The Frysk Folksliet

Eeltsje Halbertsma was doctor and poet in Grou. In 1844 his wife, Lykele, was incurably ill. She lay in bed three months. Eeltsje cared for her by day, and at night wrote poems in Frisian. One night she asked him: «Eeltsje, write me a song I can take with me when I go.» Eeltsje wrote: «Frysk bloed tsjoch op, wol no âns fâr en heugje» — Frisian blood, arise, gather speed for once, and remember your old princes and their fight.

Lykele died in March 1845. Eeltsje hid the song in a drawer of his writing-desk. He found it too personal to publish. It lay there thirty years. Only in 1875, when Eeltsje himself lay dying, did his nephew Joost Halbertsma find the manuscript. «Uncle,» Joost asked, «may I publish it?» Eeltsje nodded. «It was a song for her. But now it may become a song for all.» Eeltsje died three weeks later.

The Frysk Folksliet was sung publicly that same year at the provincial summer festivals in Drachten. It struck like a bomb. Everyone sang along, though no one had known the song before. The words seemed written from the Frisian heart. All felt that one Frisian woman who knew no other people had asked, in that song, the whole Frisian world to be strong.

Since 2002 the Frysk Folksliet has been the official anthem of the province of Fryslân. At every burial, every wedding, every skutsje race it sounds. And whoever sings it remembers — sometimes without knowing — a Frisian doctor and a Frisian woman who died in Grou in March 1845, with a new song in her ears.