Gathering data about folk customs began in Friesland in the early 19th century, in line with the general European Romantic interest in popular life. Important sources of inspiration were Le Grand d’Aussy’s Histoire de la vie privée des Français (1782) and the work of Jacob Grimm, whose projects for collecting popular traditions and folk customs extended to the Netherlands; Grimm’s contacts were H.W. Tydeman, whom Grimm got to know before his move from Franeker University to Leiden, and Jacobus Scheltema, who worked in Holland but was deeply committed to his Frisian region of origin.

Scheltema himself wrote about courtship and marriage customs in Hindeloopen (1832), a town widely believed to date back to the early Middle Ages and to have Anglo-Saxon origins. It had attracted attention from earlier scholars such as the Amsterdam professor Rinse Koopmans and the clergyman and school inspector H.W.C.A. Visser. Visser in 1825 published, with H. Amersfoordt, the first part of an envisaged source publication, Archief voor vaderlandsche, en inzonderheid Vriesche geschiedenis, oudheid- en taalkunde, to include biographies, antiquities, proverbs, folk tales, songs and local customs, practices and manners.

Scheltema’s brother Paulus published his Tesck-laow in 1823, a work which, containing many historical half-fantasies, attempted to portray contemporary customs in Friesland as a continuation of primordial folkways. Threshing customs were dated back to a fabricated 16th-century regulation, and the book included biographies of Standfriezen (so called from their alleged refusal to kneel before the Spanish king, saying they only kneeled before God). The work had undoubtedly been inspired by Grimm’s appeal for folk material, probably mediated to Paulus through his brother Jacobus, who had also started a correspondence with Grimm.

The prominent antiquary and philologist Joast Halbertsma shared the belief in the Frisians’ primordial roots; he was more positively disposed towards Paulus Scheltema’s work than most others. In 1830 he entered into a life-long correspondence with Grimm, with Halbertsma arguing that Frisian was, together with English, the most direct descendant of ancient Anglo-Saxon. Halbertsma found evidence for this Frisian-English link in J. Strutt’s Sports and pastimes of the people of England (1801) and in Cruikshank’s Comic almanak for 1837, which listed popular pastimes that had, as Halbertsma noted, Frisian analogues. More than other Germanic peoples, Frisians and English had stalwartly resisted the encroachment of aristocratic privilege and maintained a popular-egalitarian (“national”) spirit. Friesland and England had the most witches (tjoensters) and shared a number of cultural traditions and popular customs, as well as linguistic features such as word endings in n, d or t, and the palatalization of k into tsj. These conjectures were never seriously researched in depth but did find their way into Halbertsma’s literary work, and gained a good deal of influence.

The Frisian folk writers Waling Dykstra and T.G. van der Meulen started collecting children’s songs and games, convivial songs, party games and riddles in In doas fol âlde snîpsnaren (“A box full of old clippings”, 1856; 2nd enl. ed. 1882). When Dykstra started with a more extensive compilation in 1887 at the publisher’s request, much had been published in Frisian-language magazines. Dykstra also followed the example of folklore collecting in Flanders, and was among the first subscribers of Volkskunde: Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsche folklore, established by Flemish researchers such as Pol de Mont. Dykstra’s monumental compilation Uit Friesland’s volksleven appeared in 1892-96. It consisted of four sections: popular traditions (sagas), popular customs, folk tales (fairy tales) and popular concepts (sorcery, ghosts, weather portents, remedies, etc.) The popular customs section consists of customs on Christian holidays, estate sales, moving house in May, the maypole, foundation stone, courtship, marriage, birth, death, harvest customs, children’s games, fairs, popular games, ice sports, slaughter, home furnishing, and clothing. Few of these nowadays appear to be specifically Frisian.