Mythical beasts of the Netherlands

I have to admit it: I know very little about the Netherlands. I’ve had a few very brief stopovers in Amsterdam – which I suspect, like any capital city, bears almost no relation to the country it supposedly represents – and like capitals tend to do, it likely amplifies some aspects of the country that people would rather not have reflected. No one likes to stare into a mirror for too long; it can do strange things to a mind. This is not to say I’ve ever had a bad time there, or in any way dislike it – quite the opposite, I’ve had some great times there. I’m merely highlighting my own ignorance of the Netherlands as a whole. But I’m ready to learn.

One of the reasons I love making these maps is that something as strange as the beasts can tell us a great deal about a place. You start to understand the geography by the point at which the creatures stop wanting to play a deadly game of Marco Polo and change it up to a horrifying game of chase in the woods. You can see from the dates the point Christianity clashed with pagan beliefs, the crimes people were most concerned about, the concentration of myths will likely highlight population density, and the similarities with other countries will show historic trade alliances. There is indeed a lot you can tell about a place – and the psyche of a population – by the horrid things they conjured up to make sense of the environment they found themselves in.

Big players in the Netherlands (and it should come as no surprise) are things that will drown you. These myths change as you head east, and you begin to see fewer of them as the canals and waterways give way to trees and hills. It shares a lot of myths with Germanic countries as well as the Nordics, which makes complete sense based on its location. You see plenty of variations on fiery men, things that jump on your back before becoming exponentially heavier, nightmares, gnomes, harvest spirits and glowing spectres in the boglands – all of which are abundant.What there is a surprising lack of is the bigger beasts, such as dragons. I managed to find a few, but for a lover of dragons like me, it was a little thin.What the Netherlands truly excels at is witches and spirits. Unfortunately, I don't tend to include witches due to problematic history, though on this map we have a couple (Olde Marolde and Varende Vrouw), as they are less associated with these problematic areas and take on more unique forms – more akin to beasts or bogeymen. I also tend to leave ghosts out, as I think it would be pretty lazy of me – every building over 100 years old has some basic-ass ghost, and slapping one over a gap on a map doesn’t scream “deep dive”. For better or worse, whether people appreciate the effort or not, I’m committed to doing the maps/lore justice. Having said that, on this map we have the Ossenspook – because sometimes ghosts are so unique they get their own name and purpose. Even if that purpose is simply to throw poo at people and break children’s necks.

It has been a joy to learn more about the Netherlands, and I would like to thank Abe Van Der Veen for his wonderful website which provided a great place for me to start. And more importantly, an enormous thank you to William Kampen, who helped to research this map and guide me through some of the Netherlands more obscure folklore, as well as providing clarity and explanations when the various translation sites chewed up the stories and spat out jibberish. I appreciate you greatly.

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Now let's get into the beasts!

Update- I’m working on book proposals at the moment, so I’ve kept some stories offline to save them for the books (and to stop anyone pinching all the hard work before they’re published!). If you’d like to know when the books are ready, just pop your name on the mailing list.

In the meantime, here are a few of my favourite beasties and legends -

Blauwe Gerrit

I like that we’re starting here. I like Blauwe Gerrit very much. It has the classic folklore naming structure of “colour” + “name”, which always adds a little pizzazz. Also, having its own name adds to its uniqueness – it’s way better than “unnamed fairy number 17” in the credits.

Blauwe Gerrit is perhaps a demon, or maybe the devil himself; he may look a bit monkey-like, or like an orb of glowing light – he varies greatly – but what remains the same is his distinct colour and his translucent blue cloak. He’s from the class of folklore beings known as “tormentors”, which takes on a more malevolent tone than his actual behaviour deserves. Gerrit could more accurately be referred to as “a bloody nuisance” or “a pain in the arse”.

See, despite the suspicion that he was a demon, or even the devil, Blauwe Gerrit was mostly interested in just messing with people (usually bad people at that), simply for the lols.

His hijinks were usually fairly benevolent, employing a combination of his only two real skills in life: making himself invisible, or making things heavy. It’s a brief and niche CV, but in the right role, I’m sure he’ll go far.

If you’ve seen the Bluey episode “Featherwand”, where Bingo runs around waving a feather as a magic wand and saying “heavy” which makes things in the house magically too heavy to lift – well, you’re pretty much there. Gerrit would look for people trying to take more than their fair share of something and make the item impossibly heavy, or jump on thieves’ or kidnappers’ horses, making them unable to move.

So, apart from knackering some poor horse’s knees (do they have knees? *googles* yes they do – well, kinda), Blauwe Gerrit seems to have been mainly a force for good… which I’m sure must be a terrible disappointment to his demonic parents.

Capirussa

An OG from the bestiary days, it’s a goat-like creature with a human face, a collar of jester’s bells, pointed flappy ears like a hound, goat-like feet (hooves?) and a dog’s tail – sometimes it has ladies’ breasts, but we’re trying to keep it fairly PG over here.

According to bestiaries, they were mainly found in Indonesia, but one was reportedly seen in the River Meuse near Brielle. It even became part of the city’s coat of arms – until, in an absolutely sellout move, it was replaced by the more familiar centaur.

You used to be cool, Brielle. Traded in your Converse for Birkenstocks, and your Pantera CDs for a Taylor Swift poster. Disappointed in you, Brielle. Disappointed.

