DUTCH LITERATURE

the body of written works in the Netherlandic language as spoken in The Netherlands and northern Belgium. Of the earliest inhabitants of The Netherlands, only the Frisians have survived, and they have maintained a separate language and literature since the 8th century. The remainder of The Netherlands was colonized by the Saxons and Franks between the 3rd and 9th centuries, resulting in a predominantly Frankish culture in the south and Saxon or an amalgam of Saxon and Frankish language and culture elsewhere. Under the less nomadic Franks, the south prospered more than the north, and there a literary language first developed. Because of marked differences between the dialects of the east, the centre, and the west (Flanders, with features that linked the coastal dialects with Old English), the development was very gradual. In the early Middle Ages, when Latin and, later, French were the languages of the educated, the vernacular was largely confined to unrecorded oral legend and folk songs. The earliest text that can claim to contain examples of Old Dutch was the early 10th-century Wachtendonck Psalm Fragments. Additional reading C.G.N. De Vooys and G. Stuiveling, Schets van de Nederlandse letterkunde, 30th ed. (1966); Gerard Knuvelder, Handboek tot de geschiedenis der Nederlandse letterkunde, 5th ed. (197076); Theodor Weevers, Poetry of the Netherlands in Its European Context, 11701930 (1960); James Anderson Russell, Dutch Romantic Poetry (1961); and Reinder P. Meijer, Literature of the Low Countries, new ed. (1978). Gerard Willem Huygens Peter K. King Paul F. Vincent The Editors of the Encyclopdia Britannica