The story of the Dutch boy who prevented a flooding disaster: origin and variations on the theme

The tale of the boy who is said to have prevented a flooding by putting his finger in a hole of the (Spaarndammer) dike in the Netherlands, is well known all over the world. However, little is known about the origin of the story or about the wide range of variations that have been published and are still being published. This paper argues that the French author of children tales Rebecca Eugenie Rodrigues-Henriques (1796–1852) published the first version of the story under the pseudonym Eugenie Foa in French, with the title Le petit eclusier, "the little sluicer". However, the story has been made famous by the American author Mary (Elisabeth) Mapes Dodge, who included the tale in her book Hans Brinker, or The silver skates. A story of life in Holland. The paper shows as well that this remarkable tale has found its way into a huge amount of books and other forms of information transfer in at least thirty-five languages. In more or less chronological order, this history will be described, focusing on how and in what variations the story has arisen, been retold and what significance we can assign to all the story variants.