The Sammelkes of the Sammeltjeskuil

According to old Wieringers, the Sammelkes lived in a pit near Zandburen: small, good-natured little men. They smoked tiny pipes, played on little flutes and danced when it was dark. Anyone who found a very small clay pipe in the fields was holding a "Sammelepiepke".

The Sammelkes were mad about copper and about anything that shone. If you left a copper kettle outside, it was gone the next morning, or it was back again, more brightly polished than ever.

They also brought the babies: children came from the Sammeltjeskuul long before the stork took over that job. And parents kept their children indoors after dark with the warning that the Sammelkes were out.

In 1845 the minister Heldring went to see for himself and described earth men of two to three and a half feet. He did not get a clear picture of what people actually believed. By then the pit was already a farmhouse. Nearby he was shown a place where people who had been robbed could recover their things. The soil was black and ash-like, unlike anywhere else on the island, and he found Roman sherds there. He took it for an old sacred place, later disturbed by the gospel of Hippolytus. By around 1880 nobody believed in them any more.

On Texel they are called Sommeltjes. The oldest printed mention, from 1696, is about that island. The minister Abraham Magyrus writes of hommeltjes, little people whom the Texel islanders dreamed of as living in holes in the earth. How the word went from hommeltje to sommeltje is not clear.

Around 1850 Van der Aa calls the Sommeltjeskuil a former farm, a quarter of an hour north-east of Hippolytushoef, on what had been a pagan burial ground. Sherds lay in the little walls and in the fields. The land, about five bunder, belonged to Nan Scheltus and others. In 1961 the municipal secretary pointed to land on the Gemeenelandsweg, used by S. Snooij at number 14. In popular speech he was called "Simon van de zandkuul". Nothing of the pit could be seen any more. An old farm did still stand there, far from the road.

The explanations of the name do not agree. In 1992 Kees de Jager thought of tumulus, a burial mound, by way of tommelt to sommeltje. Others hear "gather" in it: Frisian sammelje, German sammeln, Danish samle. Another explanation points to sumbl, a Germanic drinking feast. These remain guesses. On Wieringen it was also said that they could come through the cracks of a bedstead (bedstee). Usually they did no real harm, and sometimes they helped with a chore. If you walked past the pit, silver coins could vanish.