The Belly Band of Eenrum

In the beginning Eenrum and its neighbouring villages Mensingeweer, Obergum and Winsum still had no names. To put that right, three able men were appointed: fat Stokkum, tall Kortum and slim Bergum. They sat together for a long time, but no name would come to them. At last they resolved to take chance as their godfather: wherever something happened, from that the place would take its name.

The first village they reached was very much to fat Stokkum’s liking. They set one dish after another before him: bowls of pea soup with bones, a roasted pork chop, veal on the spit, pigeons and wild ducks, and finally a suckling pig that fell apart the moment it was touched. Stokkum’s belly swelled until it almost burst.

His two companions saw the danger in time. They sent for a smith, who forged an iron band around Stokkum’s belly, so that it would hold out under the weight of all those good things. In this way they thought they had saved their friend.

But in the evening a rich meal was served once more: a capon as sweet as honey, a trout as white as snow, tender chicks and a browned joint of beef basted with fine Rhenish wine. Stokkum enjoyed it so much that his belly began to rise again. The expanding fat pushed against the iron band with such force that the metal began to crack.

In mortal fear, meaning that he wanted a second band to strengthen the first, fat Stokkum cried out: «Nog een r um, nog een r um», another one around it. And ever since, the place where this happened has been called Eenrum. On the same journey the neighbouring villages were named too: when tall Kortum vaulted a stream with his leaping pole, the cry went up that there was the fellow again, and so Mensingeweer arose; Bergum’s floundering at the next water yielded Obergum and Winsum.

Folklorists do not take the tale for truth. It is a place-name legend, a piece of folk humour that gives a prosaic reality a cheerful origin. The ending -um that Eenrum shares with so many Hogeland villages goes back to an old word for dwelling place or home, not to a belly band. Josef Cohen recorded the legend in his Nederlandsche sagen en legenden of 1918 and honestly noted that he had joined two orally transmitted versions into a single whole.

Behind the joke lies a real and ancient village. Eenrum is a mound village: it is built on an artificial dwelling hill that the inhabitants raised in the centuries before the dikes, against the water of the sea. Around it stretches the flat Hogeland, fields and meadow to the horizon, cut through by tidal creeks and the Baflo-Mensingeweer Canal.

On the mound stands the church, built partly of tuff stone and reaching back to the thirteenth century. On 24 May 1873 lightning struck the tower; with united effort the people of Eenrum managed to put out the fire. A little further on, the stage mill De Lelie has turned since 1862, an octagonal corn mill that also served as a hulling mill and now, worked by volunteer millers, houses a bakery museum. An older mill, the Lutje Meuln of 1737, once the oldest corn and hulling mill in the province, was largely demolished in 1956.

Until 1990 Eenrum was the main village of its own municipality; afterwards it became part of what was named De Marne, and since 2019 of the municipality of Het Hogeland. The old village centre is a protected townscape. Whoever walks the Pieterpad long-distance path and set out in Pieterburen enters here through the first village, past the mill, the tuff-stone church and the terp. Of fat Stokkum and his cracking belly band nothing is to be seen, but the village still bears the name, and no one who speaks it easily forgets why.