‘In the land of the blond dunes / And not very far from the sea, / Once upon a time lived a dwarf couple / And their name was ‘Piggelmee.’
They were very, very small people / And they lived – terrible fate, / Because they had no house at all – / In an old Cologne pot.‘
This is how the famous thing started Piggelmee album that the Van Nelle factory released in 1920. It was artfully rhymed together after ‘an old fairy tale’ by employee LC Steenhuizen, who preferred to use the pseudonym Leopold. The picture book was illustrated with separate pictures that you automatically collected if you drank a lot of Van Nelle coffee.
And you were happy to do that, because Van Nelle coffee was very tasty, that’s what the Piggelmee story was about. Male Piggelmee had caught a magic fish that could grant all your wishes and female Piggelmee had more than enough wishes: she wanted a real house, furniture, nice clothes, a maid and a lot of money and she got it all. But when she wanted coffee that was better than Van Nelle’s, she went too far. Then the spell broke and the Piggelmeetjes suddenly found themselves under the Cologne pot again. Thank God with Van Nelle coffee.
Piece merchandisingso to speak, a bit flatter than Verkade did with his beautiful albums and renowned authors, but hardly less effective. Children have been saving and pasting themselves to death.
But what kind of fairy tale was that that had so inspired Steenhuizen? Van Nelle did not say that, not even when she republished the story after the war, with pictures that were somewhat nicer than those of the German artist who in 1920 so precisely showed how the little guy Piggelmee shot hares and rabbits.
Half a century can easily pass before you discover that ‘Piggelmee’ is very similar to the Grimm fairy tale called ‘About the Fisherman and His Wife’. There is also a fish that fulfills the wishes of a greedy woman, until she goes too far. That must have been it. At the same time, the motif of the story is so simple and recognizable (ATU 555 according to the international classification: greed is punished) that the fairy tale had undoubtedly been circulating through Europe for many centuries. The German fairy tale expert Johannes Bolte was able to write an infinite number in 1913 list variants. In Flanders Piggelmee fished under names such as Timpelteen, Tintelteen, Tintelentee, Ticktocktee and Tietentater. Dundeldee is also mentioned.
Ragged foundlings
When the young lawyers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm started collecting fairy tales around 1808, at the request of friends who had published old folk songs, they heard the story of the wishing fish from many sides. Others who collected fairy tales, because that was fashionable, also came across the fish. The first to publish about it, according to Google Books, was Albert Grimm (no relation) who invented a rare weak variant in 1808.
Jacob and Wilhelm found the version of the prominent painter Philipp Otto Runge the most beautiful, perhaps especially because he delivered it in the Western Pomeranian dialect. It seemed to come straight from the German people. It is certain that Runge greatly coiffed the story he had written down in Hamburg. ‘That’s not how it went at all’ said the sailors who were told later. That is the disaster that befell most fairy tales: that the middle-class people who started collecting them around 1800 also started making them more beautiful. And less dirty. Wilhelm Grimm regarded fairy tales as ragged foundlings that you first washed and dressed in new clothes before letting them into the living room. All references to sexuality and bodily functions were removed.
20th century images of magic fish.
Image Getty Images
The beautiful book describes how rude the old fairy tales were Trembling and Devil’s dung van Meder, Van Ekert and De Vries (2022). It is a collection of raw Groningen fairy tales as recorded in an account book by eleven-year-old Gerrit Arends in 1804 when he heard them told by seamstress Trijntje Soldaats. And then Trijntje probably still held back.
At Runge the fisherman is called Timpe Te and his wife is Ilsebill and only from the fact that they live in a toilet you can conclude that they are dwarfs. The fish that Timpe Te catches is a flounder (for others it is a pike). I’m an enchanted prince, says the bot, so let me go, I don’t taste good. I wouldn’t have eaten a fish that could talk anyway, says Timpe Te and puts it back. You should have wished for something first, Ilsebill says later, and then the series of wishes begins that ultimately brings the couple back to the piss pot.
The many times repeated encounter dialogue between fisherman and fish is magically beautiful:
Male, Male, Timpe Te,
Buttje, Buttje in the See,
Myne Fru de Ilsebill
Won’t do that, if I want to
A bit incomprehensible too, because who actually says what at what time? Fairytale connoisseurs discussed about that in a corner of Wikipedia in August 2020.
They think it could make sense for the two to pass each other on the water. But maybe the first lines should be changed.
And what does that strange ‘Timpe Te’ refer to? That’s a misunderstanding, experts think. It should have been Timpetje. The diminutive form -tje is common in Western Pomerania, but it sounded strange to the dignified Runge. He knew the dialect less well than he thought. And a Timpetje is something pointed, perhaps it referred to the fisherman’s hat, but it is more likely that it meant the gnome’s penis, the micropenis. Boy, little boy, what do you want, the bot shouted cheerfully.
We would like to wish the reader a healthy wish fish for the coming year.
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