Lange Wapper

Three men came up the Kattevest arm in arm, singing, too full of beer to care whose sleep they were spoiling. Away down by the Meir a little man was walking toward them, no higher than a fist. With every step he took he was larger, and by the time they thought to look properly he stood black against the housefronts with his head above the highest roof in the street. He set his legs apart like a pair of compasses and let all three walk under him. Then he stooped, gathered them by their collars, and stood them side by side in the roof gutter, where they stayed until morning, shivering and entirely sober.

The Antwerp tellings call him Lange Wapper, and the name is older and stranger than the figure. A wapper was a strap weighted at one end with a ball of lead, a thing meant for swinging; by the late sixteenth century the word had also been given to the swinging beam of a drawbridge, and the verb wapperen, to flap or sway in the wind, is one of those words built out of the sound it makes. By the middle of the seventeenth century a wapper could also mean a long loose-limbed man. Put the adjective in front and you arrive at something close to “the tall swaying thing”, which is a fair account of what people claimed to have met.

He is long and he is thin. The tellers give him spindle legs, a smooth chin with no beard on it, and arms described in one story as slinger-arms, the sort that hang and swing. Past that he has no settled body, because he has no settled size. He comes as a boy small enough to join a game of marbles, as a farmer hawking eggs, as a fisherman with a live pike in a wicker basket, as a young man not quite twenty at a dance, as a newborn left crying in a doorway. Whatever he arrives as, he ends the story enormous, and the last thing anybody hears is the laugh.

Where he came from, the old tales simply decline to say. The body of Wapper stories collected in Flanders and printed in 1929 runs to twenty-five separate tellings and not one of them gives him a birth, a parent or a first day. Two come close and then turn the idea into a joke. A childless couple in the Stoofstraat take in a foundling, feed him milk and sugar, lay him in their own bed, and watch him swell until a giant is lying there kicking the bedstead to splinters. The origin now told to visitors, in which a farmer at Wilrijk called Peer-Jan finds a baby inside a red cabbage too big for his largest kettle, and the boy grows up to save an old woman from drowning in the Scheldt and is rewarded with the power to grow and shrink at will, belongs to a later and far more civic tradition. Wilrijk built an eight-metre effigy of him, baptised it in foaming beer on the Bist in August 1964, and entered him in the population register as an honorary citizen. The cabbage is charming. It is not what the fireside tellers said.

What they said instead was worse, and the tale that sticks is the one about the milk. A poor woman was walking home from the Kiel in the evening with fresh milk from a farm, hurrying, because she had an infant of her own. On the road she found a baby wrapped in old cloths, a few weeks old at most, screaming with hunger. She picked it up, reasoned that where there is food for one there is food for two, and gave it her breast. It fed, and went on feeding as though it would never be full, and while it fed it grew heavy, so heavy that inside a hundred paces she had to sit down in the road to keep from going under the weight of it. When it finally stopped she looked down and saw a strong boy at her chest, and knew him. He sprang up, was ten times larger before he landed, and went off laughing.

Water is where he lives and where he goes. He was seen at the Kranenhoofd with his head in the cloud and one hand resting on the great harbour crane, and the next morning a bargemaster was missing, and three days after that the river gave him back. He blew a returning fishing fleet apart in a squall while the people along the quay watched from behind their curtains. One boat nearly got clear, almost as far as Burcht, so he made himself three times larger again, took one stride to Burcht and a second to Hoboken, lifted the boat by its mast from between his own legs and threw it over the dyke at Oosterweel; the man telling it swore his grandfather had seen the wreck still lying where it fell. When he has finished with a street he walks down to the Scheldt and goes into the water.

