Druon Antigoon

Also Known As: earlier Druoen; also Antigoon, Latinised Druon Antigonus
Region/Culture: Western Europe
Mythos: Belgium Mythology, Medieval Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: He is strong enough to hold a working river closed and greedy enough to charge for the privilege of passing.
Role in Mythos: He is the obstacle whose defeat explains where the city of Antwerp got its name.
Relation to Humans: Every telling puts him between ordinary people and their livelihood, taking money from bargemen and taking a hand from anyone who has no money. He is never negotiated with and never worshipped, only killed.

Low tide on the Scheldt leaves a grey shine across the mud and a smell of salt and rot that carries well inland. A bargeman working the bend below Antwerp knew the arrangement. You brought the boat in, you paid what was asked, and if you had nothing to give, a hand came down and took a hand, and the severed one went into the water. The giant who collected that toll was called Druon Antigoon, and he is the reason the city on that river carries the name it does.

Except that he is not. Antwerpen almost certainly comes from something like anda verpa, thrown-up ground, the silt a river piles against itself at a bend, which is exactly what the site is. A rival reading starts from Andouerpis, the form that appears in the seventh-century Vita Eligii, and takes it for a Celtic phrase meaning those who live on both banks. Neither has anything to do with throwing anything. What happened is the ordinary and rather wonderful thing that happens to place names: somebody heard hand werpen inside Antwerpen, the h going quiet the way it does in Flemish speech, and then somebody had to invent a hand worth throwing.

The oldest witness is later than most people assume. Breboen and Druoen first appear together in the Cornicke van Brabant, a rhymed chronicle finished around 1414 by Hennen van Merchtem, an official at the Brabantine court. In that version Breboen is a knight in the retinue of Octavian, son of the emperor of Greece, sent north on a family errand. Druoen demands horse, weapons and one hand as toll from everyone who passes. Breboen fights him, wins, and cuts off his head. There is no thrown hand, and there is no city name at the end of it. The hero himself is older than his monster: a Silvius Braboen riding with Julius Caesar turns up in a genealogy of 1356, and the name comes out of a thirteenth-century romance where Brabo is a king of Tongeren and a relative of the Roman general.

The famous version arrives around 1470, in a chronicle by Willem van Berchem, a canon of Nijmegen. Here Silvius hacks off the giant’s hand and throws it away, and the toponym Hand-Werpen drops neatly out of the gesture. The giant also acquires the classical-sounding name Antigoon, which fits a generation newly hungry for antiquity. Jean Lemaire de Belges lifted the story into his Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye in 1512, and Marcus van Vaernewijck copied Lemaire into the Spieghel der Nederlandscher Oudtheyt of 1568, adding the detail that Brabo threw the hand as far as midstream, and having Caesar reward him with a margraviate, name the spot, and build a castle on it. Van Vaernewijck also, to his great credit, wrote down the people who did not believe him. Some of his contemporaries thought Antigoon no giant at all but a strongman who had controlled the river before the Romans came, and reckoned he had swollen into a monster in the retelling because he was said to be of Russian stock.

Then the bones turned up. In 1510 workmen digging near Het Steen struck fossil whale bone, and Antwerp decided it had found its giant. The pieces were read as a shoulder blade and ribs and hung in the aldermen’s chamber. When a celebrated woodcut of the Antwerp roadstead was printed in 1518, a building on the waterfront carried the caption dit es de borch waer de reus te wonen plach: this is the castle where the giant used to live.

Albrecht Durer saw them. He was in the city between the third of September and the fourth of October 1520, buying pigment, selling prints and dining out on his own fame, and somebody walked him into the chamber. His notebook records it flatly and without a trace of doubt. He had seen the bones of the great giant at Antwerp; the leg above the knee was five and a half feet long and beyond measure heavy, and so were the shoulder blades, a single one broader than a strong man’s back. The man, he wrote, was eighteen feet high, and reigned at Antwerp and did great wonders, as was set out in an old book belonging to the town magistrates. Note what is missing from that. Durer’s giant governs and performs marvels. Nobody had yet told him about the toll or the hands.

