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Imagine a time unlike ours. When there were no engines, amplifiers, and speakers, and the sounds you heard were made by the actions of men, beasts, or the elements of nature. Be quiet and listen. Can you hear the chatter of children and vendors, and the hooves of horses on the streets? Can you hear the loose sails of docked ships flapping, drying in the wind? A time when communities, villages, and towns were of manageable size. This soundscape was a world where the sound of t

In the final two weeks of December 2024, one of the bastards of the Frisian Coast Trail  solo hiked the coastal section of the Bibbulmun Track in Western Australia. Naturally, it had to be the coast. This section runs between the towns of Albany and Walpole, with only a brief brush with civilization halfway through, at the town of Denmark. The trail is marked by the Waugal—see featured image—a symbol of the Indigenous First Nations peoples of Australia, representing the guard

When re-enactors bring early-medieval Frisia to life, they are often seen wearing a small iron hammer on a leather cord around their...

It is at the inn The Prancing Pony in the village of Bree that the Hobbits find refuge from the screeching Nazgûl on their coal-black horses. It is also here that they encounter Strider, the mysterious wanderer who is later revealed to be Aragorn—future king of the Reunited Kingdom. Horses, wanderers, fugitive royalty, shifting alliances, the forging of armies, and the rise of kings—these are also the hallmarks of the epic North Sea saga of Hengist and Horsa. A tale set 1,600

The fate of tribes and their names in the age of the Great Migration, between the fourth and sixth centuries, was anything but certain....

For many turbulent centuries, the town of Stavoren was a tightrope walker before it finally settled as a small harbour at the Lake...

Breaking! Great Pier measured around 2.30 meters in height! This question has been bugging the Frisians for centuries. Now we know. How? Keep reading… Granted. We asked ourselves this very same question in a previous blog post . We explored how great Pier was… as a leader. This time we are asking the same question, but taking it quite literally: how tall was Great Pier? No, we did not find and measure Great Piers remainings. We know where he is buried, but we don’t know exact

Most Frisians know the name of Great Pier, or ‘ Grutte Pier ’ in Frisian. But what do we really know about him? Well, all we know for sure is that he was tall. Very tall (read how tall exactly ). Spoiler alert: his name gave away that he was tall, right? If you would ask your friends and family what they know about Grutte Pier, then most of them would be able to tell you a handful of characteristics. Some might be even able to add a small story to that name. What most of them

Who’s afraid of Jóða Fenris , 'the offspring of Fenrir'? Afraid of hund hrynsævar hræva , 'the hound of the roaring sea of corpses'? Who, today, fears the wolf? The dark creature that once haunted the shadowed forests of the East is rising again in Europe. Nearly two centuries have passed, yet the wolf has returned to the southern shores of the North Sea. Returned to former Frisia, rekindling ancient fears thought long extinguished. It is killing sheep. More unsettling still,

Where the English Channel meets the Celtic Sea, the ships of the Frisian brothers Corsold and Coarchion are said to have sailed, raided,...

On the west bank of the mighty River Rhine, halfway between the cities of Koblenz and Mainz, lies the town of Sankt Goar. Named after...

Imagine this: one day your husband brings home a young, unmarried woman. A virgin, even. He simply takes her into your house, openly shows her affection—and who knows what else. But that is not all. He also gives this maiden full access to your pantry and your savings account, which she—for crying out loud—starts spending on charity. And when you dare to speak up, your husband brushes you off by comparing you to the jealous queen in Snow White , or Cinderella’s evil stepmothe

In the Middle Age lived a once promiscuous girl named Elisabeth. She had come to repentance, found honourable employ as a maid, and had...

This blog post is not about Aindreas Ó Céirín (1840-1915), better known as Brother Walfrid from Ireland and who founded the Scottish...

The Battle of Tours in 732 was a turning point in the wars against the Umayyad Caliphate. The Caliphate was one of the biggest empires in history, but it lost this battle. At the confluence of the rivers Clain and Vienne, the Franks, led by statesman majordomo  Charles Martel, only just managed to defeat the great army of Emir Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi, governor of al-Andalus  ‘Andalusia’. Historians estimate tens of thousands of soldiers died. In the run-up to this historic ba

Although the conversion of the Woden-devoted Frisians  was a slow and cumbersome process that only succeeded in depth in the tenth century, Frisia subsequently turned into the richest ecclesiastical area of Europe. Nowhere else on the Isles and the Continent were there this many monasteries and churches packed together. Even though nearly all monasteries have been dismantled with the advent of Protestantism, to this very day, nowhere in the world can one find as many high-med

Hjoggum vér með hjörvi —'we swung our swords'—as all the stanzas of the twelfth-century epic poem Lay of Kraka  begin, the tale of Ragnar Lothbrok’s death. When reading about the famous deeds of great Viking warriors, little attention is given to their moments of failure. Little is written about where and when those glorious men and women died. As it turns out, the coast of Frisia is one great Viking graveyard. It is here, in the (still) smelly blue mud, that legendary heroes

In 2004, archaeologists made a remarkable discovery at the early medieval burial ground of Solleveld, just south of the city of The Hague: a boat grave. It lies almost exactly two hundred kilometres in a straight line due east across the North Sea from the legendary ship burial at Sutton Hoo. With this extraordinary find, the Netherlands joined the select group of nations known for ship burials—a distinction not to be taken lightly. National pride soared. The discovery also e

When, on a moonlit night, you stand atop the dyke at Lake Lauwersmeer and gaze out over the water, you might just catch a glimpse of the...

High in the majestic Alps, in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland, many men, women, and children have witnessed the dreadful sight of dead Frisians marching home under the cover of darkness. The path they follow is known as The Frisians’ Way , a ghostly route linking the Haslital —the Hasli Valley in the Bernese Oberland—to the distant shores of the North Sea, once the heart of ancient Frisia. The dead do not speak the word ‘friend’ and simply enter when they want to pass through