Confusion and division over Valentine’s Day remain prevalent in the Netherlands. Wednesday February 14 is that time again: the day on which you are expected to give your loved one(s) a gift or send a love greeting. Valentine’s Day is a young holiday in the Netherlands, only around 1950 by the Dutch flower trade introduced as ‘friendship day’ in America Valentine’s Day-example. It became a commercial success: one in three Dutch people participate, according to one 2020 research from Motivactionespecially women and young people.
It is remarkable that almost half of Valentine’s Day participants (46 percent) also think the holiday itself is “commercial nonsense”, according to the researchers. The funny thing is that Valentine’s Day indeed contains a lot of nonsense, also commercial, but it still fits into a very old, also Dutch, love greeting tradition.
Not a Christian Valentine’s Day
To start with the mountain of nonsense: there is no Christian Saint Valentine’s Day. The Catholic Church removed that name day from the calendar of saints in 1969, because too little was known about all the saints called Valentine. That there would have been a monk Valentine in the Middle Ages who handed out flowers to loved ones is a marketing fiction.
It was the 14th century British poet Geoffrey Chaucer (of The Canterbury Tales) who first linked romantic love and ‘Volantynys day‘, because on that day ‘every bird chooses its partner’. That was probably not February 14, because not all birds nest then. Chaucer may have been referring to May 3, on which a Genoese Valentine was honored. The colder February 14th only later became Valentine’s name day. Medieval Britons tried to match marriageable couples in the countryside on that day. That was done with lottery tickets. Small gifts and notes were also exchanged. That grew into the romantic British and American tradition ofValentine’s Day.
Birds, nests and love
But we also know that link between birds and building a nest and romantic love: as the Old Dutch phrase Hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan hinase hi(c) (e)nda thu uuat unbidan uue nu (All the birds have started nests except me and you, what are we waiting for). That Valentine-like sentence from 1100, found in a monastery book in England, is considered the beginning of Dutch literature. These are lines from a folk song that according to man of letters Frits van Oostrom fits into a rich love greeting tradition, which probably represents the female poetic voice.
The phrase Hebban olla vogala According to him, it fits in with a long, initially oral, universal tradition of love poetry from a female perspective, in which nature, spring and longing for love are linked, addressed to a male lover.
Van Oostrom quotes in his book Vote in writing (2006) a two-thousand-year-old similar Egyptian poetry line: “When the wind comes, it wants to go to the fig tree; when you come, you want to come to me.”
The woman as ‘eager party’
In the early Middle Ages it was also women, such as nuns in monasteries, who wrote such love songs. To the annoyance, according to Van Oostrom, of the male church leaders, who considered this reprehensible worldly amorous frivolity. The European ruler Charlemagne therefore issued a ban in the year 789 on nuns and abbesses from writing such love songs and sending them to each other.
It is astonishing, and typical of male template thinking in literary history, according to Van Oostrom, that Hebban olla vogala has never been interpreted as a line of poetry with a woman as the “eager party”.
Be that as it may, the romantic Valentine’s Day spirit is gone Hebban olla vogala deeply rooted in Dutch culture – not just on February 14.