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 digital storytelling

In this revised and updated edition of the StoryCenter’s popular guide to digital
storytelling, StoryCenter founder Joe Lambert offers budding storytellers the
skills and tools they need to craft compelling digital stories. Using a “Seven Steps”
approach, Lambert helps storytellers identify the fundamentals of dynamic digital
storytelling – from conceiving a story, to seeing, assembling, and sharing it. Readers
will also find new explorations of the global applications of digital storytelling in
education and other fields, as well as additional information about copyright,
ethics, and distribution. The book is filled with resources about past and present
projects on the grassroots and institutional level, including new chapters specifi-
cally for students and a discussion of the latest tools and projects in mobile device-
based media. This accessible guide’s meaningful examples and inviting tone makes
this an essential for any student learning the steps toward digital storytelling.

Joe Lambert founded the Center for Digital Storytelling (now StoryCenter) in 1994.
He and his colleagues developed a computer training and arts program known
as the digital storytelling workshop. Joe and his staff have traveled the world to
spread the practice of digital storytelling, to all 50 U.S. states and some 48 countries.
Lambert is author of Seven Stages: Story and the Human Experience (Digital Diner
Press). In 2017, he celebrated his 34th year as an Executive Director of StoryCenter,
having evolved his work in the 1980s in the performing arts to work in digital
storytelling and media education in the 1990s.

Brooke Hessler is Director of Learning Resources at California College of the Arts,

where she teaches multimodal inquiry and writing. Her scholarship has appeared in
the International Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Community
Literacy Journal, Writing Groups Inside and Outside the Classroom, A Guide to
Composition Pedagogies, and Digital Storytelling in Higher Education: International
Perspectives, among other journals and collections. An award-winning instructor of
media arts-integrated courses, her digital story work has included long-term collabo-
rations with K-16 educators, community arts activists, museums, and survivors of
natural disasters and domestic terrorism.
(.?\ Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
� http://taylorandfrancis.com
 digital storytelling
capturing lives, creating community
5th edition

joe lambert with

brooke hessler
Fifth edition published 2018
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
 2002, 2006, 2010, 2013, 2018 Joe Lambert
The right of Joe Lambert and H. Brooke Hessler to be identified as the
authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
First edition published by Life on the Water, Inc. 2002
Second edition published by Life on the Water, Inc. 2006
Third edition published by Digital Diner Press 2010
Fourth edition published by Routledge 2013
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Lambert, Joe, author. | Hessler, H. Brooke, author.
Title: Digital storytelling : capturing lives, creating community / Joe
Lambert & H. Brooke Hessler.
Description: Fifth edition, revised and updated. | New York : Routledge,
Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. | “Fourth edition published in 2013 by
Routledge”—T.p. verso. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017055435| ISBN 9781138577657 (Hardback) | ISBN
9781138577664 (Paperback) | ISBN 9781351266369 (eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Storytelling. | Literature and technology. | Creative
writing. | Digital storytelling.
Classification: LCC LB1042 .L36 2018 | DDC 372.67/70285—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017055435

ISBN: 978-1-138-57765-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-57766-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-26636-9 (ebk)

Typeset in Minion Pro

by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

Visit the authors’ website at www.storycenter.org

 For Dana Atchley (1941–2000)

Artist, Friend, Digital Storyteller

Your final exit was beyond reason.
Your vision will live on.
See you on the flipside.
(.?\ Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
� http://taylorandfrancis.com
Contents

Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction 1

1 The Work of Story 5

2 Stories of Our Lives 14

Interlude 1: The Legacy of Tanya 22

3 A Road Traveled: The Evolution of the Digital Storytelling Practice 24

4 The World of Digital Storytelling 37

Interlude 2: Wynne’s Story 50

5 Seven Steps of Digital Storytelling 53

6 The Story Circle 71

7 To Students: Getting Started in Digital Story Work: Mindsets

and Methods 86

Interlude 3: İlmiye’s Story by Burcu Şimşek 91

8 Approaches to the Scripting Process: Prompts and Processes 94

9 The Walking Story Circle: Rethinking Digital Storytelling in the

Era of Mobile Devices 103

Interlude 4: Areej’s Story by Nikoline Lohmann 113

10 Storyboarding 115
viii Contents

11 Designing in Digital: Working With Digital Imaging,

Audio, and Video 121

Interlude 5: Nellie’s Story by Rani Sanderson 134

12 Distribution, Ethics, and the Politics of Engagement 136

13 Applications of Digital Storytelling 142

Interlude 6: Zahid’s Story 156

14 Silence Speaks: Interview With Amy Hill 159

15 Listening to Change: Stories From Alaska’s Native Health

Communities: Interview With Laura Revels 169

16 Humanizing Healthcare: A Conversation With Dr. Pip Hardy and

Tony Sumner 180

17 Transforming Education Through Story Work: A Conversation

With Dr. Brooke Hessler 192

Addendum: Silence Speaks: Guidelines for Ethical Practice 204

Bibliography 212
Index 217
Foreword

Grete Jamissen

My journey with digital storytelling began 12 years ago, when I was involved in an
innovation project at my institution, Oslo University College of Applied Sciences.
Our aim was to create a better dialogue between researchers, students, and the
surrounding community. A natural approach was to focus on how researchers
communicate – not only their findings, but also their questions and motivations for
research. And here my journey took a serendipitous turn, both in my professional
career and in my personal job commitment.
One of our young collaborators had been to California and experienced a digi-
tal storytelling workshop at the Center for Digital Storytelling, now StoryCenter,
in Berkeley. He suggested that we invite researchers to make digital stories to be
published on the university website. As it turned out, this was a bit premature
and researchers were not ready for this personal and narrative turn in commu-
nication. As project leader, I was invited to the screening of the stories from our
first pilot workshop, where senior faculty members shared stories about turning
points in their professional lives. I was blown off my feet and joined the next
workshop, where I created my first digital story – about how I became an action
researcher. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that my story is about how research
“subjects” – in this case, old people in a neglected and poor area in downtown
Oslo – took center stage and benefited from the opportunity of having their voices
heard in the public debate.
What really set me off, however, was not the opportunity for research commu-
nication, but the learning process I went through in my struggle to condense this
life-changing experience to a three-minute story. What was it really about, and what
was it really, really about? As a teacher since 1971, I have always looked for ways
to support learners as active participants in their learning, rather than as passive
recipients of information. As ICT entered Norwegian classrooms in the 1980s as
something other than programmed instruction in a behaviorist tradition, I observed
children using the new tools in creative writing processes. I wrote my master’s thesis
in 1985 focusing on ICT as a tool in the hands of the learner in a social constructivist
tradition more than as a tool for effective content presentation.
x Foreword

In my various jobs, in the computer industry and in educational institutions, this

approach to ICT for learning purposes has been my touchstone. I still recall how
colleagues in the innovation project made fun of me and of my excitement at having
finally found, in digital storytelling, the answer to the challenge of reflective learning.
As a university college, we prepare students for the professions of the welfare
state, to become nurses, child welfare professionals, teachers, and so on. Such pro-
fessional skills and identities are complex: at once technical and social, cognitive
and emotional, experiential and theoretical – in other words, “the art and science”
of professional work. Practice placement constitutes a large part of these programs
precisely to help students develop the personal and artistic aspects of the work.
Traditionally, however, reflective reports from placement are descriptive and
analytical, representing the scientific rather than the artistic dimension. Thus, we
have long been looking for an approach to support reflective learning and we were
thrilled to find digital storytelling as one answer. It has the capacity to help students
learn from experience and support the personal and artistic dimension of their pro-
fessional identity by not only allowing, but actually asking, them to keep a personal
focus. In looking for theories to make sense of our experience, I came across the
concept of Poetic Reflection, which immediately resonated with me as a way to com-
municate what is not so easily put into words. An old Norwegian book on learning
from placement describes poetic reflection as a combination of the personal logs
and diaries that are not meant for sharing and the informative facts- and theory-
based reflections that are meant for the public sphere. Poetic reflection, as we use
it with digital storytelling, is intended for sharing but strives to keep the focus on
personal experience and reflection.
For the last 12 years I have been able to follow up this experience. In this pro-
cess, I have been actively engaged in building a community of practice of digital
storytelling in higher education in Norway as well as participating in an inspiring
international network. As Joe and Brooke discuss several places in this book, digital
storytelling was quickly adopted by, and is gaining momentum in, higher education
worldwide, building on the inspiration from StoryCenter and adapting it to a wide
variety of practices. My institution’s contribution to such adaptations has been to
meet the challenge of large classes by developing a guided story circle practice where
students are self-reliant and learn how to listen attentively and give feedback – a
practice with huge transferable value to other areas of their education and future
professional work.
So, what is it with digital storytelling? Why do we keep doing it, and why is it that
more and more colleagues join us in exploring and developing it? If you saw the
sparkle in the eyes of the students involved in storytelling workshops, you wouldn’t
need to ask that question. Hearing them say how awareness of their personal emo-
tions is an important dimension in their professional work and studies, and that
digital storytelling makes them reflect more deeply, is all the inspiration you need
as a teacher. They also stress the social and constructive process and say that the
feedback from their peers enhances their reflection. Listening to the stories of peers
inspires them to rethink their own experiences. And our teachers, experiencing a
digital storytelling workshop for the first time, are blown off their feet just as I was
 Foreword xi

in my first encounter 12 years ago. They see qualities in their students that are new
to them and they get a better understanding of the students’ actions in their practice
placements.
A while ago our source of inspiration changed its name from the Center for
Digital Storytelling to StoryCenter, thus underlining even more strongly what has
been the message in all previous editions of this book: that the core of the work is not
digital, but storytelling. By now the digital is such an integrated part of our lives that
it is not even worth mentioning. So, with the generation of students called “digital
natives,” even if, upon close investigation, they may not be all that native, things
have definitely changed. We no longer need to spend our valuable workshop time
teaching editing software and this allows for more time and greater focus on reflec-
tion and the creative process.
I had not been involved in digital storytelling for long before I had the opportu-
nity to meet and be inspired by Joe in person, first in an attempt to create a European
branch of CDS in Copenhagen in 2008 and then at my first DS conference in Obidos,
Portugal, 2009. The main breakthrough in our collaboration, however, was the
Fourth International Conference on Digital Storytelling, “Create–Share–Listen,” in
Lillehammer in 2011. I had the privilege of leading the Norwegian planning group, a
triple helix group with representatives from higher education, small businesses, and
the public sector, with Joe as supportive guide. For me, this was the beginning of an
exciting worldwide digital storytelling working group and, of course, more confer-
ences: Ankara in 2013, Athens in 2014, Massachusetts in 2015, and most recently
the Untold “unconference” in London in 2017. The higher education deme there
identified assessment, sustainability, and research as the three most important areas
to discuss in the development of digital storytelling – in addition to ethical issues
which were the focus of another deme at the conference. So, we still have questions
to discuss, many of which are addressed in this edition.
Another, even more tangible, outcome is Digital Storytelling in Higher Education:
International Perspectives, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017. In organizing
this book, my fellow editors and I relied on the four scholarships of higher edu-
cation identified by Ernest Boyer in his seminal report Scholarship Reconsidered:
Priorities of the Professoriate, published by the Carnegie Foundation in 1990. Not
surprisingly, we easily identified relevant and exciting projects to cover all four
scholarships: teaching and learning, discovery, integration, and engaged collabora-
tion. You will also find many examples of applications of digital storytelling in all
these areas in the book you are holding in your hands.
My digital storytelling journey started off with an ambition to reform and enrich
research communication and, while this was premature then, I now meet an increas-
ing demand from my fellow researchers and faculty members. In the last 10 years,
narrative has become acceptable and respectable, both as a research methodology
and as a communication approach. This is exciting and in no way straightforward.
Developing the personal professional story will only happen as a result of exciting
dialogue with colleagues.
In my recent role as a retired Professor Emerita, I am also lucky to still be invited
to workshops and meet new groups of students. Only last week I met an international
xii Foreword

group of Social Work students making and sharing stories of important turning
points in their lives that have shaped their identities and motivated them to do this
work. To be part of this process, observing how they benefit from story work and
how brave they are in sharing and giving feedback, really gives meaning to working
in higher education.
I will be forever grateful for the work of Joe and his colleagues at StoryCenter for
creating and generously sharing the basic values and steps of digital storytelling that
have made this journey possible.

