Sint Nicolaas Goet Heylig Man
ear 1750. This is one of the earliest depictions of Sint Nicolaas, “Good Holy Man", in the Netherlands.
Year 1750. This is one of the earliest depictions of Sint Nicolaas, “Good Holy Man”, in the Netherlands.
Sint Nicolaas, Goet Heylig Man 1750
Niklaus und Klaubauf (Johann Michael Mettenleiter, 1790). This 1790 painting of St. Nicholas and Klaubauf, in which the evil helper Klaubauf attempts to put a child into a bag while St. Nicholas stands silently behind, is one of the earliest depictions of Nicholas’ evil helpers.
Concerning Goet Heylig Man ( or its current (most common) Dutch form Goedheiligman), though one could indeed understand translate that as Good-Holy-Man, its form is a bit weird as it does not show any inflection, even in contexts where the Dutch grammatical rules would force inflection, though the word “goedheilig” meaning “friendly and pious” made it into Dutch dictionaries, the word seems hardly ever to be used if not in connection with St. Nicholas, it’s meaning seems thus to be formed in a sort of “you know, like St. Nicholas” way, the only people indicated by it (in a Google search)a not directly related to St. Nicholas in some way were some dwellers of the Vatican, and thus still, in probably sort of colleagues of St. Nicholas.
The older, more original and sensible form of the indication is generally considered to be Goet-hylik Man (or even Goet-hylik Maker), with hylik (current Dutch form “huwelijk”) meaning marriage, referring to the role the saint and his feast had in the establishment of good marriages for the unmarried…