Kabouter

Also Known As: also kaboutermannetje and kabouterman; regionally alvermanneke, auvermenneke, aardmannetje, bergmannetje, oelermenke, grauwke, sommeltje, hus and heihus; recorded as cabouterman in 1573 and kabouter-manneken in 1599, from the same old Germanic compound that gives German Kobold
Region/Culture: Western Europe
Mythos: Dutch Mythology, Belgium Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: He works a farm faster and better than the people who own it, and cannot be held, since a hand closing on him finds him gone like a grasped eel.
Role in Mythos: He is the unpaid night labourer of the Low Countries, a small earth-being who does the byre work, the churning and the threshing while the household sleeps.
Relation to Humans: The arrangement runs on food left out and eyes kept shut, and a farm that keeps its side of it prospers quietly. Break either half and he sours the milk, blackens the grain, drives off the cattle or takes an eye.

At one in the morning the gate in the side of the hill swung open to admit a stolen cow, and a young farmhand who had been crouching in the heather since dusk took hold of her tail and walked in behind her. What lay inside was not a cave. It was a warehouse. Thousands of small men had hollowed the hill out from beneath, evicted the foxes and the rabbits, and stacked it with turkeys, ducks, chickens, rabbits, calves, cows and oxen lifted out of every byre in the Kempen. They saw him at once. They came from every corner and beat and kicked him until he lay stretched on the floor, half dead, among his neighbours’ livestock.

He shouted at them to stop and then talked. Fifteen cows of his had gone into this hill. He wanted to marry Mieke from the next farm, and Mieke’s father had named a price of ten thousand guilders for a boy who owned nothing and was fit only to mind cattle. He put it so well that the small men took pity. They sent him home, and in his stall stood fifteen cows, and on his table lay a heavy purse of gold crowns, and the rich neighbour had nothing left to say. The trouble was that the story got out. After that the kabouters had lovesick young people at the door every day of the week, weeping at them, and the weeping wore them down. One evening they packed their bundles and went out of the country altogether, over the Rhine, where they live still.

Stories like that were collected across Flanders and the southern Netherlands, and for a while the Dutch state tried to put the whole species on a map. Folklore questionnaires went out in 1937 and again in 1953 asking what people in each village called these beings and what they were supposed to do. Two maps were drawn from the answers, numbered 13 and 14, and neither was ever published, because J. J. Voskuil, who was meant to write the commentary, judged the distributions too poor to stand. They survive anyway, and they are worth more than their draughtsman thought. Map 13 shows aardmannetje spread tidily over the whole country, sommeltje clustered on Texel and the top of North Holland, and the south swarming with kabouters and alvermannekes. Map 14 shows the work. In the western coastal provinces they simply did whatever needed doing overnight if you left food out for them. In the southeast and across into Flanders they had trades: housework, tailoring, churning, threshing. In other districts they were nothing but something to frighten children with.

The word itself is older than any of the collectors. Cabouterman appears in 1573, kabouter-manneken in 1599, plain kabouter by 1666, and behind all of them sits the same old Germanic compound that produced the German Kobold. The likeliest reading of the first element is a word for a hut or a house, and one proposal for the second is a word for a ruler, which would make the kabouter the master of the building he haunts. The nearest English relative is cofgodas, house gods. The oldest thing about the kabouter is the roof over him.

Under his other name he keeps different company. Alvermanneke carries alf inside it, and the alven of the Middle Ages were not earth-beings at all but creatures of the air, demons that pressed false pictures and bad dreams onto sleepers, which is why a German nightmare is still an Alptraum. Somewhere over the centuries that airborne family split, and one branch came down into the soil of Brabant and Limburg and started doing the milking. It makes the kabouter kin to Scandinavian trolls and to the fairies of Britain and Ireland. It does not make him a dwarf, whatever the garden statuary suggests.

