Read De Leeuw van Vlaanderen in Dutchwith every sentence explained

De Leeuw van Vlaanderen by Hendrik Conscience was first published in 1838. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 133,500 words.

Flanders, 1302. A land under French rule. Weavers and butchers ready to fight for their freedom.

The King of France has seized Flanders and thrown its old Count into prison. In proud Bruges, French knights swagger through the streets while heavy taxes crush the craftsmen. Many nobles bow their heads — but the people will not. Pieter de Coninck, the wise dean of the weavers, and Jan Breydel, the fiery dean of the butchers, begin to rally the guilds.

At the centre of the storm stands Robert of Béthune, the Count's eldest son, called the Lion of Flanders for his courage, and his gentle daughter Machteld, caught up in a dangerous game of loyalty and betrayal. Every road leads to a great battle on the fields outside Kortrijk.

Hendrik Conscience's The Lion of Flanders (1838) became the national epic of Flanders — the book “that taught a people to read”. Its battle is still celebrated every 11 July, and the novel was filmed in 1985.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in Dutch. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:

• a natural translation of that exact sentence,
• a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
• the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
• all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.

It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate Dutch book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.