—Grete Jamissen
Professor Emerita,
Multimedia Studies,
Oslo and Akershus University College
Acknowledgments

On behalf of my collaborators at StoryCenter, I would like to graciously thank a

number of people for their contributions to the development of this book over these
many years.
To start with, I recognize the thousands of storytelling participants who have
shared their lives and stories with us, whose courage, trust, and honesty continue to
inspire our work.
My colleagues and I have the greatest job in the world, and in every workshop
we expand our circle of friends. We must recognize that this book itself has seeds in
two projects. In 1996, we were given support by Apple Computer, under the guid-
ance of Ralph Rogers and Kelli Richards, to create the original Digital Storytelling
Cookbook. Then in 1998, the Institute for the Future, led by our friends Kathi Vian
and Bob Johansen, gave us support for a white paper on digital storytelling, called
“The Creative Application of Digital Technology to the Ancient Art of Storytelling.”
The original work in 2002 on this particular book was made possible principally
as a collaboration with Emily Paulos, the Managing Director at StoryCenter. Her
support and guidance has remained vital to the ongoing process of evolving this text.
I want to thank all the staff at StoryCenter, Daniel Weinshenker, Andrea Spagat,
Stefani Sese, Allison Myers, Rob Kershaw, Amy Hill, Root Barrett, Andrea Paulos,
Mary Ann McNair, and Rani Sanderson, as well as former staff members, Caleb
Paull, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Theresa Perez, Ary Smith, Zoe Jacobson and our
numerous other collaborators. My work is driven by the efforts of this family of co-
workers, and I thank all of them for their commitment to the general development
of the practice of digital storytelling. For the help on the fourth edition, I thank
Patrick Castrenze, who helped shape and advise our approach. I want to give thanks
to Erica Wetter and Mia Moran of Routledge for their work on this fifth edition.
Over the years digital storytelling has evolved beyond our studios and our work-
shops with practices in numerous contexts. We look back to recognize the impor-
tance of our collaboration with countless organizations and individuals. Some of
the names include: Warren Hegg and the Digital Clubhouse Network; Glynda Hull
at UC Berkeley; Ana Serrano and the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto; Daniel
Meadows and the team at Capture Wales from the BBC; Helen Simondson and the
xiv Acknowledgments

Australian Centre for the Moving Image; Burcu Şimşek in Turkey; Geska Helena
Andersson, Simon Stromberg, Grete Jamissen, Nikolene Lohmann in Scandinavia;
Pip Hardy, Tony Sumner, Clodagh Miskelly, Alex Henry, and others around the
UK; Federica Pesce and Melting Pro in Rome; Erwin Schmitzberger and Cilli Supper
in Austria; Pam Sykes and Daniela Gachago in South Africa; the entire network
of the New Media Consortium; Aline Gubrium, Yvonne Mendez, Vanessa Pabon,
and others, in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts; Carroll Parrott Blue, Charlotte
Hamilton and Rubén Durán at the University of Houston and Houston Community
College, respectively; Stephanie Goss and our dear friends at Asian Pacific Wellness
Center; as well as our other Board members, Nina Shapiro-Perl, Walt Jacobs, Nikki
Yeboah, Kristi Laughlin, and Anand Kalra; California State Librarian Greg Lucas,
and program associate Janet Coles, for their support of California Listens; and all of
our partners and clients around the world.
I would like to thank the following individuals for permission to reproduce illus-
trations in the text: Zahid Al-Amin (Interlude 6); Rosalie Blakey Wardell (portrait
of Dana Atchley); Roberto Gerli (Chapter 11 images 7–13); Monte Hallis (Interlude
1); Rob Kershaw Chapter 11 images 1–6); Wynne Maggi (Interlude 2); Thenmozhi
Soundarajan and Thiakavalhy Soundarajan (storyboard in Chapter 10).
This book of ideas, inspired by the digital storytelling workshop, grew out of my
collaboration with Nina Mullen and the late Dana Atchley.
My former wife Nina Mullen spent nine years as the Co-Director of the center
in San Francisco and Berkeley, and traveling the world teaching and representing
our organization. As co-parent of my amazing children, Massimo and Amalina, she
continues to make this work possible for me.
Of course, now that Massimo is 22, I consider him an able digital storyteller, and
digital storytelling facilitator, but mainly a person with a vision for change and hope
through mapping the world around him. With Amalina, she is fabulous as a voice-
over recording coach in our workshops, but I now also see her as a Bodhisattva-in-
waiting and current future scientist-scholar-athlete, and the only person who can
really leave me without words. I am working as hard as I can to make a world for
them that values compassion as much as competition.
As for Dana, he remains the person for whom this work is dedicated. Miss you,
brother. Your dream lives on around the world.
I want to give a very specific thanks to Tatiana Beller. Once upon a time, a child
was given up for adoption at birth in 1972. As her father, for 40 years, I wandered
the desert carrying a psychic empty space, wondering who this person was, and had
become. After we met, and I met her son, my grandson Sebastian, and I saw these
mirrors of myself, much changed in my life. She is now a central part of this work as
a collaborator, teacher, filmmaker, and daughter to me. Such a story. Hijole!
And, finally, to Brooke Hessler, my love and collaborator. Here’s to making our
life, one story at a time.
Introduction

5th Edition

Welcome to this book.

You, my reader, are why this book exists.
I want to know your story. I want to know if I can help you help others find their
story.
If you are new to these ideas, I want you to become a story worker – someone that
listens, supports, cajoles, and collaborates.
If you already do all of those things, in relation to people’s stories, then I want you
to become better at it.
And if you find little new here, I want you to call me.
We have to talk. I am ready to listen.
Seriously.

How to Use This Book

With our decision to publish with Routledge in 2013, we reached a much broader
audience, an audience that over that last four years gave us one central piece of feed-
back. Could we have more of the book speak to the students they might assign this
book as part of a classroom text?
The book started as an autobiographical reflection of a community arts-based
practitioner working mainly in community, and then, later, educational settings.
Much of the original writing was directed at my fellow community arts facilitators,
as likely to work in an informal after-school setting as a classroom. With this edi-
tion, we are putting more emphasis on how digital storytelling can serve students in
formal educational settings. I have asked a longtime classroom educator, Dr. Brooke
Hessler, to join me in reorienting the book toward the student jumping into digital
storytelling for the first time. You will find a new chapter by Brooke Hessler about
using digital storytelling as part of one’s educational journey. And we have added a
very practical chapter about mobile media.
As for what remains, you can still read as if Chapter 1 refers to the Why of this
work, Chapter 2 refers to the What we mean by story, Chapter 3 refers to the When
of our history, and Chapter 4 as the What Else, as in how our work connects to
2 Introduction

a spectrum of participatory media and story-work practices. When you arrive in

Chapters 5 through 14, you really are in the how-to part of the book. Chapters 15
to 17 are about the ways that digital storytelling has become a global movement,
spanning sectors and approaches, but sharing a common commitment to ethics and
activism (including new conversations with Dr. Hessler about education, and a dis-
cussion with Laura Revels about doing work in the context of Alaska Native public
health).
We are also maintaining our Interlude sections – the stories about people work-
ing with another person on a particular story – with international contributions
by Burcu Şimşek of Turkey, Rani Sanderson from Canada, and Nikoline Lohmann
from Denmark.
You can, of course, jump around in any order if you are looking for specific
ideas or useful material, but if questions remain, feel free to email me at joe@story
center.org

Story in the Eye of the Storm

I am writing this introduction as the second of two enormous hurricanes comes

sweeping across the southeast United States. Along with recent earthquakes,
scorching heatwaves and huge fires, we feel like we are passing through some
biblical narrative of end-times.
A border was crossed in the United States in 2016. We moved from a coun-
try led by Obama, to a country led by Trump, a country stretched between ever
more polarized perspectives about the meaning of citizenship. An astound-
ing moment. That fierce political whiplash would have been enough, but add
to it the ups and downs of 2017 news cycles, with daily doses of the surreal,
and, well, it made us feel all like we were bobbing along in the middle of a
psychic tempest.
By mid-year, many Americans, like us, were feeling bruised, in our minds and in
our hearts.
Everyone comments how, in the middle of a crisis, people rise to perform their
best selves. They gather in solidarity, selflessly, with genuine compassion. They
lift each other up off the ground, stand between the vulnerable and that which
threatens. They awaken the spirit of human dignity. Despair becomes hope with
every rescue, with every counseling session, with every chipping in of a neighbor to
carry out the debris, nail up a board, celebrate the reconstruction. Together. Every
story matters.
The circles of storytellers that I, and my colleagues around the world, gather in
our community centers, classrooms, and public spaces are asked to become their
best selves. The most respectful and kind, supportive and encouraging, the most
decent, person they can be. It is the precondition of success in a workshop environ-
ment, in any teaching environment.
We will not share our stories in places where we meet dismissive, caustic, or
confrontational opinions. We will go silent. And that silence corrodes on everyone.
On everything.
 Introduction 3

Witnessing each other’s story is an analgesic for modern times. I have yet to have
an experience where the story circle, and the moving of an idea to the completion of
a document, a digital story, has not created this sense of calm, of hopefulness. Story
work is the quiet place around which the storms can blow.
This is what keeps us committed.

