The Minnewater and the legend of the Lake of Love in Bruges

The legend of Minna and Stromberg, as it was written

First, the tale itself, in its author's version. It's set at the time when Julius Caesar's legions are conquering ancient Belgium. Minna flees a marriage she's being forced into, so as to stay true to Stromberg, her beloved, who has gone off to fight. She dies in the wilds, on the bank of a stream, shortly before he gets back. Stromberg buries her in the bed of the stream and carves one word into a stone: "Minnewater". And from those far-off days, the story goes, the name has survived.

Faithful love, Romans, a death a moment too soon and a name carved in stone. It had everything going for it. And it took off.

Who invented the legend of the Lake of Love?

The tale has an author, a date and an address. It first appeared in Bruges in 1834, in a book called Chroniques, traditions et légendes de l'ancienne histoire des Flandres ("Chronicles, Traditions and Legends from the Early History of Flanders"). It opened the collection under a suitably sugary title: Le Lac d'Amour ou Stromberg et Minna, "The Lake of Love, or Stromberg and Minna".

Its author, Octave Delepierre, was born in Bruges in 1802. He was a lawyer, the town librarian and the provincial archivist, and he ended up as a consul in London, where he died in 1879. He was no charlatan: he had something of a name as a historian, a linguist and a bibliophile. For his chronicles he took an English book as his model, Romances of History, and turned episodes from Flanders' past into fictionalised tales. He hoped they would steer plenty of readers towards serious historical works.

The folklorist who later pieced all this together put it like this: poetic tales like these ended up taking the place that rightly belonged to genuine popular tradition. Delepierre meant to open a door onto history, and a legend walked in through it.

When was the legend found to be invented?

Before long. In 1843, the German folklorist Johann Wilhelm Wolf published his Niederländische Sagen, a collection of legends from the Low Countries put together after careful research into the sources. He'd been sent Delepierre's book by the author himself. In his introduction he explained that he'd first taken the Lac d'Amour for a genuine legend, but that, after making enquiries, he'd become convinced it was pure invention.

Who did he ask? Nobody knows. Wolf had plenty of correspondents in Flanders. H. Stalpaert, the Flemish folklorist who untangled the whole story in 1948, thought it was probably Delepierre himself, or failing that a canon who was a friend of Wolf's. If it was the author, the scene has a certain charm: the creator of the legend owning up that it was his, and the legend carrying on regardless.

Stalpaert also left a warning that still holds: much of what passes in Flanders for "historical legend" never came from popular tradition at all, but from the imagination of some man of letters, or from chroniclers who made it up from start to finish.

A town that collected legends

Minna wasn't a one-off. In the nineteenth century, Bruges developed quite a taste for its own legends. That enthusiasm kept growing between 1874 and 1880, and in 1879 a local weekly, De Halletoren, announced a competition for whoever could hand in the largest number of legends about the town's houses, buildings and statues. A rival magazine objected, to protect its rights over what it had already published. Nobody knows who won.

And the Lake of Love kept on giving. L. Hoste wrote Minna Wunnestein, a rhyming play for string puppets that follows Delepierre's plot to the letter. A story that ends up dangling from strings belongs to everyone.

What does Minnewater mean?

The honest answer is that nobody's quite sure. The Flemish heritage inventory notes that the name could mean "common water", water shared by all. Some linguists explained minne as a water spirit, a theory Stalpaert found as learned as it was naive. Neither has been proved.

What is documented is that the romantic reading of the name was doing the rounds in the nineteenth century. Delepierre's own title already spoke of a Lac d'Amour. And in 1892, in Bruges-la-Morte, the novel that turned Bruges into a character, Georges Rodenbach wrote of the Minnewater: "le lac d'amour, a-t-on traduit, mais mieux encore: l'eau où l'on aime!" In other words: the lake of love, as it's been translated, but better still, the water where one loves.

What the Minnewater really was

Take away the tale and the lake has a story that's more practical than romantic. Most of the river's water entered the town from the south, where the Minnewater lies, and this long, narrow lake probably took shape some time in the 1100s or 1200s as a small reservoir, when the sluices that controlled Bruges' water were built. The lock house, the Sashuis, on the Wijngaardplein, went up in 1519 when those sluices were rebuilt. The lake probably drove water mills as well.

From the 1620s it served as a commercial dock. It lost that role in 1752, when a new canal, the Coupure, was dug to give a better link through the town between the canals to Ghent and to Ostend. Even so, the boats that plied regularly between Bruges and Ghent went on tying up here until 1782.

What surrounds the water is a mix of centuries. The Poertoren, the round tower by the bridge, dates from 1398–1401 and stored gunpowder from the fifteenth century to the early twentieth. The stone bridge is from 1739. And the very long neo-Gothic front of the former Minnewater Clinic, from 1885–1892, is a reminder that in this part of Bruges a good deal of what looks medieval was built between 1883 and 1912.

Fact or legend.

• Literary invention, with an author and a date: the story of Minna and Stromberg. It first appears in 1834, in a book by Octave Delepierre.
• Fact: in 1843 the folklorist Wolf, who had first taken it for a genuine legend, concluded it was invented.
• Hypothesis: that it was Delepierre himself who told Wolf. Stalpaert thought it likely.
• What can't be proved: that there was no earlier oral tradition about the lake at all. What is proved is that the story of Minna has an author.
• Unresolved: where the name comes from. "Common water" and "water spirit" are both hypotheses.
• Fact, with a "probably": the lake began as a reservoir for the sluices, around the twelfth or thirteenth century, and later became a commercial dock.

Where to hear it

Podtour tells this story on The Beguinage and the Lake of Love, twelve stops in the southern part of Bruges, finishing beside the Minnewater. The legend and its author are told by the water, at the stop "The Lake of Love, Invented in 1834". The stop before it, "The City's Tap", explains what the lock house was for, and the last one, "Bruges, the Dead City", follows Rodenbach's trail. The swans of Bruges have a legend of their own, told at the stop "The Swans of Lanchals". For the practical side of your trip, see our Bruges guide.

Further reading

• H. Stalpaert, "De zogenaamde sage van het minnewater te Brugge", Biekorf 49 (1948), pp. 31–36. https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_bie001194801_01/_bie001194801_01_0007.php
• Johann Wilhelm Wolf, Niederländische Sagen, Leipzig, 1843. https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_OxpbAAAAQAAJ
• H. Vandenbroeke, "Minnewater en omgeving", Inventaris Onroerend Erfgoed (ID 301976), 1998. https://inventaris.onroerenderfgoed.be/erfgoedobjecten/301976
• Inventaris Onroerend Erfgoed, "Sashuis" (ID 82243). https://inventaris.onroerenderfgoed.be/erfgoedobjecten/82243
• Inventaris Onroerend Erfgoed, "Poertoren" (ID 200722). https://inventaris.onroerenderfgoed.be/erfgoedobjecten/200722
• Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, Flammarion, Paris, 1892. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14911