Eel
In culture

The large lake of Almere, which existed in the early Medieval Netherlands, got its name from the eels which lived in its water (the Dutch word for eel is aal or ael, so: " ael mere " = "eel lake"). The name is preserved in the new city of Almere in Flevoland, given in 1984 in memory of this body of water on whose site the town is located.

The daylight passage in the spring of elvers upstream along the Thames was at one time called "eel fare". The word 'elver' is thought to be a corruption of "eel fare".

A famous attraction on the French Polynesian island of Huahine (part of the Society Islands) is the bridge across a stream hosting three- to six-foot-long eels, deemed sacred by local culture.

Eel fishing in Nazi -era Danzig plays an important role in Günter Grass ' novel The Tin Drum. The cruelty of humans to eels is used as a metaphor for Nazi atrocities, and the sight of eels being killed by a fisherman triggers the madness of the protagonist's mother.

Sinister implications of eels fishing are also referenced in Jo Nesbø 's Cockroaches, the second book of the Harry Hole detective series. The book's background includes a Norwegian village where eels in the nearby sea are rumored to feed on the corpses of drowned humans, making the eating of these eels verge on cannibalism.

The 2019 book The Gospel of the Eels by Patrick Svensson commented on the 'eel question' (origins of the order) and its cultural history.
language:response_language[Latin], keywords:existence, length_constraints:number_sentences[7]