The Movement Matures

In the last four years, digital storytelling has continued to grow as an international
movement. We have seen major international conferences in Ankara, Athens,
Valencia, Spain, the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, and most recently in London.
New books, new dissertations, new articles, and presentations seem to be emerging
from all corners of the world.
What has become striking about these developments is the depth and maturity
of our little niche in the field of participatory media. We now have hundreds of
practitioners, with a decade or more of consistent methodological development,
of testing, adapting, and innovating on the original StoryCenter model. The areas
of content being addressed seem also to expand by the day, as we discover efforts
across the curriculum in education, and across community-based contexts.
And, while we are constantly working to take an expansive view of digital story-
telling to include various new technologies, new approaches, new integrations with
other practices and approaches, we have also been trying to work toward defini-
tional and theoretical clarity about our historical approach and methods. At my
organization, the emphasis has been on deepening our practices through ever more
consistent and rigorous summation and assessment, and exchanging case studies in
the nuanced improvements on each part of our process.
While I have always felt there were simple ways to explain this model, and sim-
ple ways to differentiate it from other models, I hope you find our considerations
of our practice filled with potential for endless complexity. Like any skill, like any
craft. I know I am still learning – about how best to listen, how best to hold space,
how best to collaborate, and how best to inspire, across cultures and locations, with
the endlessly diverse expectations of finished products and use of stories.

Finding Home

I have always felt that home was an odd construct for me. As the son of two activ-
ists who defined themselves by their relationship to the events of the world, to
their service outside of home, how could it be different? Home was the waystation,
the platform, the resting spot, not the source, the center, the essential. Something
is changing in me, is settling, that makes the great campaign of my work less and
less about the next place it takes me, but more about how it can assist me in this
process of return.
I always feel the need to recognize how much my personal life washes over
my efforts to sum up my work, and build the connections with the larger digital
4 Introduction

storytelling community. In a book about the way our personal stories collide with
our processes of learning, of working, of connecting in communities, how could it
be different? We all recognize the ways our stories inform our values, our prefer-
ences, our focus and energy.
I am sure being a listener to so many people has aided me in holding a space for
change, big change, as I journey from middle age to the last third of my life.
When I think about the changes in my own life in the last four years, what can I
say – my life is profoundly different.
Four years ago, I was married to Nina Mullen. In December of 2013 we sepa-
rated, and then divorced. We endeavor to make home for our children, Massimo and
Amalina, in two places, sharing the tasks of support and encouragement as positively,
and effectively, as we can.
Four years ago, I had not met Tatiana Beller. My birth daughter, born when I
was 15 years old in Texas. Raised in Mexico and the United States. Mother to my
grandson, Sebastian. She has become a vital part of my life, and an active part of
my organization.
I had not met Brooke Hessler, who joined me in California last year as my love
and partner.
I find myself at peace with all these changes, as happy, as flourishing, and as at
home, as I have ever been.
Stories arise from change. Change from within. Change from without. In enter-
ing my seventh decade of existence, I am confident that the quiet work of reflection
will become more dominant than the change that occurs as I travel around listening
to stories. But I know the external world assures us all of change, as we rise to so
many new challenges, so many new urgent natural, social, and political emergencies.
A surprise around every corner. And a new story.
I look forward to hearing yours.
1
The Work of Story

Why tell stories? This is the basic question to ask at the beginning of a book about
storytelling. Stories are what we do as humans to make sense of the world. We are
perpetual storytellers, reviewing events in the form of re-lived scenes, nuggets of
context and character, actions that lead to realizations. But the brain you are using
to listen to me talk about stories and storytelling is very different than the brain you
have when you hear me tell a story.
Here is a story.

We had this sofa chair. Brown Naugahyde. An embossed weave stamped into
the plastic, and a cigarette hole burned into the arm. I loved that chair.
I remember my dad sitting in that chair one afternoon. A book in hand,
glasses perched on his nose. Cigarette in the ashtray.
He raised his head and looked at me.
“Remember that story I told you about the guy in San Antonio. The painter?”
“Yeah, sure,” I answered.
I had remembered the story. Natividad – a character in my father’s stories
of union organizing in San Antonio, Texas – a Mexican-American artist. One
story told about how he had painted something critical of the local Catholic
bishop on the wall of the cathedral. He then sat across the street to watch the
nuns try desperately to wash the paint off the wall. Another story was about
Natividad’s studio up above a storefront near downtown. The staircase was no
wider than two and a half feet. Despite having to lug his canvas up and down the
narrow stairs, the artist had chosen the place precisely. No cop in San Antonio
could fit his rump in there to chase him.
My dad would laugh and laugh. And I would laugh with him. These stories
made my father happy – ingenuous ways to make those redneck authorities in
Texas squirm.
“What about him, Dad?”
“Nothing.” My dad smiled. “I was just thinking about him, is all.”
He took a puff of his cigarette. His eyes returned to the book.
6 The Work of Story

When I am explaining an idea to you, I want to be clearly understood. I want very

little distance between my intended meaning and your perceived meaning. To
accomplish this, I need to be precise. I need the ideas to be substantiated by argu-
ment, where each example, each concept, builds upon the other, toward a coherent
conclusion.
But when I tell a story, reflecting on a moment in time, and reflecting on that
reflection, I am not so concerned about interpretation. Perhaps I imagine my
meaning is evident. While I might hope you would read something similar to me
about what this story tells about the source of my political views, I am not trying to
convince you to share them. I want you to relate my experience to your own.
Much more important is that my feeling is evident. Unconsciously, I am sure I
tell stories that I hope would endear me to you, or at least create an emotional con-
nection between us. An intimacy. When I am in conversation and drop into telling
a story, something changes about my choice of words, about the way I describe
interactions, impersonating the characters, pulling out the details, feeling, even as
I recite my memories, how the actual events worked upon my psyche, how they
changed me.

The Biology of Story

What gives real memory [organic and biological instead of an image of a

computer-like brain] its richness and its character, not to mention its mystery
and fragility, is its contingency. It exists in time, changing as the body changes.
Indeed, the very act of recalling a memory appears to restart the entire process
of consolidation, including the generation of proteins to form new synaptic
terminals. Once we bring an explicit long-term memory back into working
memory, it becomes short-term memory again. When we reconsolidate it, it
gains a new set of connections; a new context.
(Carr 2010: 191)

My exploration of story has always coincided with an interest in cognition and

memory. Over these many years I have found myself lost in some popular press
discussion of the advancements in neuroscience, and the evolving discipline of neu-
ropsychology, specifically the biology of our sense of self and the role biochemistry
has in emotion and identity.
We have many ways of thinking of story from a biological sense. The hunter/hunting
party returns from the hunt and explains how to catch the next big meal. The mother
shares her birthing story with a teenage daughter, and explains the process by which
she kept the child alive through a long, cold winter. Story becomes a teaching tool
for survival. And one could argue that the human race stills uses story for this rea-
son, to put the stakes of survival, and the emotions that come with it, as the basis
for attentive consideration of a remembered event. Many of the stories we have in
our work in public health are life-and-death cautionary tales about the results of our
own unfortunate or disastrous choices, or those by a person exerting power over us
and with those for whom we have primary relationship and attachment.
 The Work of Story 7

We now know the general pattern of brain activity that causes short-term memory
to become long-term memory. We know that sensory experience is mostly forgotten,
moments after we hear, see, touch, smell, taste it. Based on the research of psycholo-
gist Brenda Milner, we learned that to remember we move sensory information from
a slower part of our brain that senses back to the fast-working hippocampus. The
hippocampus is integral to a complex process of consolidation of the memory over
days, weeks, and years. The process, as far as we can tell, requires rehearsal, review-
ing the experience again and again in our minds. The new neural pathway that is
forged in the cortex through this process becomes long-term memory. The more
we rehearse, in our conscious mind, but also in our dreams and subconscious, the
deeper the pathway, the more the memory is sustained (Kandel 2006: 129–33).
We all think of this as the essence of learning; you repeat something again and
again until it sticks. This works for physical activities (playing an instrument, using
a fine tool), as well as for mental activity (doing multiplication tables or following
directions). Practice makes perfect. Repetition creates retention.
As it turns out, if we have an affective relationship to the sensory information –
if that information is connected to the part of our brains that processes our
emotions – then the pathways become even stronger. The memories associated with
our most important life lessons are inevitably those with strong emotional encoding
at the moment, as in traumas or events involving those close to us. When we describe
these events, and their meaning to our lives, we inevitably drop out of argumenta-
tion and into story. Story in this sense works biologically to ensure the total recall
of those events we have ingrained as being of greatest emotional importance to us.
In retelling, we set the scene of the learning, not only to help the listener have a
rich context for the meaning, but also to simply return us to the sensory and emotive
environment that burned the memory into our neurons. As we remember the scene,
we actually are linking back to the sparking neural pathways that were formed in the
strong associative memory (Rappoport 2006, Siegel 2012).

The Hollywood Century and the American Myth

Myth is an imaginal story or statement that addresses existential human issues,

and that has behavioral consequences. This is in line with Joseph Campbell’s
proposal that myths are “motivated from a single psychophysiological source –
namely the human imagination.” Myths often, but not always, employ symbol
and metaphor; they are usually, but not always, expressed in verbal narrative.
Myths can be cultural, institutional, familial, or personal in nature; a “mythology”
is the interwoven (and sometimes contradictory) collection of myths held by a
culture, institution, family, or individual. Unlike such related terms as “scripts,”
“attitudes,” “beliefs,” or “worldviews,” the word “myth” is able to encompass the
unconscious as well as the conscious dimensions of the concept.
(Krippner n.d.)