The giant got a body at last in 1534, when Pieter Coecke van Aelst designed a colossal figure of him for the city’s Ommegang procession; a papier-mache head that may be that one survives in the Museum aan de Stroom. The thing made its public debut in 1549, at the Joyous Entry of Prince Philip, and Coecke’s own woodcut of it, printed in Cornelius Grapheus’s festival book, shows Druon Antigoon seated between two columns on the Grote Markt under the caption Magnus gigas in foro, the great giant in the marketplace. This is the honest answer to the question of what he looked like. He was never described into existence. He was built, by a named designer, for a parade, and every picture since descends from a float.

His power, such as it is, is entirely positional: a body big enough to stop the traffic of a working river and the nerve to price it. His weakness is the same fact turned over. He cannot leave the bend he guards, he has no cunning and no allies, and in every version of the story he loses the first fight he is given. He exists to lose.

One thing the guidebooks get wrong deserves killing off. Antwerp’s arms carry two severed hands, and you will be told they come from Brabo. The oldest city seal, from the end of the twelfth century, shows a tower with an arm holding a banner. The seal adopted in 1239 shows a castle whose pennants bear a glove, not a hand. Two hands only reach the city seal in the seventeenth century, though Antwerp craftsmen were stamping little hands on their work as a quality mark from the fifteenth. The gloves stand for the authority of the sovereign, the emperor or the duke of Brabant, and they have nothing whatever to do with the giant.

He nearly vanished. A statue of Brabo stood on the front of the new city hall finished in 1564, and after Antwerp fell in 1585 the Jesuits had it taken down as too heathen and a madonna put up instead. The hero came back three centuries later for reasons that had nothing to do with folklore. Belgium bought out the Scheldt toll from the Netherlands in 1863, the port boomed, and a liberal city council warmed to an origin story with no saints in it. Jef Lambeaux got the commission; his 1885 plaster model was still being called the Antigonusgroep, and the Catholic press attacked it for indecency and lost. The fountain was unveiled on 21 August 1887. At the foot of it the giant lies beheaded, which is the 1414 ending, while above him Brabo hurls a severed hand, which is the 1470 one. Five hundred years of chroniclers disagreeing, cast in bronze, contradicting themselves in the middle of a market square.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Druon Antigoon?

Druon Antigoon is a legendary giant of Antwerp who is said to have demanded a toll from everyone crossing or sailing the river Scheldt, and to have cut off a hand from anyone who could not pay. He was killed by a Roman soldier named Silvius Brabo. He is a literary creation of Brabantine chronicles rather than an inherited folk belief, first appearing in a chronicle finished around 1414.

Did the giant really give Antwerp its name?

No. The folk etymology derives Antwerpen from hand werpen, hand throwing, but the name is much older than the story and most likely comes from a term meaning thrown-up or alluvial ground, describing the silt bank the settlement stood on. The seventh-century Vita Eligii already records the form Andouerpis. The legend was constructed to explain the name, not the other way round.

How was Druon Antigoon killed?

The chronicles disagree. In Hennen van Merchtem’s version of about 1414 the hero Breboen defeats the giant and cuts off his head. In Willem van Berchem’s chronicle of about 1470 the hero cuts off the giant’s hand and throws it away, which is the version that produced the hand-throwing etymology and the one Antwerp adopted.

Are the giant’s bones real?

They were real bones, but they were not his. In 1510 workmen digging near Het Steen in Antwerp uncovered fossil whale bone, which the city took for the giant’s shoulder blade and ribs and displayed in the aldermen’s chamber. Albrecht Durer saw them in the autumn of 1520 and recorded in his notebook that the giant had stood eighteen feet high.

Do the two hands on Antwerp’s coat of arms come from the legend?

No, although the connection is repeated constantly. The city’s medieval seals show a castle with pennants bearing a glove rather than a hand, and the glove symbolised the authority of the emperor or the duke of Brabant. Two hands only appear on the city seal in the seventeenth century, well after the legend was in circulation.