The hills he lived in were often not hills. In the Campine, the Kabouterberg above Hoogeloon that the locals also called the Duivelsberg was a burial mound on the open heath, and the kabouter king Kyrië was said to hold his court there, sending his people out by night into the Peel and the Meierij to help farmers who were careful never to look. A hunter out on the Riethoven heath shot at something and hit him. Kyrië had strength enough left to reach the mound. The hunter walked over to see what he had brought down and heard, from inside the heath, small voices saying that Kyrië was dead. The news ran through every kabouter settlement in the region within the night. They buried their king somewhere in Hoogeloon and then the whole population left, and nobody has had a sighting since. One telling has the death announced by a passing traveller, which the historian Jona Lendering has pointed out is the exact shape of a far older story, the one Plutarch tells about the death of Great Pan.

What they wanted in return was small and exact. Milk and bread set out where they would find it. Pots and pans lent after dark and cooked in underground, returned by morning. Silence, above all, and no watching. The punishments for watching are consistent enough across the collections to look like a rule rather than a plot: a farmer who spied on them lost the sight of one eye. Lesser offences got lesser answers. The milk went sour, the grain went black, tools and small objects stopped being where they had been left, the cattle panicked in the dark for no reason anyone could find, and livestock left unattended simply stopped being yours.

Their strengths follow from their situation, which is that they are small, numerous and not entirely solid. They work faster than men and they work unseen. They come in hundreds and swarm a grown man until he cannot move his arms. Held, they slip the hand like an eel, and in the Kasterlee telling not one of them was ever caught in a fight. They live a long time and go grey doing it. Their weaknesses are narrower and all of a kind. They can be shot, as Kyrië was. They cannot bear to be looked at, and they cannot bear to be pestered, and the second of those has emptied more of the Low Countries of kabouters than any hunter. Every local tradition about them ends the same way, with the small men leaving.

The cheerful red-capped fellow on the lawn is a much later arrival and his paperwork is in order. In 1976 a Dutch general practitioner named Wil Huygen and the illustrator Rien Poortvliet published Leven en werken van de kabouter, translated the following year as Gnomes, and wrote it deadpan, in the register of a field biology textbook. Their gnome stands six inches high, weighs under a pound, lives up to four hundred years, and produces twins after a twelve-month pregnancy, the female smaller than the male and dressed in grey where he wears blue. It spent sixty-two weeks on American bestseller lists and has sold something over four million copies, and it is the direct ancestor of most of what anyone now pictures. The folklorists noticed the softening at the time and said so. In the traditional stories the kabouter is a far less comfortable neighbour, friendly one moment, and perfectly capable of taking your eye the next.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a kabouter?

A kabouter is a small earth-being of Dutch and Flemish folklore, the Low Countries equivalent of the brownie or the tomte. Kabouters live in or near houses, stables, hills and heathland, and do farm and household work at night in exchange for food left out for them. Folklore questionnaires recorded them under many local names, including aardmannetje, alvermanneke, bergmannetje and sommeltje.

What happens if you see a kabouter?

Being seen is the one thing kabouters will not tolerate, and the standard punishment in the stories is blindness in one eye. Milder retaliation includes souring the milk, blackening the grain, making household objects disappear and frightening the livestock. The safe arrangement was to leave milk and bread out and never watch to see who collected it.

What do kabouters do at night?

It depended on the region. Dutch folklore maps drawn from questionnaires in 1937 and 1953 show that in the western coastal provinces kabouters did general work around the farm overnight if food was left for them, while in the southeast of the Netherlands and in Flanders they did specific jobs: housework, tailoring, churning and threshing. They were also known to borrow kitchen pots after dark and cook with them underground.

Who was Kabouterkoning Kyrië?

Kyrië was the king of the kabouters of the Campine in North Brabant, said to live in a burial mound above Hoogeloon known as the Kabouterberg or Duivelsberg. A hunter shot him on the Riethoven heath, and he reached the mound before dying. When the news spread, every kabouter in the region left for an unknown destination and was never seen again.

Is a kabouter the same as a garden gnome?

Not originally. The modern friendly gnome owes most of its detail to Leven en werken van de kabouter, published in 1976 by Wil Huygen and Rien Poortvliet and translated as Gnomes, which fixed the height at six inches and invented a full natural history for the species. The kabouter of the older folk tales was ambivalent rather than sweet, helpful when treated well and dangerous when crossed.