Life and death, moments of clarity, decisive events that change us; these are not just
the subjects of life recalled, these are the essence of our oral traditions of myth and
8 The Work of Story

folktale, our literatures, and, in the last century, the immersive media of the screen
and recorded sound.
We first know story through our experience, but the stories told to us become part
of our tribe, our community, our culture, and are formed into myth and archetype.
We see our own lives in the plots of the journey, the romance, the mystery. We see
our identity and those of our most important relationships in the characters of the
hero, the lover, the seeker, the wizard, the sidekick, the beast. We know them as they
reappear in our sacred texts: the Bible, the Quran, the life of Siddhartha the Buddha,
Anansi the Spider, as well as our epic and children’s narratives, The Odyssey, King
Arthur, and the Brothers Grimm. We know how they work in westerns, sci-fi, detec-
tive stories, and romantic comedies.
Myths have always served our coming to terms with developmental processes –
our place in the world, selfhood, partnering, parenting, death – the stories that held
us, that spoke to us, that gave us patterns we could be assured of in considering the
choices and changes that are part of our lives. But in the recent centuries, the myths
that bound us as tribes, as cultures, that gave us the particulars of our definitions
of good and evil, speak to the process of dissembling identity as we left the farm for
the factory.
Much of twentieth-century literary and media history was to assist in the devel-
opment of how societies and individuals could process their vast exit from agricul-
tural life to the city. As human experience changed, we searched the old myths for
patterns to help explain our feelings of dislocation. We also created new myths and
archetypes. The machinery of mass media was to put the project through all genres
of storytelling. With Disney and others, they borrowed directly from the folktale to
contemporize children’s stories to the experience of modern existential alienation,
showing us hipster heroes and wise-cracking damsels battling corporatist monsters
and dictatorial tyrants. The western showed us how to bring frontier ethics into our
chaotic urban experience, mapping the pastoral ideal of self-sufficiency and famil-
ial integrity onto a suburban ideal of the single-family dwelling, and the sense of
embattlement with the savage and wilderness with the relationship between civi-
lized suburb and lawless inner city. Science fiction, for instance, provided a way to
take our fear of sweeping technological innovation and overlay the mythos of the
hero’s confrontation with the evil genie let loose upon the world. Crime and mystery
narratives gave us ways to examine the psychology of social dysfunction through a
mythic presentation of the detective as shaman. And romantic narratives helped us
to explore difference, juxtaposing characters of different class, situation, and culture,
negotiating the chaos of prejudice and simmering fears of the other that exploded as
cities crammed a multiplicity of tribes into close proximity.
Implicit in these mass-media mythologies was a sense of both nation-state sig-
nification and a new universalism; the American century could also be defined as
the Hollywood century. The U.S. imperial mythic landscape also served American
exceptionalism in the battle with the totalitarian Other. Our stories were more
than reassuring forms of entertainment assisting with our social transitions; they
brought with them the values of democracy and a particular sort of individualism
that was perceived as the inevitable ethos of all the planet’s peoples and societies.
 The Work of Story 9

As presented by our dominant medias, the American ideal continues to be an

unquestioned pinnacle of human progress.
And, as has been true with all dominant ideologies inside a culture, we took on the
characters as our own. Rather than the collectivist ethos, we saw ourselves as individ-
ually responsible for our fate. We saw the signifying success of our own specialized
career, our own successful family, single-family house, two cars, and endless stuff
to continually validate our status. And, as an empire, we exported (and continue to
export) those expectations as far as we could/can reach.

Our Ordinary Stories Become Extraordinary Journeys

Inherent in the individualism of citizen democracy is that every story matters. In

practice, twentieth-century media culture also can be seen as the triumph of the
ordinary person. Traditional cultures took individual experience and mythologized
the hunt into the hero’s journey or the animist characterizations of mysterious
forces in nature. Feudal societies privileged the lives of kings, gods and saints, magi
and warrior-heroes. Industrial culture gave us the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
But the forces of industrial class struggle and the democratic impulses it created
stressed that even the most plebeian character had a powerful story to tell. Charles
Dickens, Mark Twain, and their contemporaries, created stories about the people, in
which the people became their own heroes. The newly literate laboring classes could
see themselves in the stories, and a tradition of working-class storytelling has con-
tinued through their literary progeny. In Western industrial culture these traditions
emerged. At the same time, a feminist literary tradition, a tradition of representa-
tions of the racially oppressed, stories of outcasts and marginalized peoples, of the
silenced and invisible, of all kinds, emerged as well. By the 1920s and 1930s these
stories became increasingly written not as outsider celebrations of the ordinary by
authors of the “Other” but by working-class men and women, storytellers who lived
racial, class, and gender oppression themselves.
People had the idea that their stories mattered, but, in form and attitude, the nar-
ration of these lives did not necessarily take on self-mythology. The natural orienta-
tion of many, if not all, of these stories was heroic melodrama. (In those countries
where the success of social revolutions created an “official” social realist proletar-
ian culture, simplistically drawn melodrama were all the stories were allowed to
become.) The storylines were simple: an evil oppressor tortures the masses; heroes
rise from the mass and, through a mix of individual smarts and their leadership of
collective action, the oppressed conquer the oppressor. Transformation occurs, but
not the kind of transformation that reveals new insight, or advances depth of under-
standing. The power to take the actual life and make a document for personal, and
community, ongoing transformation needed another impetus.
Precisely as the industrial landscape created a proletarian literature, psychol-
ogy and the other social sciences gave us concepts about the relationship between
the individual and society that suggested the role of myth, and therefore story, was
hard-wired to our subconscious.
10 The Work of Story

Sigmund Freud and the large cohort of specialists delving into the science of
our minds and behavior learned very quickly that what we thought we knew about
ourselves wasn’t the half of it. Maybe not even the tenth of it. Our conscious minds
are in fact slaves to our subconscious in ways we could not, and still cannot, eas-
ily grasp. It is not easy to understate what this insight did to Western storytelling.
Just as our instinct for fairness and social reform was telling us to value individual
stories, we also learned that as individuals we were essentially puppets of our devel-
opmental bodies. Our mammalian urges for safety, food, and reproduction were
driving as much of our decision-making as were the cognitive faculties we associated
with our rationality.
Perhaps this is the point. Freud’s insights fit nicely into the collapse of religious-
based dogma about human “uniqueness” in the face of the Darwinian certainty of
our mammalian ancestry. Darwin made Freud possible. What makes a story a con-
temporary story is that it substitutes God-given fate for subconscious personal his-
tory. There not because of God’s will, but because of good (or bad) will generated by
context, parenting, and the luck of biochemistry.
In literature, almost all the Western canon was informed by psychology. Having
been trained in theatrical literature, as much as I focused on the social playwrights
of the twentieth century – Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, Clifford Odets, Arthur
Miller – I was also privileged to study the psychological realism of August
Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, Eugene O’Neill, and Tennessee
Williams. All these authors inhabited their stages with characters driven by
demons within the family history. And, while they were critiqued by the social
realists as hopelessly individualist, it was clear by the postwar period that even
proletarian characters needed complex personal lives from which we could read
their journey as against the “system” as well as against their demons. Think of
Marlon Brando’s character in On the Waterfront.
Freud’s colleague Carl Jung, and then later contributors like Joseph Campbell
and others, helped create a sense that we all had a “personal mythology.” We learned
we have a hero’s journey myth in all our lives. A journey that allows us to confront
demons, come to terms with ego, and place ourselves as victors over our demons
and deficits.
This concept of personal mythology became more frequently used in the 1960s
and 1970s to suggest a framework for psychological intervention and individual
transformation. We should know our myths – those we tell about ourselves and
about the world we inhabit, and if they do not suit our healthy existence we should
seek to change and/or reframe them. Many practitioners of the concept of personal
mythology found that the recounting and shaping of personal stories was precisely
what enabled resiliency from earlier traumas.
For those psychological practitioners and theoreticians concerned with a more
inclusive democracy, it was not difficult to see how coping with the demons of sys-
temic oppression – family dysfunction, violence, sexual abuse, substance abuse, low
self-esteem, learning disorders and disabilities, general lack of agency, etc. – meant
the project of understanding and reframing the myths of the oppressed was central
to the social project. As En Vogue sang, “Free your mind, the rest will follow.”
 The Work of Story 11

Story Work in the Age of Media Ubiquity

While we do not question the psychological benefit derived by story work, ours
has not been a fundamentally psychological endeavor for personal transforma-
tion. People come to our trainings to express themselves creatively. StoryCenter is
self-described as an arts organization, focused first on creativity. Our storytellers’
aspirations are limited, based on the time we have to engage them. We are not dedi-
cated to long-term reclamation of individual lives. We do not have any examples
of facilitators working with individuals for several years, compiling one story after
another to allow for a complete re-vision of a person’s operational myth, and the
little myths that left them stuck in their healing process, as one would expect with
psychological treatments.
At StoryCenter, we became aware that one small story in the form of film has
totemic power for the storyteller. The story allows some shifts in perspective about
the events in our lives, and we believe that those shifts are particularly useful to work
in identity. The process of identity construction in the twenty-first century will be
as accelerated, fluid, and dislocating as has been virtually all aspects of our current
economic and social experience within our societies.
Story work, whether through the contemporary narrative-oriented traditions
of counseling and psychotherapy, or through various arts practices similar to ours
(PhotoVoice, expressive arts, drama and movement therapy with a textual or story
component, creative writing therapies, journaling, etc.) is as important to our emo-
tional survival as our strategies for healthcare and recovery, diet, and sustainable use
of energy/resources are necessary for our physical survival.
The work of digital storytelling is to support the continued construction of a
healthy, individual identity. We share this goal with all educators, social service
providers, and agents of social change.
As media workers, we recognize the particular dysfunctions caused by dominant
media. Part of what accelerates social dislocations is our ubiquitous screen culture.
This culture is driven by massively centralized engines of entertainment, informa-
tion technology, and telecommunications industries. All three work to read the
pulse of society and serve us with content and form that we seem to desire, but all
inevitably replicate their worldview into the products and services. They are count-
ing on the shaping of our desires and fears, they need to connect to our intimate
selves in order to sustain our attention, but their real goal is to shape our identities
as Homo consumerus.
And we resist as we can. But the effort to unplug, or at least take perspective,
is making us crazy. The project of human survival and success as a species will
be as much about keeping people from going completely bananas in the face of
media ubiquity as it will be charting the policy path to sustainability. We are losing
ourselves in the face of massive change in the way we interrelate. We are seeking
adaptive reactions. We are finding ways to unplug and retreat to pre-information
technology, lifestyles, and ideologies. And, while many of these approaches may be
ingenious, they do not seem to be equal to the task. We need to wean ourselves from
screen culture twitch and the jittery, deficit-disordered, deeply insecure, fragmentary
12 The Work of Story

identities that come with it. This will not occur because of total abstinence, but by
ascribing more humanistic possibilities to these tools. We need to claim the screen
machines, not as a fuel for our addictions but as a tool to make ourselves whole.

Reframing Our Personal Myths

Our old myths gave us solidity. They gave us a meta-reference to our understand-
ing of good and evil. They still play this role, but they are only part of the massive
chatter that nurtures and sustains us now. If I grow up as a Pakistani-German living
in Dusseldorf, or an Aymara Bolivian living in São Paulo, Brazil, or a Sri Lankan in
South Korea, I negotiate both rooted identity and my global identity on a minute-
by-minute basis. But even if I am a relatively homogenous suburban WASP in the
Simi Valley of Los Angeles, I can have a hip-hop side of me, as well as a curious
attraction to an esoteric form of Thai spirituality. Which are my operational myths:
WASP-ish conservator of Western tradition, hip-hop gangsta questioning author-
ity, or Buddhist monk retreating from the noise? In the end, they are my own, and
whether they evolve in stages, or manage to integrate into a single mash-up identity,
the creative process of narrating a story with image, voice, and sound becomes a way
to mark these changes and make sense of them.
But what does that look like? How does the process of story turn into personal
mythology?
Another version of the story:

I see him there. Sitting, book in hand, glasses perched on his nose. Cigarette in
the ashtray. His ghost looks up. “Remember that story I told you about the guy
in San Antonio, the painter?”
What do I do with those memories? Of course I remember. All his stories.
The hundred ways he outfoxed authority, the endless quixotic adventures of a
union organizer in Texas. They filled my childhood with the romance of having
fun while fighting the good fight.
And I remember his ulcers, his addictions, and the final heart attack that stole
him from me at 17. I remember his sadness, his longing, what drove him to keep
fighting, drove him out into the world, also took him away from those he loved
dearly. He did not process attachments. Never sad, rarely angry. His body broke
down, even if he never did.
I spent a life trying to be like him. To be a peaceable warrior with a smile on
my face. To make some sacrifices for the causes I believed in. To endure the
stress and strain. But for the sake of my own children, I also learned to cry. To
let go of the cause just enough to be present for them. To be present for myself.
His ghost is still there. He is still speaking to me.