Draak

I found one! Thank goodness I found one. That was close – I thought we were going to have a mythical beasts map without a dragon. Fortunately, I found an extremely brief bit of text about a dragon in the Netherlands. It comes from near Staveren and is found in a fairly modern fairy tale – but luckily, that was based on a much older account from the area. It simply says a dragon appeared and sprayed fire across the region.

It is sadly a very sparse bit of text, but it is a dragon, and doing very dragony things, so I will absolutely take it as a win.

There was another more complete tale about a dragon that explains how the region of Gelderland got its name. Unfortunately, due to changing borders, the actual area associated with the legend is way down in modern-day Germany. And man, we spent days trying to find ways around this to locate it in the Netherlands – but no joy.So we’ll leave it there.

Disappointing, I know.What? You still want the story? Don’t be greedy. You know these blogs end up being the length of a small book without getting into stories that aren’t even on the map.I’ve got stuff to do, man. On we go.

Elf-Rib

Elf-Rib tells the story of King Radboud. In the days when the Church was converting pagan rulers to their belief system, they had finally convinced King Radboud to take the metaphorical – and literal – plunge. Radboud stood with one foot in the baptismal font, before having a classic Detective Columbo moment and turns to ask “...one last thing”.

Radboud had suddenly realised that if he became Christian, would his ancestors be waiting for him in the afterlife. The priest informed him that, unfortunately not. Because they had died pagans, they would have gone to the other place (said with heavy and ominous air quotes). It never sits well when someone tells you your dear old gran-gran may have gone to H-E-double-hockeysticks, and well, it ain’t exactly paradise if you don’t ever get to have more of her delicious pancakes.

King Radboud decides “screw this” and nopes out of the entire baptism thing. On exiting the font, it smashes in two – one half remained in the church, the other was cast into the swirling void of the waters nearby.

But our story doesn’t end there. Radboud has a spooky post-death sequel. Like many second acts in life (or in this case, afterlife), Radboud decides it’s time for a complete makeover. And instead of a motorbike or age-inappropriate clothing, he opts for a different stylistic choice: a pike’s head and a brand new name – Tientôn Elfrib, which translates to ten toes(the normal amount), eleven ribs (not the normal amount).

Elf-Rib creeps around villages, kidnapping children in a sack, and sneaking into the church to dip his toes in the font in an effort to break his fishy curse. I’m sad for Elf-Rib – he got neither the opportunity to go to heaven, nor to join his dear old gran for pancakes in the other, slightly hotter, place. Maybe if he can find the missing part of the font, he’d finally be able to undo the bad juju.

Varende Vrouw

I wanted to include this one as it finally gave me an origin story for something strange I first heard from my mother-in-law. When my daughter had finished a boiled egg, my mother-in-law told her she had to break the shell so a witch couldn’t use it as a boat…

I’m sorry, what?

I’m no stranger to whimsy, we go way back, but this was a new one to me. She told me it was something older generations used to say to her, and I absolutely loved it. Though it did raise questions. Are these witches tiny? Or are the eggshells made larger, using some kind of Cinderella’s fairy godmother-type magic? How does it not just roll over?

These are the kind of pedantic, invasive thoughts that come into play and take away some of the magic in what I do – my fun brain.

A Varende Vrouw is a sailing woman, or sailing witch. They are said to cross the North Sea in eggshells, sieves, or mussel shells – all of which I would describe as unsuitable forms of transport for traversing a notoriously turbulent body of water.

It also brings back the question of scale… and a sieve? How on earth does that work? Anyway, moving along.

They are mentioned from medieval times and are said to be responsible for all kinds of natural calamity at sea – hurricanes, whirlpools, cloudbursts, etc – which you’d think would be the last thing you’d want to conjure up if your vessel is a sieve.

I’d like to say this is where my obsessive mind stopped, and that I didn’t spend a significant amount of time distractedly reading about the history of witches going to sea in eggshells…I’d like to tell you that. But unfortunately, I cannot.

Breaking eggshells seems to be a very old tradition. Even ya boy Pliny the Elder mentions breaking them in the 1st century – though with little information regarding witches. He more hints at an unspecified, uncomfortable malevolence, and it just being the done thing – that of course you’d break the shell.

Fortunately, things get a lot more explicit as time goes on, and by the 16th century we get quite clear verses from Scotland, Wales, and Ireland about the perils of not breaking your eggshells. The accounts even appear in the witch trials.

It is said that not breaking the shell can lead to harm not just to sailors, but to the eater, or even the hen that laid it. What a witch would have against a hen for providing a nutritious breakfast, I do not know. It also raises the question of why a witch can’t just procure her own eggs – it hardly seems a labour, and they’re a readily available foodstuff. So many questions.

Other Mythical Beasts of the Netherlands featured on the map:

Bokkenrijders

De Basilisk van Utrecht

De Dolende Peelridder

Dunaters

Dwaallicht

Flodder

Gloeiïge van Schinderhinke

Grijpvogel

Hémänneken

Het Gluujende peerd

Ijzeren Veulen

Jan Haak

Kabouterkoning Kyrië

Klabautermann

Kladdegat

Koningsslang

Zeewijf

Nachtmerries

Olde Marolde

Ossaert

Ossenspook

Roggemoeder

Sommeltjes

Spinwijf

Toornmantjes

Trijewiif

Waterreus

Weerwolf

Witte Wieven

Zeewijf

Zwaardman

Zwarte Juffer

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