Literature of the Low Countries

Literature of the Low Countries A Short History of Dutch Literature in the Netherlands and Belgium Reinder P. Meijer bron Reinder P. Meijer, Literature of the Low Countries. A short history of Dutch literature in the Netherlands and Belgium. Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague / Boston 1978 Zie voor verantwoording: http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/meij019lite01_01/colofon.htm © 2006 dbnl / erven Reinder P. Meijer ii For Edith Reinder P. Meijer, Literature of the Low Countries vii Preface In any definition of terms, Dutch literature must be taken to mean all literature written in Dutch, thus excluding literature in Frisian, even though Friesland is part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, in the same way as literature in Welsh would be excluded from a history of English literature. Similarly, literature in Afrikaans (South African Dutch) falls outside the scope of this book, as Afrikaans from the moment of its birth out of seventeenth-century Dutch grew up independently and must be regarded as a language in its own right. Dutch literature, then, is the literature written in Dutch as spoken in the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the so-called Flemish part of the Kingdom of Belgium, that is the area north of the linguistic frontier which runs east-west through Belgium passing slightly south of Brussels. For the modern period this definition is clear anough, but for former times it needs some explanation. What do we mean, for example, when we use the term ‘Dutch’ for the medieval period? In the Middle Ages there was no standard Dutch language, and when the term ‘Dutch’ is used in a medieval context it is a kind of collective word indicating a number of different but closely related Frankish dialects. The most important of those were the dialects of the duchies of Limburg and Brabant, and of the counties of Flanders and Holland. The term ‘Holland’ itself can be confusing as it may refer to the present-day Kingdom of the Netherlands but also to the medieval county or the later province of Holland. In this Reinder P. Meijer, Literature of the Low Countries viii book the term ‘Holland’ will be used to refer to the county or province, the term ‘the Netherlands’ when referring to what is now the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The term ‘Low Countries’ will be used when reference is made to the combined territories of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Kingdom of Belgium. The plan of the book is the simplest possible: a chronological narrative divided into periods of a century. For a first introduction to a literature this arrangement, however crude, has advantages over a subtler division into short periods and over arrangements according to genres or generations of writers. The book is presented as a history of literature, and a short one at that. This starting-point placed limitations on its scope and led to treatment of only the most important writers. Although the selection is a fairly conventional one, it has been made in full awareness of the fact that no-one can escape his own preferences. Also, since history is normally understood to deal with the past, the temptation to include a running commentary on what is being written in the Netherlands and Belgium at the present time, has been resisted. Time, the much maligned anthologist, will have to do its work first. The absence of footnotes does not imply a claim to originality. My indebtedness to Dutch literary scholarship in general can best be expressed by stating that if acknowledgment had been made wherever it was due, the notes would have become unwieldy. Special thanks are due to Professor Jacob Smit, Dorothea R. Coverlid and Elizabeth Meijer-Mollison who read the manuscript and who are responsible for many improvements. It remains to thank the Minister for Culture, Recreation and Social Work of the Netherlands for commissioning the book, and the Australian Humanities Research Council, now the Australian Academy of the Humanities, for awarding a Myer Foundation Research Grant for short-term study leave in the Netherlands. Reinder P. Meijer, Literature of the Low Countries ix Preface to the second edition In this new edition the text has been thoroughly revised and brought up to date. Writers who should have been discussed in the first edition, but were not, have been included. Jacob Geel now has, I hope, his rightful place, as have Piet Paaltjens, Herman Heijermans, Nescio and others. I express my sincere thanks to Professor Peter King of the University of Hull for his helpful criticism of the first edition. I am particularly grateful to Mr. Paul Vincent, Lecturer in Dutch at Bedford College, University of London, for many valuable suggestions. London, February 1978 Reinder P. Meijer, Literature of the Low Countries 1 I The early stages Twelfth and thirteenth centuries When does a literature begin? With the first text, one would say, and the answer seems neat and simple. But the literary historian, more often than not, is not satisfied with a first text and asks for more. The first text, he argues, is only the first text that has been preserved, and he is prepared to spend a great deal of time and energy in trying to find out whether there were any texts before this first one, and if so, what these lost texts were like. So he milks the available evidence down to the last drop of information, with results that are often spectacular, but at the same time highly speculative. In Dutch literature, too, a great deal of speculation has been going on about the question of whether there was a literature in the vernacular before the first texts appear in the twelfth century. It seems beyond doubt now that there was. The comparatively high standard of literary technique of the oldest preserved works suggests this very strongly, and, moreover, we do have some references to works that did exist once. We know the name of Bernlef, a Frisian bard, who is mentioned in Altfridus's biography of Liudger. Bernlef lived in the Carlovingian period (he died in 809), and Altfridus says of him that he sang the heroic deeds of the Frisians and the wars of their kings, accompanying himself on the harp. So the pre-twelfth-century silence was not completely unbroken, but we do not know whether Bernlef was a lone figure or one of many, nor what his work was like. A notorious apodictic statement ‘Frisia non cantat’ - the origin of which has not yet been traced - seems to Reinder P. Meijer, Literature of the Low Countries 2 suggest that there were not very many Bernlefs, but it is a statement that allows of many interpretations: it may have been an overstatement, a wild generalization, an angry outburst by an embittered poet, or a home-truth. We do know, on the other hand, that in that same period there were Frankish songs, because Charlemagne showed great interest in them and made an effort to have them collected and recorded. Unfortunately, not a single song of this collection has been preserved; they were destroyed, it is said, by order of Charlemagne's son. The political disintegration of the post-Carlovingian period was on the whole not very conducive to literary production. Western Europe was in constant turmoil, and the internal unrest and uncertainty were aggravated by frequent invasions of the Norsemen. Much of what was written must have been destroyed under these circumstances. The only text we have left of this period is extremely short, little more than one full sentence. It is to be found on the last page of a manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford and was discovered in 1932. On that page someone must have been trying out a new pen by writing ‘probatio pennae si bona sit’ (‘test to see whether the pen is good’, an early version of ‘the quick brown fox’). To this he added a Latin sentence with a version of the same sentence in what the philologists call Old West Lower Frankish, the oldest known stage of Dutch. This sentence reads: hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan hinase hic enda thu wat unbidan we nu (all birds have begun their nests except me and you; what are we waiting for now). It dates probably from the middle of the eleventh century and stands therefore at the beginning of Dutch literature. Some read it as an expression of home-sickness of a Flemish monk who lived in England, others interpret it as the desire for the spiritual peace of monastic life, but it looks most like a love poem, or at any rate the beginning of one. The first complete work of literature in Dutch comes from the southern part of the Low Countries. In fact, most medieval Dutch literature originates from the south, that is Reinder P. Meijer, Literature of the Low Countries 3 from Limburg, Flanders and Brabant. Holland remained a backwater for a long time and did not come out of its cultural isolation until the fourteenth century. The southern regions had the advantage of their geographical position, close to the cultural centres of Western Europe and at the cross-roads of several trade-routes. The county of Flanders, with the port of Bruges, grew rapidly to great prosperity through its wool trade and cloth industry (Ypres, Ghent), establishing in this way a firm basis for cultural development. Moreover, Flanders was a fief of the king of France, so that French culture had easy access and provided a strong stimulus for the development of local cultural life. Limburg, which lay open to the Rhineland, was at first more orientated towards Germany: it belonged to the diocese of Liege, which in its turn was part of the archdiocese of Cologne.

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