The expression of the myth of my father can serve as inspiration to social action or
as cautionary tale. My story becomes a remapping of the meaning of these primary
relationships to serve whom I need to be now. The story becomes a way to find, if
not a re-statement of rooted identity, at least a new center of gravity.
 The Work of Story 13

Looking back at the many thousands of stories I have heard, the vast majority end
as texts that address these kinds of re-negotiations. Our storytellers take the current
moment’s anxieties and fears, hopes, and aspirations to reframe a story about a core
relationship. The retelling of an incident of trauma, or a situation of achievement, or
even a seemingly mundane interaction is made to service the establishment of new
equilibrium – a homeostasis – in the storyteller’s sense of self. That equilibrium may
not be stable, but the story becomes a successful marker, a lingering positive feeling.
You have returned to some critical part of your past, a part that hung like a shadow
over your identity, and you have begun to make sense of that experience.
As suggested, story has many jobs: as a learning modality through memory, as a
way to address our connection to the changing world around us, as a form of reflec-
tion against the flood of ubiquitous access to infinite information, as the vehicle to
encourage our social agency, and, finally, as a process by which we best make sense
of our lives and our identity.
What story cannot do is completely simplify the messiness of living. Story is essen-
tially an exercise in controlled ambiguity. And, given the co-constructed nature of
meaning between us as storytellers, and those who are willing to listen to our words,
this is story’s greatest gift.
We can feel whole about impermanence. We can bear to be ourselves.
2
Stories of Our Lives

A story can be as short as explaining how you misplaced your keys this morning, or
as long as a multi-volume autobiography. Many people have entered our workshops
with ideas appropriate for a television mini-series instead of a two- to three-minute
digital story. In the coming chapters we will talk about shaping the content and form
of your story, but before you consider crafting a tale you need to decide what story
you want to tell.
Every day, with virtually no effort, you tell stories to other people. At the water
cooler, the dinner table, walking your child to school, you find yourself reciting an
event from memory to make a point, to give a “case” where the attitudes and actions
of the characters provide insight to your audience. These casual storytelling experi-
ences well up out of us as naturally. But ask most of us to jump on stage, or pick up
a pen, or turn on a camera or microphone, and tell a story, and our minds tend to go
blank. Authorship from our own life experience suddenly forces the questions about
what role the story will have in our lives, right now, or in the near future.
If you are someone trying to sell a story, as a writer, filmmaker, dramatist, you as
often as not ask yourself: “What stories compel me and where might I find a pro-
foundly dramatic story?” You want a subject filled with high consequence, compel-
ling characters, exciting challenges, plot twists, and an ending that provokes insight.
So you go looking for the equivalent of the trapped miner story in Chile, or some
other miraculous event with people facing tragedy and escaping at the last moment.
We see versions of these “trapped miner” stories every night via entertainment
and news. In my observations of countless storytellers, I have found that people
have learned to equate the idea of a good story with high drama. If they have not
had major drama in their lives, then they have no story. Frankly, even if their lives
were filled with loss and setback, inside their stories it seemed more mundane
than dramatic.
In the practice of community work and storytelling, we are talking about a story
that emerges from a small audience, within a safe environment, that is as close to
private as family, as close to personal as diary. This is an essentially private medium.
A media document may find a broader public forum, but the purpose of the artifact
may simply help you to process your dreams and aspirations. It may be public, but
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
voorkomende in den ouden naam van eene kade te St-Omaars,
namelijk E r b o s t a d e , thans Quai des Tanneurs genoemd; en
v a a r t ). Het riviertje dat tusschen Gisen (Guines) en Kales (Calais)
vloeit, komt in eene middeleeuwsche oorkonde voor als L e d a , in
eene andere van den jare 1208 als G i s e n l e t , en nog anders als
G h i s n e n l e t . De vergelijking met den naam van het rivierke
L e d a in Oost-Friesland, en met den naam L e i e , die in Friesland
tusschen Flie en Lauwers aan verschillende wateren eigen is, zoo
mede aan de Vlaamsche plaatsnamen L e n d e l e d e , L e d e ,
L e d e z e l e , L e d e b e r g ligt voor de hand.

In Artesië vloeit een helder stroomke, weinig meer dan eene beek, al
westwaarts kronkelend door een liefelijk dal; het verbreedt zich
verder tot eenen flinken stroom, die langs de stad Boonen (Boulogne
sur Mer) loopt, en de haven van deze schoone zeestad vormt. Deze
rivier draagt den naam van L i a n e , een naam die volstrekt geen
Dietsch voorkomen heeft. Toch meen ik dat ook deze naam van
Dietschen oorsprong zij. Maar oude, middeleeuwsche vormen van
den naam L i a n e zijn mij niet bekend. Zoo neme men den
volgenden naamsuitleg voor anders niet als voor eene ongegronde
gissing. En, men weet het, gissen doet missen. De grondslag, de
oorsprong van den naam L i a n e dan, meen ik te vinden in den
eenvoudigen, boven reeds vermelden waternaam A a of A . In
sommige Nederduitsche tongvallen wordt de naam of het woord Aa
verbogen tot Ane, Aan; dezen verbogenen vorm vinden wij in de
plaatsnamen M u n d a h n (Mond van de A a of A a n ) en
O v e r a h n , N o r d a h n (in de middeleeuwen N o r d a ) en
M i d d e l s t e n a h e (in de middeleeuwen M i d d e l s t e n a n e ), die
in de Friesche gouwen van Oldenburg en van Hannover (Land
Wursten) voorkomen. Het mannelijke lidwoord luidt in de
gouwspraak van het Fransch, die hedendaags aan Artesië eigen is,
als li. Dit lidwoord neemt wel de plaats in van het Dietsche lidwoord
de, ook al blijft het hoofdwoord dat er op volgt, onvertaald. Zoo is de
geslachtsnaam D e J a g e r , D e J a g h e r e heden ten dage in
Artesië half-verfranscht [123]geworden tot Liagre (Li Jagre) en niet
geheel (Le Chasseur). Zoude nu dit lidwoord ook niet het eerste
gedeelte van den naam L i a n e zijn (Li Ane), en deze naam D e
A n e , D e A a , met andere woorden het water, het stroomende
water beteekenen?

Al deze Artesische plaatsnamen, op de voorgaande bladzijden

opgenoemd, en nog honderden dergelijken zijn (bij enkelen is dit
nader aangeduid geworden) in vorm, oorsprong en beteekenis
naverwant of ook volkomen gelijk aan andere namen, die in alle
andere Germaansche landen, maar vooral in Vlaanderen, Friesland
en Engeland voorkomen, in die landen dus, waar de bevolking
oorspronkelijk geheel of ten deele van eenen zelfden stam, van
eenen zelfden bloede is met die van Artesië.

De namen, op bladzijde 120 en vervolgens vermeld, zijn allen aan

middeleeuwsche oorkonden ontleend, en, naar men mij in Artesië
mededeelde, zijn ze daar heden ten dage onbekend; dus
uitgestorven. Dit moge voor een groot gedeelte dezer namen waar
zijn; dat het echter voor allen zonder onderscheid zoude gelden,
meen ik te mogen betwijfelen. Immers namen over het algemeen, en
bijzonderlijk plaatsnamen hebben een taai leven. En, al zijn zulke
namen van velden en akkers, van dijken en vaarten, van straten en
wegen niet meer in geijkten zin bekend, en al komen ze nooit meer
in geschrifte voor, het eenvoudige landvolk kent ze nog wel, en
gebruikt ze nog wel, zoo goed als hunne voorouders, van geslacht
tot geslacht, die deze namen eerst gegeven hebben. De
taalvorscher, die dus bij het van ouds ingezetene volk te lande in
Artesië naar zulke Oud-Dietsche namen zoeken wil, zal dit zekerlijk
niet te vergeefs doen. Zelfs in de steden vindt men nog wel zulke
namen, ja, in de stad Kales (Calais), die toch nooit volkomen Dietsch
is geweest, zooals de dorpen in den omtrek. Daar ter stede draagt
een buurtje aan de haven, waar de visschersschepen liggen, buiten
den ouden vestingwal, ter plaatse waar oudtijds het strand zich
uitstrekte, den naam van Place de l’Estran, zoo als ik zelf gelezen
heb op het naambordje aan het hoekhuis. Wie herkent in dit Estran
niet den verfranschten vorm van ons woord strand, of strange
volgens de Westvlaamsche, strân volgens de Friesche uitspraak?
En, als om de Oud-Dietsche herinnering te volmaken, de tapper die
in dat hoekhuis zijn bedrijft uitoefent [124](althans in 1891 uitoefende)
draagt den oorbeeldigen geslachtsnaam van B a r e n d s .

Zeer bijzonder en hoogst opmerkelijk zijn sommige woordvormen die

in deze Oud-Artesische namen voorkomen; zoo als wog (in
verbogenen vorm woge, woghe) voor weg, en brigge voor brug. Ook
mille en melle voor molen, rok voor rots, enz.

Voorbeelden van wog en brigge, in plaatsnamen, zijn op bladzijden

120 en 121 reeds genoemd. Anders en elders is dit woord wog mij
nooit voorgekomen. In eene oorkonde van den jare 1286 wordt
bepaaldelijk de weg die van het stedeken Gisen (Guines) naar het
dorp Witzand (Wissant) voert, de G i s e n e w o g genoemd. Men
vergelijke d e G i s e n l e t op bladzijde 122 vermeld. Dat men
evenwel oudtijds het algemeen geldige Dietsche woord weg,
verbogen als wege, ook wel kende in Artesië, blijkt uit oorkonden
van de veertiende en vijftiende eeuw, waarin melding gemaakt wordt
van den B o e r w e g u e bij Baienghem, en van den O u d e w e g bij
Salperwijk (Salperwic). Aan het voorkomen dezer twee
woordvormen wog en weg, nevens elkanderen, zal wel de zelfde of
eene soortgelijke oorzaak ten grondslag liggen, als die is, welke het
voorkomen der twee vormen ing en ink, bij den patronymicalen
uitgang, heeft te weeg gebracht. Zie bladzijden 98 en 106 hiervoren.
De vormen brigge (op bladzijde 121 vermeld), Friesch bregge, brug;
mille of melle, molen (in den hedendaagschen dorpsnaam
W i m i l l e , oudtijds voluit W i n d m i l l e , windmolen, en in
M e l l e w o g , dat in eene oorkonde van 1286 voorkomt, en als
Chemin du moulin wordt verfranscht), en rok voor rots (in
S t i e n r o k k e s —meervoudsvorm, en misschien ook in R o c c a l f
en in B r o c s h o l e = bij Rokshole, bij het hol in de rots?), deze drie
ook in de oorkonde van 1286 vermeld, bieden eene zeer
opmerkelijke overeenkomst, ja eene volkomene gelijkvormigheid aan
met de vormen die deze drie woorden in de Engelsche taal hebben
(bridge, mill en rock). Deze overeenkomst bevestigt te meer mijne
meening dat de voorouders van een deel der hedendaagsche
Engelschen, en die van de oorspronkelijk Germaansche bevolking
van Artesië, lieden zijn geweest van eenen en den zelfden
bijzonderen Sassischen volksstam, lieden die, gezamenlijk [125]uit
het Oosten (dat is in dit geval, voor het naast uit Noordwestelijk
Duitschland) opgetrokken en westwaarts getogen zijnde, voor een
deel naar Brittannië overstaken, uit de havens van Kales en Boonen,
maar voor een ander deel achter bleven in de gouw rondom deze
oude, reeds door de Romeinen bezette steden.

