#flemish folklore

(friends and i were brainstorming and we came up with fairy, siren, nymph, sprite)

((or selkie so oscar can try to steal his skin and keep him LOOOL))

oh hiii! ✨✨

ooof I've been going back and forth with this for a while. since folklore Genes are very dependent on the genetic heritage of the carrier, it'd be something related to England and Flanders. I'm very tempted to say he'd be a double Gene carrier like his friend Giulia 🤠

my current hypothesis:

his British side is easy and perhaps not very surprising - he'd be a fae, though I'm unsure which type exactly (there are far too many and I'm not well-versed in fae folklore). his looks and kind of smug playfulness just scream fae to me idk... I was tempted to make him a pixie, but I mostly associate those with Cornwall in my mind, though I do believe there are some folk stories about them in Devon and some other southern parts of the UK. Plus, I think he's pretty enough to have some sort of creepy glamour around him hehehe...

now about the Flemish side... I'm not an expert of Flemish folklore either, but I do recall the presence of a water spirit called Nixie. the Nixie is present in the folklore of other Germanic areas as well (Scandinavia, Germany) and is usually described as a malicious entity which lives in lakes, rivers and ponds, and likes to drag travellers to their death:

(damn I love Theodor Kittelsen's folklore art sooooo much)

Zitiron- a creature with the bottom half of a fish and the top half of a knight.

The zitiron only shows up in three sources that I can find- the Ortus Sanitatis (published in Germany 1491, author unknown), Van der Naturen Bloeme (early 14th c) by Flemish poet Jacob van Maerlant, and De natura rerum (1244 CE) by Flemish writer Thomas of Cantimpré. Van der Naturen Bloeme is actually just a Dutch translation of the Latin De natura rerum, so technically there's only two original sources. The only reason I mention both is that the original De natura rerum- which is sourced from a large number of works by philosophers and writers such as Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, St. Ambrose, Jacques de Vitry, and too many others to explore them all as original sources- doesn't have any illustrations and is in Latin, which I can't read, making it a personally useless source. But Van der Naturen Bloeme does have illustrations- the third image in this post is Jacob van Maerlant's interpretation of the zitiron I assume to be outlined in De natura rerum.

The only other original place that a zitiron can be found, according to the internet, is in the Ortus Sanitatis, a Latin natural history encyclopedia with no known author published in 1491 in Mainz, Germany. It has illustrations, the second image in this post is the author's interpretation. But again, I can't read Latin and it's hard to read the stylized text to put into google translate.

There is almost no information about the zitiron online, which is a shame because it's a really interesting figure. If you can read Latin or medieval Dutch I would LOVE to work together to place the origin of this mythological creature and learn more about it!

For the drawing, I wanted to honor Jacob van Maerlant and Thomas of Cantimpré's Flemish heritage. The helmet, chainmail, shield, and goedendag on the zitiron are representative of what the Flemish forces wore and used at the Battle of the Golden Spurs, a 1302 victory of the French that is a source of pride and celebrated every July 11th by the Flemish today.

TLDR: The zitiron is a little known creature from the Middle Ages or perhaps antiquity, with the bottom half of a fish and the top half of a knight. My drawing is inspired by the Flemish culture of two of the only writers to leave any information about the zitiron.

In most Dutch werewolf legends the werewolf kills livestock, not humans. But most of the time they are still a threatening presence. Not always though, and I’m very fond of folktales where werewolves are portrayed as a nuisance rather than an actual monster. For instance:

The werewolf who had a habit of taking a swim in the local river and liked ambushing people who walked on its banks at night by shaking his pelt dry to drench them. After that he’d run out of reach, make a mocking bow, laugh at them, and disappear back into the dark or the river. (Recorded/published in 1925)

The werewolf who transformed after every night drinking at the inn and jumped on his friend’s back, forcing him to carry him all the way home. When his friend finally undoes his transformation by hitting him on the forehead with a knife and betrays his secret to their other friends, he sends six other werewolves to jump on him as revenge. (1925) (Werewolves jumping people to ride on their backs are very common in Dutch/Flemish folklore and it has to be mentioned it is usually described as a terrifying experience, but compared to being ripped to shreds its rather funny.)

The werewolf who shows up outside a farm where a woman and her niece are asleep, to wake them up by opening the shutters. Once they look outside he dances and jumps and makes a spectacle of himself, bows mockingly, and runs away in the direction of a nearby hamlet. They suspect it’s the father of the niece’s boyfriend, who does not approve of their relationship. (1925)

The werewolf (looking more like a big black dog) who rushes at a friend who walks alone in the dark, sniffs him and follows him home and then disappears. The following day he remarks to his friend that he wasn’t very afraid of the dog. When asked how he knows this, he dryly replies: “Well, it was me after all.” (1933)

There's a 16th century Flemish ballad "Tjanne" where the children cry and pray on their mother's grave because their stepmother abuses them. She rises from the grave, nurses the youngest, but has to explain to her children she's a ghost and can't come with them in the end. https://youtu.be/v6NXjikJG7c

Oh my goodness that is so incredibly sad...

I found the text here, where the song is titled “Ach, Tjanne,’zeyde hy, ‘Tjanne” (Och, Tjanne, said he, Tjanne) because the song starts with the husband asking:

‘Och, Tjanne,’ said he, ‘Tjanne, Whyfor sing’st thou not? - ‘Och, what would I be singing, within three days I shall live not.’

So she knows she’s going to die and then she knows her children are suffering and then even though she can rise from her grave she can do nothing about it! I’m just going to wish very hard that Tjanne learns to use her ghost powers well enough to protect her children because this is just utterly heartbreaking!

I’m....not confident in answering that.

All stories across Europe share themes, characters and plots, and the closer the countries are to one another the more similarities their tales generally show. But every culture does generally have its own style.

There must certainly be differences between the Dutch and the Flemish tales and beliefs, but there are already differences in folklore between our various provinces. I can imagine the stories in Limburg are closer to those in Antwerpen than Utrecht for instance.

In some of my older books Dutch and Flemish folklore is studied together, because the language does overlap and they are both relatively small areas. But when they show their sources clearly you can still tell the difference. If only because the Flemish stories often have a more Catholic flavour as opposed to the Dutch Protestantism. I once wrote a post about mermaids and gave the Belgian mermaids their own category, because they really did seem to have different customs to the Dutch ones.

I must confess that Tijl Uilenspiegel is the only folktale I know off the top of my head that is decidedly Flemish and I‘m afraid I have no Flemish books in my hoard.