The stories cannot agree on whose side he is on. He ruined a miser of the Lei who had haggled him down over a basket of eggs, cursing her purse to double and double again as she carried it down the stairs until it crushed her at the bottom. He exposed a woman of the Keizerstraat who spent her days in church with a prayer book under her arm, by arriving as the young widowed baron from across the road and offering marriage on condition she gave the churchgoing up, which she did, immediately, pitching the book behind the cupboard. He caught two thieves stripping the rings off a boy at the city gate, remarked that he was fond of a fight, knocked their heads together and threw them onto the gallows field. Set against that: he played the hangman in a children’s game in the Oude Boeksteeg and left a boy dead on a lamppost, he danced a floor into flames with feet that burned through the boards and left his partner standing in them, and he handed out sweets on the Burchtplein and walked a crowd of children a mile out along the Boomsche steenweg before vanishing and leaving them there in the dark.

His powers all come out of the single gift. Size is the whole of him. He can be a fist high or he can stand beside the tower of Our Lady’s and be mistaken at a distance for a second tower, and he can cross between those states in the time it takes to look away. Reach comes with it, so that a stride covers parishes, and strength enough to throw a fishing boat over a sea wall. The disguises follow from the same root, since a thing with no true size has no true face either. He can make a scrap of tin pass for a gold ducat, turn a fistful of marbles into live coals in a boy’s hand, and put weight into a bale of linen until a grown man has to set it down.

The limits are harder to state, because the tellers granted him almost none. Nobody in the old tales ever beats him. He is not outwitted, not bargained with, not driven off by a priest, and he does not lose; the most anyone is given is a reprieve, like the drunkard who made his own front door with the footsteps thirty paces behind him and got a fist shaken at the window and word that next time his neck would go. Morning ends him rather than defeats him. Antwerp says the Madonnas standing on so many street corners and housefronts finally drove him out of the city and that he drowned in the Scheldt. Those statues went up from the end of the seventeenth century out of devotion to the city’s patron, and a great many of them carried an oil lamp, which quietly made them the street lighting as well. A creature who works in the dark loses ground when somebody lights the corners.

He has done well out of the modern city he used to frighten. Albert Poels cast him in bronze in 1963 and set him at the foot of the ramp into Het Steen, the old riverside castle, long and lean, with two small figures at his feet to carry the scale. Wilrijk keeps a rival claim and its own giant, and lets him out once every five years to walk in the Geitestoet with a little man riding in his hand.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Lange Wapper?

Lange Wapper is a giant and trickster spirit from the folklore of Antwerp and the surrounding Flemish towns. He appears at night, usually disguised as somebody ordinary, and grows to enormous height once he has his victim’s attention. His name comes from wapper, an old Dutch word for a lead-weighted strap and later for the swinging beam of a drawbridge.

What does Lange Wapper do to people?

He torments them. His usual targets are drunks walking home, greedy or hypocritical adults, and children playing outdoors after dusk, and his tricks range from humiliating to lethal. In one tale he sets three drunk men in a roof gutter to sober up overnight, and in others he drowns fishermen, hangs a boy during a children’s game, and leads a group of children far out of the city before abandoning them.

How big can Lange Wapper get?

There is no fixed limit. He is described starting out as small as a fist or as a newborn baby, and ending up tall enough to be mistaken at a distance for a second tower standing beside Antwerp Cathedral. A single stride at full height carries him from one village to the next, and he once threw a fishing boat over a dyke by lifting it from between his legs.

Is Lange Wapper good or evil?

The tales genuinely disagree. Some of them make him a punisher of the wicked, crushing a miser under her own money bag and beating two thieves who were robbing a child, while others show him killing and terrifying people who had done nothing at all. There is no version in which anyone defeats him, and the most a victim ever receives is a warning.

Where does the Lange Wapper statue in Antwerp come from?

The bronze statue standing at Het Steen, the old castle on the Scheldt, was made by the Belgian sculptor Albert Poels in 1963. It shows the giant towering over two tiny figures placed at his feet to give a sense of his scale. The district of Wilrijk maintains a competing claim to him and parades its own giant effigy once every five years.

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