We have been trying to learn about the Dutch for a long time. This is our next step.
(Also, Belgium. I guess this is also about Belgium, not just the Dutch. Whoopsies!)
((Wait! Not about Belgium! Wrong side of the Netherlands! I always mess that up!!!!!!!))
The Frisians live in Friesland, and I am not making that up that is a real place. Got its own flag. Got its own borders. Part of the Netherlands, but so, again, is Holland.
(Those are or aren’t hearts on the flag we will get to that later.)
Per Wikipedia, “The Frisii were among the migrating Germanic tribes that, following the breakup of Celtic Europe in the 4th century BC, settled along the North Sea.” Great. Now I have to learn about the breakup of Celtic Europe. That’s for another day, though. Eventually, the Frisii were exterminated by the Romans. Trail of Tears stuff. After this, the area the Frisii had inhabited just sat there without people in it for one or two hundred years. Say what you will about the Romans, but they cleaned their plates.
Eventually, a new sort of Frisians came back to Friesland, thought (by at least one Wikipedia editor) to be descended from the Frisii and a few other tribes (Saxons and Jutes included). They eventually pulled themselves together into a kingdom, but before too long, the Franks defeated that kingdom, killed King Poppo (“I love it when they call me King Poppo”), and annexed Friesland. Then, Wikipedia non-sequiturs, “About 100,000 Dutch drowned in a flood in 1228.” Good god.
At this point, I started skimming Wikipedia, but Holland took a bunch of Frisian land, Friesland fell into economic and political disarray (don’t get me started on the Fetkeapers and the Skieringers, I am underqualified to speak on their behalf), some Frisians tried to revolt against the Habsburg Dynasty, and when that revolt got put down, Frisia was pushed fully into the Netherlands, of which it remains a part today. So, as part of our learning about the Netherlands piece by piece every few months when I need a blog post to fill space on this website, we have now learned about the Frisians.
A few other things you guys might care about:
- The Frisian languages (West Frisian, and North Frisian, and Saterland Frisian—the last surviving dialect of East Frisian) are some of the most similar surviving languages to English in the world. Learned about this back in college. Spanish has Italian as its closest linguistic doppelgänger. English has Frisian.
- Some Frisians migrated to and from England and Scotland way back when.
- There are a few Frisians in Denmark, but it’s a very small number and they’ve mostly fully assimilated, so a lot of them don’t even think of themselves as Frisian, or so I’m reading. It appears there may even be more Frisians in Canada than in Denmark.
- There are a bunch of North Frisians and East Frisians in Germany, but not as many as there are West Frisians in the Netherlands, including and not including Friesland. We’re talking 470K in the Netherlands (350K in Friesland, 120K elsewhere) and 60K in Germany and nowhere else with more than 10K.
- West Frisians, North Frisians, and East/Saterland Frisians are geographically separated because they kept getting yanked around during the Middle Ages. This makes them pretty independent from one another. Here’s a map to illustrate the point.
- A lot of the good Dutch speed skaters (Sven Kramer, for example) are from Friesland, and Friesland hosts the Elfstedentocht, a 120-mile race which only happens when the entire canal course is frozen thick enough. It last happened in 1997. It goes from Leeuwarden to Leeuwarden because it is a circle. Elfstedentocht translates to “Eleven Cities Tour” but it appears it is a Dutch word and not a West Frisian word.
- Those were not hearts on the flag. They are water-lily leaves. The official instructions for the flag say they “should not be heart-shaped.”
Ok. Hollandaise sauce.
It means “Dutch sauce” in French, and a lot of folks think the French Huguenots brought it back from Holland when they returned from exile, and we used to just call it “Dutch sauce” here in the English-speaking world but that changed more than one hundred years ago. It’s a French sauce, though. France just likes to pretend its sauces are from other places. Weird thing to pretend, but the French do a lot of weird things.
