690. During the Napoleonic Wars, the Castle was used as a prison and a garrison, and it continued to have various military functions right up until 1928, when it achieved the status and preservation of an ancient monument. Nowadays the castle is open to the public wanting a taste of a nobleman’s life in bygone centuries, and its restored banqueting hall plays host to authentic medieval banquets.

While the Lughnasa Fair’s medieval re-enactments and the traditional local crafts will satisfy history enthusiasts, there’s also plenty to keep the kids entertained, If previous years are anything to go by, we can expect face painting, acrobats, storytelling and street theatre. The magicians that have been advertised will no doubt go down well with the youngsters currently hyped up by the last Harry Potter movie. Jenny O’Rawe is sure that nobody will leave disappointed: “It’s for everybody, children, adults; we’ve got something for everyone.”

We’ve done a little research, and discovered that Lughnasa was a popular time for handfastings. These were trial marriages which lasted a year and a day, after which the couple had the choice of ending the contract before the new year rolled round, or formalising it for the rest of their lives. Perhaps those who celebrate Lughnasa at Carrickfergus Castle should keep this in mind: you never know who you might come home with, even if it’s only for a year and a day!

Halt Hier Berghuis.

“Halt Here Berghuis.” a slightly bizarre advertising, or warning, sign was the only thing left standing on the morning of Thursday 18^th February 1943. The rest of my grandparents’ home was gone. It had been a nice house, of a type common to the area: a front for the living space, and the back a small barn or, in my grandfather’s case, a shop for household goods. The front faced the Wolddiep canal, and the knotted willows on the other side of it, and you could also see the simple but graceful wooden bridge.

On Wednesday the 17^th February, about 6:30 in the evening, an English bomber let loose its bombs above the small village of Sebaldeburen, in the north of the Netherlands. How this happened has never become clear; probably it was being chased by a German hunter. It was a miracle that the whole family survived. As my uncle Lukas, the oldest son of the family told: “After the bang everything was completely flattened, except for a small part. A new inside wall had just been built, and part of the attic was resting on it. How we landed in that corner, I don’t know. After the hit we all were in that corner, but not before the impact.” My grandfather then forced himself through another newly built wall, wrecking his back for life, and the family got to safety.

Little can be found in the archives about what really happened, as documentation is scarce. One local historical researcher found no more than a receipt for repairing the bridge: a list of the various works, with below the line the sum of 6827,- guilders. RAF report are also infuriatingly vague. Six Wellingtons went armed with bombs to Emden, but then: “Lost: none”. That’s all. Jan Bos was a boy at the time and lived in the pub across the road. He remembers the bombardment well, according to a 2013 newspaper article: “Everything moved, it was like an earthquake. You heard a horrible shriek, really frightful. We knew something came down, but not what it was.” Jan van Duinen was just working outside: “A shriek, and then bangs. No, not one, but four or five.” He didn’t seek cover as, “It had happened already.”

*My grandparents’ house, over the bridge left.*

Locals rushed to the Berghuis family home to help, according to a recent newspaper article, and were amazed to see the family appearing from the house unscathed. Looking at some of the photos, and hearing the family stories, a slightly different picture emerges. It is of people engaging in disaster tourism searching through the rubble for anything still useable – the Berghuis family after all had a shop. It is a story of the Berghuis family being left completely destitute, and forced to bunk in with relatives for years, until they found their footing again. My mother was born in the autumn of 1945, more than two years later, on the farm of an aunt. There were no birth announcement cards – just plain postcards, brought round by an aunt to the few friends and relatives.

The joke went round that my grandfather had asked for the bombardment himself, with his big sign, “Halt Here Berghuis.” and of course the pilots had read this. My grandfather wasn’t well liked; this is what they won’t tell you in the newspaper articles. This is what we don’t talk about in the family. In the later 1930s he joined a political party which had promised to stick up for the little people like him. A party which promised, let’s use some modern parlance, to drain the swamp. My grandmother wasn’t too pleased and said: “Don’t get involved with that bunch of crooks!” but Hemke didn’t always do the sensible thing. Of course, when the Germans rolled into the country, he could not back out of the party. As a ‘friendly’ shop, the soldiers came to the Berghuis shop, and my grandmother made the best of it. She invited them for a cup of coffee, asked them what they were up to. Going round the houses looking for draft dodgers? Well good luck. Then she’d send my aunt round to warn the people to make sure nobody was hidden in their houses.

That was all forgotten on the morning of 18^th February. Was the bomb maybe divine intervention? At least, he’d deserved it, no? After the war, my grandfather was rounded up with all other ‘traitors’, great and small, and locked up in the primary school of Grootegast, where schoolboys made it a sport to look at who they’d caught. He didn’t stay long there, as the mayor wrote a letter of recommendation, stating that Hemke Berghuis had been harmless. Still – when my mother was a teenager, and went to a dance somewhere in the neighbourhood, and she was dancing with some guy, it would only be a matter of time before he’d be tapped on his shoulder and she’d overhear those dreaded words: “That’s one of Hemke Berghuis’s, the collaborator.”

A new bridge was laid over the Wolddiep, and the pub from which Jan Bos heard the bombs falling as a child is still a pub. Nothing remains of Berghuis’ house and shop. It’s pasture now. It’s as if nothing has ever happened in Sebaldeburen. Some wounds, however, run deeper than in flesh alone. One thing is as true now as it is then: don’t vote for fascists, no matter what they promise you!

(RvS)

Sources: https://www.groningen4045.nl/verdieping/de-bevrijding-van-grootegast and https://destreekkrant.nu/horen-zien-maar-niet-meer-zwijgen/

The Farmer, at the Grave of his Horse

The farmer’s life isn’t an easy one; Ymke’s father, in The Red Man, would agree with that.

As a farmer, Marten Douwes Teenstra drew the shortest straw. In 1819 he started farming on ‘Arion’, the farm his successful father bought for him. However, profit margins had collapsed due to cheap imports from the Americas, and he didn’t manage to make the farm a going concern. After five years of hard work, he threw in the towel. He became a civil servant, travelled to the colonies and wrote important travelogues and works on folklore.

In the early 2010s Teenstra’s home village of Ulrum saw some development; a new road was laid around the village for heavy traffic. The plan was that businsesses would be built alongside it. Someone suggested naming it “Teenstra Road,” but this was quickly shut down. Surely a road couldn’t be named after a failed farmer! As of 2020, only fields of potatoes and some lazing horses line the Industry Road.

Teenstra could be long-winded; make a punchy point, and then spend paragraphs, pages, diluting its impact because he couldn’t rein himself in. This was a particular problem in his own magazine, without the restraining hand of an editor. As shown by this short piece from a Frisian almanac from 1845, Teenstra at his best writes from the heart, with a shovelful of social conscience and a whiff of pity.

THE FARMER, AT THE GRAVE OF HIS HORSE

Here lies my loyal nag, who stiff and old of days
Till the end of its life, shackled in its harness,
pulled the plough through fields – ’till finally this beast,
hollowed out by hunger, gave up the ghost under the knacker’s knife.

And so this is my fate! What benefits me all my toil?
When another harvests the fruits for which I’ve had to plough,
When they milk, pick, shear, yes, skin my life away; I am
Worse off even than my horse, as it already lies dead by its grave.

Ulrum, 15 July 1844 M.D.T.