En niet enkel met het Engelsch, ook met het Friesch leveren de
Oud-Germaansche plaatsnamen van Artesië punten van
overeenkomst op. Trouwens dit kan wel niet anders, waar Friesch en
Engelsch beiden nog heden zoo naverwant en oudtijds uit eene
zelfde bron zijn ontsproten. Deze overeenkomst vinden we, in
gezamentlijken zin, in het woord aker, ook wel gespeld acre,
hedendaagsch geijkt Dietsch akker, dat deel uitmaakt van sommige
Oud-Artesische plaatsnamen. Dit woord, in het Friesch zoowel als in
het Engelsch als eker uitgesproken, is nog heden eigen aan de taal
van Friezen en Engelschen, en komt in de plaatsnamen dezer
volken voor: F r a n e k e r in Friesland; L o n g a c r e in Engeland.
Verder stemmen de Artesische woorden stic voor stuk, horn voor
hoek, stripe voor streep, stien voor steen, enz. allen in oude
plaatsnamen voorkomende, letterlijk overeen met de zelfde
woordvormen in het Friesch, zooals het nog hedendaags leeft.
Trouwens, in den loop dezer verhandeling hebben wij reeds
meermalen gelegenheid gehad, den Lezer te wijzen op de
bijzondere overeenkomst tusschen Oud-Artesisch en Friesch.

Indien men met opmerkzaamheid eene aardrijkskundige kaart van

Artesië gadeslaat, valt het den Nederlander al spoedig in het oog dat
een zeer groot deel der plaatsnamen, daarop vermeld, Dietsche
namen zijn, gelijk hierboven breedvoerig is aangetoond. Maar
nevens en tusschen deze Dietsche namen kan men ook vele namen
opmerken, die een Fransch voorkomen vertoonen in hunnen vorm
en in hunne spelwijze, en die door niemand voor oorspronkelijk
Dietsche namen zullen worden gehouden. Werkelijk zijn dan ook
eenigen van die namen, welke van jonge dagteekening zijn, en
ontstaan ten tijde dat de Dietsche volkstaal in die gouw van het
Artesische land reeds geheel of ten deele uitgestorven was,
Fransch, behooren tot de Fransche taal. Maar anderen zijn toch
oorspronkelijk Dietsch, al zien ze er in hunne hedendaags geldige
vormen ook nog zoo Fransch uit. Die namen zijn eenvoudig in sterke
mate veranderd, [126]verbasterd, naar de uitspraak der Fransche
tonge, naar de spelwijze der Fransche penne vervormd, verdraaid,
mismaakt. Reeds zijn een paar van dat soort van namen vermeld op
bladzijden 102 en 115, waar medegedeeld is dat van den ouden en
oorspronkelijken naam H e n r i c k i n g h e m heden ten dage
H e u r i n g h e m is geworden, en dat O p h o v e tot A u P a u v r e
is verfranscht. De volgende Artesische plaatsnamen behooren
verder nog tot deze groep: H y d r e q u e n t , de hedendaagsche
naam van een dorp in Artesië, is oorspronkelijk
H i l d h e r i n g a h e m , de woonplaats der Hilderingen, der
nakomelingen van H i l d h e r i of H i l d e r , een volledige algemeen
Oud-Germaansche mansnaam. In eene oorkonde van den jare 1286
staat deze volledige dorpsnaam in den vorm H i l d r i c h e m
vermeld, een vorm die wel reeds eeniger mate versleten is, maar die
nog duidelijk een Germaansch voorkomen heeft, terwijl het
hedendaagsche H y d r e q u e n t volkomen onkenbaar zoude zijn,
ware ’t niet dat de genoemde middeleeuwsche oorkonde ons op het
goede spoor bracht ter herkenning en verklaring. Een tegenhanger
van H y d r e q u e n t is de hedendaagsche naam R i n x e n t , mede
eigen aan een Artesisch dorp. Deze naam vinden wij in eene oude
oorkonde vermeld als E r n i n g e s s e m , en in een ander
middeleeuwsch geschrift, maar van latere dagteekening, als
R e n i n g e s s e m . De oudste vorm is de oorspronkelijkste, en doet
ons dezen naam duiden als E r n i n g e s h e m , E r n i n g s h e m ,
E r n i n g ’ s woonplaats. De vorm R e n i n g e s s e m is slechts een
letterkeer van E r n i n g e s s e m , en R i n x e n t is daarvan eene
verdere verbastering. Eindelijk nog H a r d i n x e n t , dat van
oorsprongs wegen H a r d i n g e s s e m , H a r d i n g s h e m , de
woonplaats van den man H a r d i n g is. E r n i n g en H a r d i n g , als
samenstellende deelen van de twee laatstgenoemde plaatsnamen
zijn wel patronymicale vormen, maar deden toch dienst als
eenvoudige mansvóórnamen, gelijk uit hunne genitiefvormen op es
uitgaande blijkt, en gelijk nog heden in Friesland voorkomt, waar
T j a l l i n g , W a l i n g , E l i n g , enz. ofschoon eigentlijk
patronymica zijnde, toch ook als eenvoudige mansvóórnamen dienst
doen. Verder, D o h e m heette in de elfde eeuw D a l h e m , de
woonplaats in het dal, een plaatsnaam die als D a l h e m (in ’t Land
van Luik), als D a l e m (in Gelderland) en als T h a l h e i m , [127]nog
heden aan België, Nederland en Duitschland eigen is. U p e n komt
in oude oorkonden als O p h e m voor, een naam die door eenen
geleerden Franschman dezer eeuw terecht als „Village d’en haut” is
verklaard. Het hedendaagsche W e i m s is ook zeer verbasterd,
naardien de oorspronkelijke vorm van dezen naam is
W i d i n g h e m , dat is: woonplaats der afstammelingen van W i d o ,
W i t o , W y t , (Guido in verfranschten vorm). De mansnaam W i d o
is in verschillende vormen en onderscheidene afleidingen en
samenstellingen zeer algemeen, vooral onder de Friezen (W y t s e ).
—De dorpsnaam T u b e r s e n t van heden ten dage doet ook den
oorspronkelijken vorm niet raden noch erkennen. Die oude, volledige
vorm is T h o r b o d e s s e m , T h o r b o d e s h e m , de woonplaats
van den man, die den zeer ouden en schoonen mansnaam
T h o r b o d o droeg.

Nog drie dorpsnamen zijn in Artesië, die in zoo sterke mate

verbasterd en verfranscht zijn, dat niemand ze meer zoude kunnen
herkennen als namen die eenen Germaanschen oorsprong hebben,
dat iedereen ze voor Romaansche, voor echt Fransche namen moet
houden. Dat zijn de namen H e r b e l l e , A n n e z i n en
F a m p o u x . Den eerstgenoemden naam vinden wij in eene
oorkonde van de elfde eeuw vermeld als H a r d b e r g . Inderdaad
ligt H e r b e l l e op eenen heuvel of berg, die heden ten dage Roide-
Mont heet.—A n n e z i n is verbasterd van A n n i n e s h e m , zooals
deze dorpsnaam in oude geschriften voorkomt. De oorsprong, de
beteekenis van dit A n n i n e s h e m is niet recht duidelijk. Het kan
oorspronkelijk A n n i n g s h e m zijn, samengesteld met eenen
mansnaam A n n i n g , die een patronymicale vorm van den
mansnaam A n n e is, oneigenlijk gebruikt, zooals op de voorgaande
bladzijde aangegeven is bij H a r d i n g en E r n i n g , T j a l l i n g ,
enz. Het kan ook beteekenen: woonplaats van A n n i n , ’t welk dan
als een verkleinvorm van A n n e gelden kan. A n n e , op zich zelven,
is nog heden als mansnaam bij de Friezen in volle gebruik, en
sommige Friesche geslachts- en plaatsnamen zijn aan dezen
mansnaam ontleend: bij voorbeeld, om van beide naamsoorten
slechts eenen naam te noemen: de geslachtsnaam A n n e m a , en
de naam van het dorp A n j u m , oorspronkelijk voluit
A n n i n g a h e m .—F a m p o u x eindelijk is langs de vormen
F a m p o e l , [128]V a n p o e l , V e n p o e l , ontstaan uit den
oorspronkelijken naam V e n e p o e l (Friesch F e a n p o e l , Oud-
Friesch ook F a e n voor veen), door eenen Artesischen geleerde
van deze eeuw vrij juist vertaald als Etang de la tourbière.

Aan het slot van dit opstel willen wij nog eene bijzondere zaak hier te
berde brengen, die wel de aandacht verdient der volkenkundigen,
bijzonderlijk van hen, die de tochten nasporen van die volken en
volksstammen uit Noordwestelijk Germanië, welke Brittanië hebben
ingenomen en aldaar hunne volkplantingen hebben gevestigd.

