A tang of foxish magic sharpens the breeze and for a moment, I slip into his storied trap, tempted to start digging in earnest. Reynard is known for his silver-tongued web of lies, but as I circle the lake, suddenly there before me are his birch trees, exactly as he describes them. There are two trees in particular: you can’t miss them, their branches touch and part over the water, the treasure is buried under the one on the left, scrape and dig some moss away, then underneath you’ll find towering, glittering, tumbling heaps of gold.” “In the middle of that damp, gloomy wood you will see a grove of delicate young birches, as white as snow and as green as glass. As he tricks the avaricious King Noble the Lion, Reynard describes his muddy treasury in detail: The perfect place for a renegade fox to go to ground or bury a substantial trove. For these are masked lands, obscure lands. The word waas carries layers of watery, chthonic meaning – mud, mire, sludge – but also a patterning of haze and mizzle.

It lies in the centre of the Waasland, a marshy domain bordered by the Schelde as it flows to the port of Antwerp. Today, it surrounds a lake, sullen and green, itself once a meandering creek called Kriekeputte, before dyke breaches swelled it into scattered ponds. In medieval times, the wood was much larger – a wolf-haunted forest known as Hulsterloe. It was here that Reynard claims to have buried the treasure of Gothic King Emereric, a mythic hoard which forms a pivot-point of the main plot in his tales. In the 13 th century Van den vos Reinaerde ( Of Reynard the Fox), written by the Ghent cleric Willem van Boudelo, this secretive place is described as ‘one of the wildest regions to be found in any realm’. There is no one around and the sky is overcast, mottled, like tarnished silver. I am pushing through brambles and broom in a lonely stretch of woodland on the Dutch-Belgium border. The final afternoon of a long research trip across Belgium and the Netherlands, gathering in a store of vulpine history for my retelling of the beast epic of Reynard the Fox. National Emerging Writer Programme OverviewĮast Flanders, April 2019.

Reynard fox latin manuscript