Charles De Coster, from Legends, charged to pastiche, toward The Legend, indigestible piece of art

This article aims to analyse how Flemish Legends (1858) in fact announce The Legend of Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak and Their Adventures Heroical, Joyous, and Glorious in the Land of Flanders and Elsewhere (1867), both written by Charles De Coster, the first great French-speaking Belgian writer. Charles De Coster sets the scene in his  first work loosely based on Flemish tales, and first published in the newspaper Uylenspiegel, with a mixture of literary genres and an old-fashioned affected writing style, on a background of 16th century Wars of Religions. This unique combination of genres and styles will be widely misunderstood both in Legends and The Legend of Ulenspiegel,  something highlighted in the analysis of Émile Deschanel’s preface to Flemish Legends.

Smee: The hell or the paradise of history?

Charles De Coster’s story Smetse Smee, published in 1858 as part of his Légendes flamandes, centers on a popular motif from Flemish folklore. The motif of clever blacksmith who sells his soul to the devil and then successfully reclaims it occurs in the folk culture of many European countries. A leading promoter of Belgian national consciousness, De Coster creatively transforms the tale to relay the ideals of freedom close to his heart that nineteenth-century intellectuals often associated with peasant frankness and joie de vivre (which formed the backdrop for political debate between Belgian conservatives and liberals in the second half of the century). These traits are  juxtaposed with the demeanor of the “diabolical” opponents of these ideals, embodied in the story by the sixteenth-century suppressors of the protestant rebellion and considered to be “enemies of the people.” Is De Coster’s point of view merely testimony of by-gone conflicts, or does it reflect a moment in the process in which contemporary readers  of the tale of the brave valiant blacksmith from Ghent are still immersed in today?

Bacchus/Master Merry-face: the malicious power of an “antiquaille”

Charles De Coster is a master in drawing on legends, including those he forges himself. In a creative and uncanny language, underpinned by the medieval coloration, he becomes a remarkable image- maker. In the tale Les Frères de la Bonne Trogne [The Brotherhood of the Cheerful Countenance], the writer appropriates a tradition that comes from far away, to endow it with the Belgian colourful characteres of yesteryear. To recount the advent of Bacchus, the emblematic figure of the wine civilization, an antique motif is accompanied by a local mythology: among beer lovers, in some part of Flanders, during the time of the Good Duke... The god of drunkenness, absent from the title of  decosterian fiction, is astutely baptized “Monsieur de la Bonne Trogne” [Master Merry-face] by the men of Uccle who establish in his honour a jolly brotherhood. Based on this scenario, the paper examines how the representation of Bacchus responds to a conglomerate of mythical elements (more or less allusive), to which is added a strong sense of  somewhereness.

Blanche, Claire and Candide, or ten graceful medieval illuminations

Blache, Claire and Candide, the shortest of the Flemish legends by Charles De Coster, is divided into ten chapters that remind us of medieval illuminations. De Coster brings into his text, written in a slightly archaic language, elements of the real and legendary world, and mingles the world of chivalrous courtesy with the world of Rabelaisian pettiness; the mystical world with that of sensations.

On Sire Halewyn’s Evil : Ugliness, Misfortune and the Charms of Chant

The Article discusses Charles De Coster’s version of the Heer (Sire) Halewyn legend and describes the protagonist as the crucial persona of the short prose.