The Sommeltjes of Texel

A sommeltje was small, sixty to ninety centimetres tall, and lived in the dunes and on the Sommeltjesberg. By day it almost never showed itself, for it could not bear the sun: whoever came into the full light turned to stone on the spot. As soon as darkness fell the sommeltjes came alive again and danced upon the hill. They could make themselves invisible, take the shape of any animal, and slip into a house through the narrowest crack.

They were especially mad for shining things. They stole copper kettles, silver coins and other valuables, though they would sometimes return a kettle polished bright and filled. Parents told their children that the sommeltjes brought the newborns, and the naughty were frightened with the warning that the sommeltjes would come out of the little hill. They were named as such as early as 1755, and a rediscovered book by the Texel minister Abraham Magyrus from 1696 speaks of hommeltjes, little people believed to dwell in the caves of the earth.

The name kabouter, akin to the German Kobold and the English goblin, took its own form all across the Low Countries. In Friesland the creature was called ierdmantsje, in Groningen aulk, in Limburg alvermannetje, and on Texel, then, sommeltje. On neighbouring Wieringen the sammeltjes lived in the Sammeltjeskuil near Hippolytushoef, where small earthen pipes were found that were held to be their smoking gear.

In 1777 Simon de Breker, the owner of the land, had the Sommeltjesberg dug away. Around that same time the draughtsman and collector Pieter van Cuyck visited the island. The hill fascinated him, and he had the excavation recorded in an engraving by Cornelis Bogerts. Van Cuyck drew a sober conclusion: this was no dwelling of spirits but a burial mound in which a prominent inhabitant of the region had once been laid to rest.

He set down his findings in a report with the long title Beschryving van eenige oudheden, gevonden in een tumulus, of begraafplaats, op het eiland Texel. Out of the hill came objects of Roman make, among them an axe and a sieve, and on several pieces the names ADRAXIVS F and MATVTIO F were scratched. In Roman times Texel was still joined to the mainland, and one could walk on foot to Wieringen and Huisduinen.

The finds drew attention up to the highest circles. In 1789 Stadtholder William V visited the island and looked over the antiquities on De Breker’s land, and ten years later the Scheltema couple still saw them. The exact site of the hill afterwards fell into long oblivion; it is thought to lie south-east of De Waal, on the Oosterenderweg, where the soil is protected to this day as an archaeological site.

The name itself, too, may keep the memory of that burial mound alive. The Texel scholar Kees de Jager suggested in 1992 that sommeltje could be a corruption of tumulus, softened through tommelt and sommelt into sommeltje. Others thought of the verb to gather, after the odds and ends the creatures carried off. It is not certain, but it is a pleasing thought that the dancing men should owe their name to an old grave.

The hill has gone, but the sommeltjes remained. In De Waal a small statue on the corner of the Hogereind and the Langwaal recalls them, and the village keeps its history in a museum of local culture. In the Duinen van Texel National Park the state forestry service laid out the Sommeltjespad in 1999, a walking route through the De Dennen wood where children search among the tree roots for petrified little men.

So a legend lives on that once served to keep children indoors at nightfall. The scholars unriddled the hill and called it a tumulus, the souvenir shops turned it into candles and prints, and yet something unexplained still hangs over De Waal. Whoever walks the Oosterenderweg by full moon knows the hill is no longer there, and listens all the same for dancing somewhere in the dark.