Reeds een en andermaal is er in deze verhandeling op gewezen, dat

eenige bijzondere woorden en woordvormen, die in Artesische
plaatsnamen voorkomen, eveneens gevonden worden in Engelsche
plaatsnamen, of anderszins eigen zijn aan de Engelsche taal. Dit
betrof echter in hoofdzaak slechts eenige samenstellende deelen
van die namen. Maar daar bestaat nog eene grootere overeenkomst
tusschen sommige Artesische en Engelsche namen, eene
overeenkomst die den geheelen naam betreft. Zoo vinden wij de
volgende namen:

In Artesië en in Engeland.
Warhem. Warham.
Fréthun. Freton.
Hollebecque. Holbeck.
S a n g a t t e . (Zie bladz. 119). S a n d g a t e .
Inghem. Ingham.
W i m i l l e . (Zie bladz. 121). Windmill.
Grisendale. Grisdale.
Rattekot. Radcot.
Le Wast. Wast.
Appegarbe. Applegarth.
Het valt niet te ontkennen dat enkelen dezer namen een meer
algemeen karakter hebben, en zeer wel, volkomen onafhankelijk van
elkanderen, elk op zich zelven, Noord en Zuid van het Engelsche-
Kanaal kunnen zijn ontstaan; bij voorbeeld: W i m i l l e , W i n d m i l l
en S a n g a t t e , S a n d g a t e . Toch blijft, bij de [129]andere namen,
de overeenkomst opmerkelijk, en een gemeenschappelijke
oorsprong blijft niet buitengesloten. In sommige patronymicale
namen ligt zulk een gemeenschappelijke oorsprong nog nader voor
de hand. Zie hier nog een lijstje van die overeenstemmende
patronymicale plaatsnamen,

in Artesië en in Engeland.
Alincthun. Allington.
Bazinghem. Bassingham.
Colincthun. Collington.
Hardinghem. Hardingham.
Linghem. Lingham.
Balinghem. Ballingham.
Berlinghen. B i r l i n g h a m (Nevens B e r l i c u m , dat is
voluit B e r l i n k h e i m , in Noord-Brabant en in
Friesland).
Elighen. Ellingham.
Eringhem. E r r i n g h a m (Nevens E r i c h e m , dat is
voluit E r i n k h e m , in Gelderland).
Lozinghem. Lossingham.
Maninghem. Manningham.
Masinghen. Massingham.
Pelincthun. Pallington.
To d i n c t h u n . To d d i n g t o n .
De patronymica die den grondslag van deze namen uitmaken, en
die, aan den Artesischen en aan den Engelschen kant geheel de
zelfden zijn, of anders zoo gelijkvormig, dat een zelfde oorsprong
voor beiden aangenomen mag worden, hebben bij sommigen de
meening doen ontstaan dat zoowel de Artesische als de Engelsche
plaatsen, waaraan deze namen eigen zijn, juist ook door de zelfde
lieden zouden zijn gesticht. Met andere woorden, dat de zelfde
H a r d i n g e n , de afstammelingen van eenen zelfden aartsvader
H a r d o , in Artesië zoowel een hem, eene woonstede zouden
hebben gevestigd, een H a r d i n g a - h e m (H a r d i n g h e m ), als in
Engeland (H a r d i n g h a m ). Ofschoon deze zaak geenszins
onmogelijk, zelfs niet onwaarschijnlijk te achten is, zoo vloeit ze toch
ook geenszins noodzakelijk voort uit deze gelijkheid der
plaatsnamen. [130]Immers H a r d o was, en is nog heden, een
algemeene mansvóórnaam, die door verschillende personen te
gelijker tijde gedragen werd en wordt. Zoo zijn er ook verschillende
maagschappen H a r d i n g a of H a r d i n g , H a r d i n k , onderling
niet verwant. De eene maagschap van dien naam kan in Artesië, de
andere in Engeland een hem hebben gegrondvest.

Engelsche navorschers en geleerden hebben uit deze gelijkluidende

of volkomen gelijke plaatsnamen nog eene andere meening afgeleid.
Volgens hen zouden lieden, inwoners uit H a r d i n g h a m in
Engeland (om bij het eens genomen voorbeeld te blijven), als
landverhuizers of volkplanters zijn uitgetogen, om in Artesië zich te
vestigen. Bij hunne vestiging aldaar zouden zij dan, in herinnering
aan hunne voormalige woonplaats, hunne nieuwe woonstede
genoemd hebben met den zelfden naam, dien het oude h e m (ham)
in Engeland droeg—gelijk zulks in deze eeuw menigvuldiglijk is
geschied bij de volkplantingen van Engelschen, Nederlanders en
andere Europeanen in Amerika. Intusschen, de geschiedenis leert
ons dat de vestiging van Sassen en andere Neder-Duitschers in
Artesië reeds van zeer oude dagteekening is, en, voor een deel
althans, zeer zeker ouder dan de nederzetting dier volken in
Brittannië. Wij meenen dus bij onze voorstelling dezer zake te
mogen volharden, gelijk die op bladzijde 107 en vervolgens
hiervoren is medegedeeld. Ook komt het ons aannemelijker voor bij
deze gelijke namen in Artesië en in Engeland liever te willen denken
aan eene toevallige gelijkheid, ontstaan door de algemeenheid van
dezen of genen mansnaam (H a r d o ; A l e of A l l e in A l i n c t h u n
en in A l l i n g t o n en in A l l i n g a w i e r in Friesland)—dan aan
eenzelvigheid in den persoon van den aartsvader, ’t zij deze dan
H a r d o of A l e , C o l o , C o l l e of iets anders heette.

De patronymica van bovengenoemde Artesische en Engelsche

plaatsnamen, en nog talrijke anderen hier niet opgenoemd, zoo
mede de mansvóórnamen, waarvan zij afgeleid zijn, komen verder
nog, in verschillende onwezenlijk afwijkende vormen, bij schier alle
andere Germaansche volkeren en volksstammen eveneens voor, en
hebben ook daar aan een groot aantal geslachts- en plaatsnamen
hunnen oorsprong gegeven. Dit alles na te sporen en uitvoerig, naar
den vollen eisch, hier te vermelden, en dan [131]ook de menigerlei
opmerkingen, die zich daarbij voordoen, nader hier te ontvouwen, is
zeker eene aangename studie. Wil ik echter niet te veel hooi op de
vork nemen, wil ik niet te veel ruimte hier beslaan, niet te veel van de
belangstelling mijner Lezers vergen, dan moet ik mij bescheidenlijk
met het bovenstaande vergenoegen.

Zoo kort en beknopt mogelijk dien ik echter toch ook nog een paar
bladzijden te wijden aan de Germaansche mans- en vrouwen-
vóórnamen en aan de Germaansche geslachtsnamen, die in
Frankrijk, die vooral in de Dietsche gewesten van dat land in gebruik
zijn en voorkomen.
Wat de mans- en vrouwen-vóórnamen aangaat, zoo heb ik hier niet
zoo zeer het oog op die namen van Germaanschen oorsprong, die
over schier geheel de beschaafde wereld verspreid zijn, en die ook
in Frankrijk geenszins ontbreken, zij het dan ook in verfranschten
vorm. Zulke namen (Henri, Fréderic, Albert, Bertrand, Gérard,
Guillaume, Louis, Charles—dan ook Henriëtte, Adèle, Mathilde,
Gertrude, Berthe, en vele dergelijken) zijn wel van Oud-
Germaanschen oorsprong; ze zijn zeker nog afkomstig van de
Germaansche Franken, het volk van Keizer Karel den Grooten, die
voor een deel de voorvaderen zijn van het hedendaagsche Fransche
volk. Maar in het bijzonder vestig ik hier de aandacht op die Oud-
Dietsche, Oud-Nederlandsche namen, die, veelal min of meer
versleten, of in vlei- of verkleinvorm, nog eigen zijn aan de Dietsche,
de Vlaamsche bevolking van Fransch-Vlaanderen en van Artesië,
die daar in de middeleeuwen, en nog in de zestiende eeuw
algemeen of vrij algemeen in gebruik waren, en die ook heden nog
daar leven, zij het dan niet in geijkten zin, dan toch in het
dagelijksche leven, in den huiselijken en vriendschappelijken kring.

Eene uitvoerige en belangrijke verhandeling over dit onderwerp, over

deze Oud-Dietsche mans- en vrouwen-vóórnamen bij de bevolking
van Noordwestelijk Frankrijk, is door C. Thelu geschreven, onder
den titel Noms de baptême avec leurs contractifs et diminutifs en
usage chez les Flamands de France, en geplaatst in het derde deel
van het tijdschrift Annales du Comité flamand de [132]France. In die
verhandeling wordt een zeer groot aantal van die namen vermeld.
Het is inderdaad zeer merkwaardig te zien hoe vele echt Oud-
Dietsche, echt Oud-Germaansche namen daar in die Oud-Dietsche
gewesten, al behooren ze sedert twee of drie eeuwen en langer tot
Frankrijk, nog in gebruik gebleven zijn, of voor jaren nog in gebruik
waren.
Onder deze namen treft men er aan, die men hedendaagsche
Algemeen-Germaansche, ook Algemeen-Nederlandsche kan
noemen, zoo wel als bijzonder Friesche namen; dat is: Oud-
Germaansche namen in Frieschen vorm, zoo vlei- als verkleinvorm.
Uit dit voorkomen van Friesche namen en naamsvormen onder de
Dietschen van Artesië, onder de Vlamingen van Fransch- of Zee-
Vlaanderen blijkt eens te meer dat een deel des volks in die
gewesten, langs den zeekant gezeten, van Frieschen oorsprong is,
en van Frieschen volksaard.

Als enkele voorbeelden van zulke algemeen Oud-Dietsche namen in

die gewesten, vermeld ik hier de mansnamen A l a r t (Adelhart),
A r e n d (Arnhold, Aernout), B a r t e l t (Barthold, Berchthold,
Bertout), B a r e n t (Bernhart, Bernaart), B r u y n (Bruno), E v e r t
(Everhart, Everaart), E w o u t , F r a n c k , G y s b e r t , W i l l e m ,
H e y n r i c k , H u y b r e c h t , C o e n r a d t , R y c k a e r t . En de
vrouwennamen B r e c h t j e , E n g e l t j e , D u y f k e n , T r u y ,
A a l t j e (Adela), R o o s j e , enz.

En als voorbeelden van bijzonder Friesche namen en naamsvormen

in die gouwen mogen de volgenden gelden:

Mansnamen. E p p o , A g g e , B o u k e n , B o u w e n (een
samengetrokken vorm van Boudewijn), W e s s e l , B i n n e r t ,
B o n n e , B o y e , C y r i c k (in Friesche spelling Sierk), D o u w e ,
E g g e , E l i n g , E i s e , F e y c k e , F e y e n , F o n g e r,
Gabe, Gauke, Gerken, Wybe, Hille, Ide, Jelken,
J e l t e n , L i n s , L i e u w, Ly c k e l , L o l c k , L u y t , L o l l e ,
M o n t e n , M e n n e , B o n t e n , R i n t s e , R e y n , R i e m e r,
R o m k e , W i m a r , W i s s e , F e d d e , H a y e n , Y t z e n , enz.

Vrouwennamen. L a m k e , N i e s k e , A e f j e en A e f k e n ,
M i n t j e en M i n k e , I t j e n , F e m m e t j e , G e p k e ,
Wybrig, Heyltjen, Hilleken, Idtsken, Jayke, Jel,
Luts, Metjen, Rix, Richtje, Walleken, Wentje,
D i e w e r t j e , S w a e n t j e , H a e s k e , enz. [133]

Al deze namen zijn juist zóó als ze hier vermeld staan, of anders met
geringe, onwezenlijke afwijkingen in de spelling, nog heden ook
onder de Friezen in volle gebruik.

