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Fabula 50 (2009) Heft 1/2

Walter de Gruyter Berlin New York

T o p , S t e f a a n (ed.): Op verhaal komen. t. 1: Limburgs sagenboek. Leuven:

Davidsfonds, 2004. 271 p.; t. 2: West-Vlaams sagenboek. 2005. 307 p.; t. 3:

Vlaams-Brabants sagenboek. 2005. 311 p.; t. 4: Oost-Vlaams sagenboek. 2006.

306 p.; t. 5: Sagen uit de provincie Antwerpen. 2007. 311 p.; t. 6: Moderne

sagen en geruchten uit Vlaanderen, 2008. 263 p.

Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to legend r esearch. The oldest hails

from the humanities and comes at legend as folk literature, focusing on legends as

stories, highlighting the art of storytellers, classifying tale types and motifs, and

tracing the way stories have spread across the world. The second, more recent,

approach is rooted in the social sciences and focuses on legend as a process: not

folk literature, but to quote the American legend scholar Bill Ellis folk

behaviour. Informed by anthropology and the socio logy and socia l psycho logy of

rumour, it typically produces case studies of the social functions of legend. Both

have their strengths and weaknesses, and the best efforts in the field today

somehow merge these complementary perspectives.

The recently completed series of volumes on F lemish legends edited by S tefaan

Top, Op verhaal komen, exemplifies the first approach to legend studies. A six

volume set of legend anthologies, complemented by a giant database available to

Internet users (www.volksverhalenbank.be), it aims to serve both an academic

and a general audience. Op verhaal komen stands as a landmark contribution to

Flemish legend studies, even though it could have benefited from insights yielded

by more recent methods and theories.

The anthologies can be said to be more than half a century in the making. The

origins of the project go all the way b ack to 1942, when Alice de Haes, masteringin folklore at the Catholic University of Leuven, set out to collect legends in the

province of Antwerp . Hers was the first of ove r a hundred masters theses (and an

additional five from Ghent University), written between 1943 and 2007. Jointly,

these student collectors amassed some 70,000 legend texts, the majority of which

lingered in the archives until recently. Op verhaal komen anthologises 2,100 texts,

but the enti re collection is meant to be pub lished on the web eventually.

Op verhaal komen seeks to represent Flemish legendry from 1875 to 1950 (t. 6,

p. 22). Although col lec ting started in the 1940s and most inte rviews were con-

ducted between 1950 and 2003, most informants were in their sixties or older.

The first volume for example, on the legends of the province of Limburg, contains

340 items. Of the informants whose age is stated, no more than six are under

sixty. Volume 5 even features a centenarian storyteller. Given the fact that manyof these stories hark back to the tellers youth, the editor reads these texts as

representing legends told during the last years of the nineteenth and the first half

of the twentieth century.

The first five volumes each contain traditional legends of one of the Flemish

provinces: Limburg, W es t Flanders, Flemish Brabant, East Flanders , and

Antwerp. The legends in the last volume, dealing with contemporary legend, are

different: these were collected from high school age children during the last two

decades. This volume partly makes up for the age bias, yet methodologically it is

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a step back compared to the earlier volumes: the contemporary legend texts were

not elicited by means of interviews, but by means of a survey, asking high school

students to write down the stories they knew. This method produces legend

digests without context. Consequently, very few are as engaging as the best-told

traditional legends in this collection.

The volumes can be read separately. Each one contains an introduction that sets

out the history of legend research in the province it covers. Read in succession,

these introductions provide an overview of legend research in Flanders from the

nineteenth century to the present day.

The main part of each volume consists of the legends themselves, presented

according to the categories of Sinninghes 1943 legend catalogue, e. g. spirits of

earth, air, fire and water, revenants, witches, wizards, haunted places, and buried

treasure. Many faces will be familiar to Flemish readers, such as the goat-riding

Bokkenrijder brigands, Baekelandts highwaymen, or those malicious scourges of

nightly travellers, chain-rattling water demon Kludde and Lange Wapper, a

shape-shifting trickster. The atmosphere is thick with black magic: a significant

number of texts (comprising almost one third of the traditional legends) are about

the harm that witches do. Many of these are memorates, personal recollections of

the way the tellers and their relatives have been afflicted by magic spells. Priests

often appear as powerful magicians in their own right, sweating profusely (drops

of sweat the size of peas were hanging from each of his hairs) as they cast out

evil. Many legends in these collections are well-told, polished stories.

The texts were edited for ease of reading: phonological idiosyncrasies wereironed out, but many of the grammatical and idiomatic quirks of the original

dialect versions were kept intact, so the result still contains a flavour of the

original. Since many legends, particularly those featuring accusations of witch-

craft, could be considered slanderous, informants surnames have been reduced to

initials, e. g. Gerard H., farmer, 84 years, Halle-Booienhoven. Persons who

could be recognised by their profession (e. g. the village blacksmith or the mayor)

are identified as self-employed or official. Full particulars are still available to

researchers though, as are the original dialect versions, in a password-protected

section of the database, accessible from computers within the domain of the

University of Leuven.

The legend texts are followed by a commentary that draws attention to

rhetorical and stylistic features, and uses the legends as a source of informa tion on

popular attitudes towards disease, dea th, the afterlife, and other themes. Each

volume concludes with a bibliography and extensive subject and name indexes,

that enhance the series value as a research tool.

