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Dance
lime trees have come down to us from an extremely ancient
European tradition. The earliest representation of a dance
lime tree is found in Anne de Bretagne’s celebrated
Book of Hours, which dates from 1508 and is kept in the French
Bibliothèque Nationale.
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| Pieter
Bruegel the Elder. |
Book
of hours |
Van
Den Berk nursery |
click
to enlarge |
Dance
lime trees also figure in paintings by the Flemish artists
Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Pieter Bruegel the Younger, as
well as by Lukas Taffle. Arnold van Gennep, the great French
specialist of folklore and ethnology, describes a very old
lime tree that survived until the end of the nineteenth century
in the northern French village of Lynde. The tree, which had
a double crown and a multitude of intertwining branches, was
surrounded by a sort of platform. A few exceedingly old and
rare dance lime trees® still grow today in various parts
of Germany, Belgium and Holland. |
Dance lime trees were planted in the centre of villages. One
or more platforms, supported by wooden structures, were built
around their trunks, and these were used for dancing. Rope-makers,
who used lime tree bark for their ropes, were the first to
build platforms in lime trees in order to facilitate their
work. Over time, these platforms began to be used by the villagers
for dancing, and little by little they became places where
festivities occurred, and where people gathered to dance. |
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