De schrijver van bovengenoemde verhandeling in de Annales du

Comité flamand de France heeft den Oud-Germaanschen oorsprong
van deze namen niet erkend. Hij is in zijne verklaring dezer namen
volkomen op eenen doolweg. In al deze namen ziet hij slechts
verknoeide, verminkte, versletene, saamgetrokkene, verkleinde, in
sommige gevallen ook vertaalde vormen (M i n k e van Charitas) van
Bijbelsche en van Kerkelijke namen, uitsluitend van zulke namen die
door de Roomsch-Catholyke Kerk als doopnamen voor de kinderen
van de belijders harer leer, in geijkten zin erkend worden. En zoo
worden in die verhandeling die volledige Bijbelsche en Kerkelijke
namen dan ook steeds als de oorspronkelijke namen vermeld,
nevens die Oud-Dietsche en Friesche namen en naamsvormen. De
schrijver staat in deze zaak geheel op het zelfde onjuiste standpunt,
waar ook het bekende lijstje van doopnamen, ten dienste der
Roomsch-Catholyke geestelijken op staat; te weten, de Nomina
vernacula Hollandorum et Frisiorum, adjuncta nominibus Sanctorum,
quae per illa significantur, gevoegd achter het Rituale Romanum
contractum et abbreviatum in usum Sacerdotem Missionum
Hollandiae.

Als voorbeelden van zulke geheel averechtsche naamsafleidingen,

in Thelu’s verhandeling voorkomende, wijs ik hier op gedrochtelijke
verklaringen, als C y r i c k (Sierk, Sigerik, Zegerijk, rijk in
overwinning) van den Kerkelijken naam Cyriacus; E p p o van den
Bijbelschen naam Absalon, of van den Kerkelijken, oorspronkelijk
Griekschen naam Epìmachus; D o u w e van David; F e c k e n
(Fekke) van Felix; L o l k a van Lucas, H a y e n (Hayo) van
Hyacinthus. Verder op de vrouwennamen L a m k e en N i e s k e die
beide oorspronkelijk Agnes zouden zijn; op M i n k e dat van Charitas
zoude komen; F e m m e t j e van Euphemia, J e l (Jeltje) van
Juliana, G r e t s (Gretske, Graetske) van Grata, enz. Maar genoeg
van dezen onzin.

In het tijdschrift De Navorscher, jaargang XX, bladzijde 251, heb ik

zelf, onder den titel Friesche namen in Frankrijk op bovengenoemde
verhandeling van Thelu de aandacht gevestigd, en de zaak der
Friesche namen in Frankrijk nader ontvouwd, [134]en met
voorbeelden gestaafd. Naar deze twee geschriften, dat van Thelu
en dat van mij, verwijs ik verder den belangstellenden lezer.

Wat nu de bijzonder Dietsche geslachtsnamen aangaat, die in

schoone, veelal zeer oude vormen nog heden onder de Vlamingen
en de Dietschen van noordwestelijk Frankrijk voorkomen, als eene
getuigenis van den alouden oorsprong des volks in die gewesten, als
eene getuigenis van de nauwe verwantschap, ja van de
eenzelvigheid die ons, Noord- en Zuid-Nederlanders, met dien
verlatenen broederstam in Frankrijk verbindt, vereenigt—daarvan
weet ik nog minder mede te deelen dan van de Oud-Dietsche mans-
en vrouwen-vóórnamen in die gouwen. Ik kan hier slechts enkele
Oud-Dietsche maagschapsnamen geven, die door mij, op mijne
omdolingen door de straten der steden Duinkerke, Sint-Winoks-
Bergen, Hazebroek, Sint-Omaars, Kales en Boonen (St. Omer,
Calais en Boulogne sur Mer) van de naambordjes der huizen zijn
opgeteekend. Zie hier dat lijstje:

D e P o o r t e r , H o u v e n a g h e l , V a n C a u w e n b e r g h e .5
[135]
Het gaat niet aan van alle deze maagschapsnamen hier naderen
uitleg, nadere verklaring wat hunne beteekenis aangaat, te geven,—
al is dit onderwerp ook nog zoo aanlokkelijk voor mij, en voor den
Lezer zeker niet onbelangrijk. Maar ik zoude zoodoende te veel in
herhaling moeten vervallen, met ’t gene ik reeds vroeger uitvoerig
heb geschreven. Met mijn werk De Nederlandsche geslachtsnamen
in oorsprong, geschiedenis en beteekenis (Haarlem, 1888) in de
hand, kan iedereen de verklaring dezer namen gemakkelijk vinden.

Het is voor iederen Vaderlander duidelijk, dat dit allen goed Oud-
Dietsche, ik mag wel zeggen goed Oud-Nederlandsche namen zijn,
en dat de dragers dezer namen onze volksgenooten, ja onze volle
broeders in volkenkundigen zin moeten wezen. Deze schoone
namen zijn grootendeels of allen ongetwijfeld van oude
dagteekening; zij bieden ook in menig opzicht allerlei aanleiding tot
veelvuldige beschouwingen op het gebied onzer namenkunde. [136]

1 Dat ook oudtijds, reeds in de 16de eeuw, de Franschen zoo dachten, daarvan
strekt het volgende voorval ten bewijze.
Jonker Wigle van Aytta, van Swichum, lid en Voorzitter van den Raad van State,
en van den Geheimen Raad ten hove te Brussel, bij Keizer Karel den Vde en later
bij diens zoon, was een echte Standfries. Eens ontving hij als voorzitter van den
geheimen raad, een afgezant van den Koning van Frankrijk, die over belangrijke
staatszaken met hem wilde onderhandelen. Deze man, van den zelfden aard, die
velen Franschen in den tegenwoordigen tijd ook nog eigen is, sprak Jonker Wigle
aan in het Fransch, en bracht hem zijne boodschap over, in die taal sprekende.
Jonker Wigle liet hem geheel uitspreken, en gaf den Franschman toen zijn
antwoord in het Friesch, dat is, in zijne eigene moedertaal. De ambassadeur nam
dit hoogst euvel op, en vroeg, in zijne Fransche opgeblazenheid geraakt, of de
raadsheer met hem en met zijnen koning den spot dreef, door hem bescheid te
geven in eene taal, die hij niet verstond. Maar Jonker Wigle antwoordde in kalme
en eenvoudige waardigheid, en zeide: „Zijn wij dan meer gehouden, om uwe taal
te spreken, als Gij de onze? Wanneer wij in Frankrijk komen, spreken wij Fransch.
Het is dus ook billijk, dat Gij, als Gij hier in de Nederlanden wat te zoeken hebt,
ook onze taal gebruikt. Of, zoo Gij dit niet kunt doen, spreek dan Latijn, de taal die
allen volkeren gemeen is.” ↑
2 Zie mijn opstel Oude Volksliedjes, voorkomende in den Frieschen
Volksalmanak voor het jaar 1887 (Leeuwarden, A. Meyer). ↑
3 Bolwerk, ook in het Engelsch bullwark, een werk of samenstel van bollen,
bolen, Hoogduitsch Bohle, dat zijn zware balken, behouwen boomstammen. Dit
zuiver Oud-Germaansche woord vinden wij terug in het hedendaagsche Fransche
woord boulevard, breede straat, lei of laan, aangelegd ter plaatse der voormalige
bolwerken of vestingswallen en muren, die de oude steden omsloten hielden. ↑
4 In Vlaanderen echter met ééne uitzondering. De naam van de hedendaagsche
Westvlaamsche stad Waasten komt in oude oorkonden voor als
W a r n a s t h u n (1007), als W a r n e s t o n (1066–1080, 1103), in 1126
verwaalscht als G a r n e s t o n , en in 1347, niet ten onrechte, als G a r n e r i
f o r t i t u d o (de veste, de versterkte, omtuinde plaats, de tuin, tun of ton van
Garner of Warner) in het Latijn vertaald. Zie Ant. Verwaetermeulen,
Westvlaamsche Oordnamenkunde, in het Bijblad van het tijdschrift Biekorf,
Slachtmaand, 1893. De hedendaagsche Fransche naamsvorm van Waasten is
nog W a r n e t o n . ↑
5 A e r n o u t , Va n G r a e f s c h e p e , D e C o u s s e m a k e r, D e
B a e c k e r (Bakker), H a s e , B a e r t , B e r n a e r t , B e c u w e ,
Blavoet, Bloeme, Cappelaere, De Haene, De Rode, De
R u y w e , D e S m i d t , D e S w a r t e , M e n e b o o (elders Minneboo),
S t r o b b e l , To p , T r e u t e n a e r e , V a n d e W a l l e (ook half verfranscht
als Deloualle), V e r s t a v e l , D e C o n y n c k , D e M e u n y n c k (de Monnik),
D e G r e n d e l , D e L a e t e r, D e S m y t t e r e , D e Vo s , G o u d a e r t ,
H o p s o m e r (een, door Franschen invloed verbasterde vorm van Opsomer,
Opzomer, dat ook in Noord- en in Zuid-Nederland voorkomt), R y n g a e r t , V a n
d e n A b e e l e , Va n d e n K e r c k o v e , Va n d e r Ve e n e , Ve r c l y t t e ,
D e S c h o d t , D e Z i t t e r, Wa y e n b u r g , Va n d e r C o l m e ,
B e e k m a n s , B e h a g h e l , B i e s w a l , B l a n c k a e r t , D e B e y e r, D e
C o s t e r, D e G r o o t e , D e M a n , E e c k m a n , G o e m a e r e ,
G o v a e r e , H e r r e m a n , H o o f t , L i e f o o g h e , L o o t g i e t e r,
S p i l l e m a k e r, W i t t e v r o n g h e l , W y c k a e r t , We l l e c o m m e ,
Vinckevleugel, Wallaert, De Broere, Cleenewerck,
S c h o o n h e e r e , Va n d e Ve l d e , H a z e w i n d t , Va n A c k e r, D e
S t u y n d e r, D e Wa e g e m a e k e r, P l a e t e v o e t , D e G r a v e ,
R a e c k e l b o o m , D e M o l , E l l e b o o d e , Y s e r b y t , (ook verfranscht tot
Iserbi), V a n H o v e , O s w i n , D e V i l d e r , V a n H e e g h e , D a g b e r t ,
K e i n g a e r t , S w y n g e d a u w , V a n E e k e , D e Te m m a e k e r ,
G o e n e u t e , V a n E l s l a n d t , en nog velen meer. Hier bij valt op te merken
dat door de Franschen de namen die met het lidwoord de, of met het voorzetsel
van of met van de, van den, van der zijn samengesteld, in één woord schrijven; bij
voorbeeld Dehaene, Deruywe, Derode, Vanderwalle, Vandenabeele,
Vandenkerckove, enz. De namen krijgen op die wijze zulk een vreemd voorkomen,
dat een Nederlander zelf aanvankelijk ze niet herkent. ↑
[Inhoud]
III