WEIRDLAND TV (Posts tagged gnomes)

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1960s/70s illustrations from Dutch children’s series, Paulus the woodgnome. By Jean Dulieu (1921-2006).

Starting out as a newspaper strip in the 1940s, Paulus appeared in children’s novels, TV puppet shows, radio plays, et cetera, and all by this one guy, Jean Dulieu. Great artist.

I read many of the books when I was a kid; the woods were never quite the same after that. I loved the atmosphere: there was always a kind of autumn dread in the air, Paulus had animal friends, but usually he was alone, just roaming about, hoping not to run into anything bad. The woods were dangerous, or rather, indifferent. The witch, Eucalypta, might seem kind of genial in these illustrations, but she was a real terror. Running into her meant trouble: the black kind.

I’ll do a post about the puppet shows later on, because seeing is believing.

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thefloatingstone asked:

As a sort of 'language-cousin' of my own language and culture, do you have any info on the art/story book 'De Oproep der Kabouters' by Wil Huygen? it's a big part of my childhood and I adore its art and attention to small everyday details. But I know almost nothing about it apart from the book I'm holding in my hands.

I don’t think there’s much I can tell you that you can’t Google yourself. I do remember the book and the surrounding interest was “a thing”, as they say, though I was too young to be really aware of it at the time (1981). Will Huygen, the author, was a physician; the illustrator, Rien Poortvliet, a talented artist but a pretty rotten human being: his widow stopped short of saying she felt relieved when he died in 1995. He was always out hunting.

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I do remember many people genuinely believed the book to be a truthful account of the life of gnomes: more an anthropological/biological study than a flight of fantasy. This was 1981, mind you, when people were open to a wide range of spiritual and religious beliefs. New Age was blossoming. This I do remember clearly. My mother’s friends were always off somewhere to find spiritual balance or to seek The Truth or join a friendly cult to talk about the role of Man and Woman. Their living rooms were decorated with self-made macramé items, artistic expressions of their earnest quests. They were children of Mother Earth. Gnomes? Why not. Is that concept any crazier than someone turning water into wine?

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When I was a kid, we were in the middle of moving houses. Whenever I got home from school I went straight to our new house, where my mother and aunt were busy painting and cleaning. One day, bored and feeling neglected, I went out the back door to look around. There was this oddly dressed boy in the alley behind our house, called “Micha”. He was barefoot and wore something resembling a kaftan. He invited me to visit his house, which was across ours. I said sure and I followed him. We went inside through a beaded curtain. Incense filled the air, somewhere santoor music was playing. It sounded like it came from a crack between our world and another. In the living room there was this beautiful dark-haired woman with a headband, who immediately jumped up when she saw me, welcoming me. She asked me if I was Micha’s little friend, and she told me I could say and do anything I wanted here, because this house was a special house. She touched my hair, apparently surprised that it was so light blonde, like she had never seen that before, and my feet, which seemed to interest her too. She kept following us around the house, which Micha seemed to find perfectly normal. Micha showed me this book on gnomes he had received as a gift—not for his birthday, but for “Special Boy Day”. His mother giggled. She asked me if I ever had funny dreams of people making love. I said no. She asked me if it was okay if she appeared in my dreams tonight. I said sure, and she said, “Whoopee! Then I’ll be in your dreams tonight and maybe you’ll be in mine.” She invited me to dinner at their house at six. I said sure. But I never showed up.

Later, after we had settled into our new home, I came near that house again one day and discovered completely different people living there. No one had ever heard of this “Micha”, or his mother. Now how do you explain that?

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Now here’s someone who gave me nightmares when I was a kid. Eucalypta, the evil witch from Dutch puppetry TV show, Paulus the woodgnome.

She was always sort of roaming around, doing mysterious things, like one of those supporting characters from Twin Peaks. The version I remember best is the blue one (last image): she had zealot eyes and cackled like a broken siren.

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