Last month, the Meertens Institute launched the SagenJager, a digital route planner full of folktales through the Waterland area. On foot or by bike you can enjoy a beautiful piece of landscape and at the same time soak up the folk culture of this area. Witches, wizards, ghosts and water monsters:they all pass through this mobile website.
Anyone who consults the Meertens Institute's Folktales Bank will see that the stories (now about 44,000) come from all over the country. And yet there are two areas that are richer than the rest. This has everything to do with the presence of two avid story collectors, explains researcher Theo Meder:Cornelis Bakker in Waterland and Dam Jaarsma in Friesland.
Dam Jaarsma was extensively covered in various media last year. It was then exactly 100 years ago that he was born. Jaarsma is known as the greatest story collector the Netherlands has ever known. He recorded thousands of folktales for Friesland in the 1960s and 1970s. "That's why we are already busy plotting routes in Friesland," says Meder. “The technology is there, it's just a matter of filling in the map.”
Book Eyes Collection
What Jaarsma was to Friesland, Bakker was in a sense to Waterland and the surrounding area. Around 1900, Cornelis Bakker collected about 500 stories in the Waterland area. He did this after an appeal in the newspaper of Gerrit Jacob Boekenoogen. This Dutchman worked in Leiden for the Dictionary of the Dutch Language (WNT). Folktales and folk songs had his personal interest. You can still find his hand in the dictionary, Meder knows:“He used sentences sent to him as proof of the existence of certain words. For example, you will find the word Redstocking back in the WNT. No other lexicologist would have included such a word.”
Because of his linguistic, onomastic and folklore interest he could easily have come to the Meertens Institute, but that did not exist in his time. Boekenoogen died in 1930; the Dialectenbureau was founded in the same year. His collection of folktales and songs did end up at the Meertens Institute. The children's books he had collected went to Leiden University.
Doctor Bakker
Most of the stories in the Boekenoogen collection therefore come from Cornelis Bakker. Bakker was a general practitioner with a fairly large practice in Broek en Waterland, and he also had patients in the surrounding areas, says Meder:“Sometimes he was taken out of bed early in the morning by some servant who had come to row from Uitdam. or Zuiderwoude. Like the time Jan Lof's wife gave birth to her first child…”
“Doctor Bakker arrives there on Thursday. At that moment there is access, but nothing else happens. So he stays there to sleep because now to go back and forth. There he starts talking to the man of the house about all kinds of folktales. This continues until Saturday until labor begins and the child is born. Bakker leaves the house with a bag full of stories.”
Doctoral degree
When his patients were short on cash, Bakker sometimes settled for stories. That he cared little for money is also apparent from the low rates he charged. Meder:“The GP who succeeded him later was furious that he had never raised the rates in the thirty years that he was there. His fascination for folktales is also apparent from the pieces he published in De Gids, and the thick book he wrote:Folk Medicine in Waterland. A comparative study with the medicine of the Greeks and Romans. His family saw a thesis in it, but his theories were too dubious for that. As soon as Bakker started to theorize, he was on thin ice.”
Although Bakker had never made it to a doctorate degree, he was too educated to take the superstitions of his informants seriously. “He knew you got typhoid because the toilet was on the side of the ditch, where the laundry and dishes were also cleaned. And that there was little witchcraft involved. It was not for nothing that he was a member of the Maatschappij tot Nut van 't Algemeen:the people had to be educated in order to be able to rid themselves of this kind of superstition."
The water scare
The stories Bakker collected fall into different genres, but the sagas predominate. Legends about witches, wizards and of course water monsters. However, these are not typical for Waterland, says Meder. “The first story in the Sagenjager is about the Okkerman:a water monster that lures children to the water. It was a children's scare story designed to keep children away from the water. But that story can be found throughout the Netherlands, a water country par excellence, only the water terror has different names everywhere.”
There were also storytellers who were adept at telling fairy tales, the researcher continues:“Aesthetically, Dirk Schuurman could tell the most beautiful stories. There are no recordings of this as this is before the time of the recording equipment. But Bakker wrote everything down as faithfully as possible. He tried to write it down in dialect, and he also included the interaction:'Remember when I told you about robbers last time, now a nice piece has come to my mind.' That gives you a complete picture.”
You can still get a good taste of the zeitgeist in which Dr Bakker lived from the stories, says Meder:“Waterland has a special history. It has always been a cattle ranching area, but around 1900 it experienced a great period of poverty. The opulent houses you cycle past are now sometimes inhabited by one professor, while in Bakker's time four families lived there.”