Considering the richness of these offerings, it feels ungenerous to bring up

some goals these volumes do not accomplish probably do not even want to

accomplish. Op verhaal komen is meant to be a legend anthology, and in this

regard it is an overall success. Still, the project raises issues regarding its relation

to current legend scholarship that need to be addressed in this review.

Editing more than half a centurys worth of unpublished legends could have

been an occasion to re-examine the genre o f legend. W hat is it? How does it re late

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to other genres? What kind o f historical information does it contain? W hat, if any,

are the differences between traditional and contemporary legend? Op verhaal

komen does visit these contentious areas in legend research, but it could have

done so more thoroughly.

To start with the last question: in order to explain the difference between

traditional and contemporary legends, Top quotes Gillian Bennetts 2005

collection of essays on contemporary legend,Bodies : (traditional) legend implies

a long-lived story about the past told by elderly people living in remote rural

places , told as true but inherently fictiona l. This contrasts with contemporary

legends, [they] reflect the fears and anxieties of a particular age or are cautionary

tales warning of modern dangers (t. 6, 23). These quotes, however, do not reflect

Bennetts opinion, but Top s. What B ennett actually wrote is the very opposite:

For a tradit ional folklo ristthe term legend implies a long-lived story about the

past to ld by elderly people l iving in remote rura l places, to ld as true but inherently

fictional. From the 1960s onward, these assumptions were challenged by a new

breed of researchers [ ] (Bennett 2005, ix [emphasis added]). In the original

version of the second quote Bennett states her opinion in even stronger terms: I

do not concur with the common view that these stories are also contemporary in

the sense that they reflect the fears and anxieties of a particular age or are

cautionary tales warning of modern dangers. I do not think tha t this contention

has yet been satisfactorily proved. (2005, xiii [emphasis added]). The reason for

dwelling on this slip of the pen is that it goes to the heart of my reservations ab out

this project: Op verhaal komen reproduces a number of taken-for-granted charac-teristics of legend that have been challenged during the last decades. It downplays

the dialogic nature of the genre, focuses on belief and generally ignores the role

of disbelief, and considers legend as essentially untrue, the product of mis-

perception and the survival of primitive belief .

Many modern researchers view the genre of legend as at heart dialogic: not a

statement of belief, but rather a debate about belief (Linda Dgh). This debate

may be reflected in the way a legend teller pre-empts sceptical arguments of an

imagined opponent (Im positive that it was a ghost. The moon was shining

bright ly and I was com pletely sober.). Or , qui te commonly, legends emerge in

conversation and become the topic of an actual discussion. Because of this,

versions that omit any mention of the way the legends were elicited, distort their

very nature.

To his credit, Top states that versions reflecting the interaction between

researcher and informant are to be preferred to reconstructed monologues (e. g.,

t. 3, 262 f.) and in fact, dialogic versions do occur, especially in more recently

collected mater ial. The majority, however, are nicely rounded sto ries, which make

for good reading, but only show one side of legend: stressing its literary quality,

they lack the emergent, urgent quality of legend that is emphasised by researchers

working in the social science tradition.

This latter quality is downplayed as well by the collectors preference for

legends told by believers. Although disbelievers are , as Dgh has argued, as much

par t of the legend process as bel ievers, disbel ief is underrepresented in these

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volumes. Hence the false feeling of timelessness conveyed by these stories:

reading the witchcraft legends, one comes away with the impression that during

the period covered by the collectors scepticism was almost non-existent. This

begs the question when and how witchcraft belie fs could ever lose their per -

suasive power. Interviewing disbelievers would have produced a more accura te

picture.

Disbelief features largely in the volumes introductions and commentaries. Top

views legend as essentially untrue and on several occasions explains away fears

of monsters lurking in the dark as the product of the alcohol-fuelled imagination

of revelers loosing their way when returning home after a night at the village fair

(e. g., t. 2, 256 f.; t. 3, 263, 266). These fears are also explained as survivals of

primitive belief (e . g., t. 4, 242 ; t. 5 , 258). Given the fact tha t we know little about

the thoughts of primitive man, it is hazardous to posit a continuity between

ancient earth spirits and twentieth century stories about underground-dwelling

gnomes, or between fire spirits and will-o-the-wisps.

The legends in these books are stories of fright and misfortune. Together, they

make up the world of legend. This dark domain, often invoked in the intro-

ductions and commentaries, is like an unknown co ntinent, to be explored by the

folklorist. This familiar rhetoric, however, obscures the fact that this world is a

construct of the folklorists making. Its out-there-ness is not a given, but a social

construction.

The darkness of the world of legend as it is depicted in Op verhaal komen is

par tly an acc ident of language and tradit ion: upli fting miracle stories and saintslegends (Dutch: legenden) are excluded from this collection of legends (Dutch:

sagen). Including them would have changed the character of the world of legend.

So would the inclusion of stories that go beyond the quaint and the marginal and

connect to major upheavals in Flemish history. The First World W ar serves as a

backdrop in a sma ll number of legends, but otherwise the two World Wars are

conspicuous by their absence, as are profound collective experiences such as the

Dutroux murders during the nineties, with their attendant allegations of Satanism

and elite conspiracies. Legend scholarship nowadays encompasses the peripheral

and the mainstream, the inconsequential and the politically relevant, stories

recreated orally and by a variety of media.

In spite of these reservations, students of legend will find these publications a

welcome addition to their scholarly resources. They have much to commend them

to the general reader as well, who will rejoice in meeting the devils, will-o-the-

wisps, burning shepherds, freemasons and revenants that used to scare his

forebears.

Leiden Peter Burger