Read De Roos van Dekama in Dutchwith every sentence explained

De Roos van Dekama by Jacob van Lennep was first published in 1836. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 192,000 words.

Haarlem, 1345. Festivities, a street brawl and a Frisian heiress at the centre of a gathering storm.

Count William IV of Holland has returned in glory from the Holy Land, and Haarlem prepares splendid celebrations in his honour. Knights, jugglers, monks and burghers crowd the town — and among them walk the proud envoys of Friesland, the free land to the north that the Count longs to rule.

When a quarrel between townsmen and Frisians turns violent, two young knights of the Count's household, Reinout and Deodaat of Verona, ride into the fray. At the heart of it all is Madzy Dekama, the gentle heiress of a great Frisian house, whom the haughty Seerp van Adeelen intends to marry — while an old Frisian rhyme binds the fate of the whole land to the “rose” of Dekama.

Jacob van Lennep's The Rose of Dekama (1836) is a full-blooded medieval romance of honour, intrigue and divided loyalties as Holland and Friesland drift toward war.

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.