Lindworm

The boy had eaten nine days of provisions in a single afternoon and drunk the wine down to the last mouthful, and he sat by a fire of felled trees in the Swabian wood telling nobody in particular that he could not think of a man he would refuse to fight. Something took him up on it. A great linnormr came out of the trees at him, low and fast along the ground. He snatched a burning trunk off the fire and hit it across the head, and went on hitting until it stopped moving, and then, because he was still hungry, he cut it into pieces with his axe and put it in a kettle to boil. That is the oldest surviving scene in Old Norse in which the word appears, and it tells you nearly everything. Something enormous comes out of the wood at knee height. A man kills it with whatever is lying about.

The name is quieter than the creature. Swedish etymologists trace lind- not to any word for snake but to a Germanic adjective meaning pliant or supple, the same root that gives English lithe and stands beside Latin lentus, and ormr is simply a serpent or worm. A lindworm is therefore the supple worm, an animal named for the way it moves rather than for anything it does to you. Old Norse linnr and Old High German lint, both serpent words, sit nearby and get offered as alternatives, and the gloss “ensnaring snake” circulates widely, but the pliant reading is the one the dictionaries settle on. The forms run right across the Germanic languages: Old Swedish lindormber, Danish and Swedish lindorm, Middle Low German lintworm, and the earliest recorded form of all, the Middle High German lintrache.

Because lind is also the Swedish word for a lime tree, country belief concluded that lindworms preferred to lie under lime trees, and that their eggs were tucked beneath the bark. The Swedish national encyclopedia dismissed this in 1912 as a false reading of the word, folk etymology building a habitat out of a homonym. The habit is worth noticing, because the lindworm attracts that sort of tidy after-the-fact explanation more than most monsters.

It also travels in the opposite direction from the one most people assume. The word surfaces first in German, and in Old Icelandic it turns up doing service in material translated from continental sources. Fáfnir, who gets called a lindworm constantly in modern writing, is never called one in the Norse poems and prose about him. He is ormr, worm, and nothing more specific. The serpent that the boy in the wood killed is not Fáfnir either. In that telling he is Reginn, brother of the smith Mímir, a man of the worst kind who took up sorcery and was repaid for it by being turned into a serpent, the largest and foulest of all serpents, wanting to kill every living man except his brother. Mímir, who had raised the boy and come to be frightened of him, walked out to the worm’s lair and offered it a foster-son.

The aftermath is better than the fight. Waiting for his supper, he put his hand into the kettle before the broth was off the boil, scalded his fingers and stuck them in his mouth to cool them, and the moment the broth touched his tongue the two birds squabbling in the branches overhead turned into speech he could follow. They were saying that Mímir had arranged his death, that the worm had been Mímir’s brother, and that if he did not go home and kill the smith the smith would kill him for it. So he stripped and smeared the serpent’s blood over every part of himself he could reach, and wherever it touched, the skin set hard as horn. He could not reach between his shoulder blades. The German poem knows the same story and spends exactly one stanza on it, put in the mouth of a man at a window identifying a stranger in the courtyard: he killed a lintrache, he bathed in its blood, his hide went horny, and no weapon has cut him since. The poem never goes back to it.

What the thing looked like depends entirely on who you ask, and this is where most accounts of the lindworm quietly go wrong. Ask a herald and you get an answer with a number in it. Ask a Swedish farmer in the 1880s and you get an animal. The ethnologist Gunnar Olof Hyltén-Cavallius spent years collecting statements from people in southern Småland who said they had met one, and what they described had no limbs at all: ten to twenty feet of snake, thick through as a man’s leg, dark along the back and paler underneath, with either a ridge along the spine or a coarse mane of hair like a horse’s. The clawed forelimbs, the dragon’s head and the wings belong to German and Austrian picture-making, not to the people who thought they were describing wildlife. Heraldry cannot even agree with itself. The English handbooks define a lindworm as a dragon without wings; the German ones define it as a dragon with four feet instead of the usual two. The number of limbs is a fact about the draughtsman.

Klagenfurt makes the muddle visible in stone. The town’s Lindwurm has four legs and wings and has never once been shown without them, which does not stop it being the most famous lindworm in Europe. In 1335 a cranium came out of a gravel pit near the town and was taken immediately for a dragon’s skull, and when Ulrich Vogelsang carved the monument in 1590 he used that skull as his model for the head. It belonged to a woolly rhinoceros and is still in the Landesmuseum für Kärnten. The statue is sometimes counted as the first reconstruction of an extinct animal, assembled three centuries before anyone had the idea that animals could go extinct. The legend behind it is older than either: the fords of the river Glan kept drowning people in the mist, a water dragon was blamed for it, and the duke put up a strong tower at the edge of the marsh, hid fearless knights inside, and staked out a stout bull on a barbed chain. The worm swallowed the bull and hung there wriggling on the chain like a fish on a hook while the knights came down and killed it.

Hyltén-Cavallius did not think he was collecting legends. In 1884 he put the accounts before the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences as a memorandum, presenting the lindorm as a contribution to natural science, and the enlarged edition of the following year carries forty-eight statements from people who claimed to have seen one and in several cases to have killed it after a terrible struggle. Nobody ever produced a lindworm. By 1912 the national encyclopedia was calling it a fantasy animal while allowing, a little grudgingly, that the detailed descriptions held an interest beyond the merely folk-psychological. In the same country speech the creature is also called drake and hjulorm, the wheel-worm, from the belief that it takes its own tail in its mouth, makes a ring of itself and rolls after whatever it is chasing.

The hoarding is the part everyone repeats and nobody can source. Everything that lies beneath a lindworm grows as the lindworm grows, runs the saying, which is the neatest explanation ever offered for why dragons lie on gold. What can actually be pointed at is a paragraph in a Danish novel of 1876, where a man’s unspoken reproaches are said to lie like lindworms in their dark dens, brooding over grim treasures that swell as the worms swell, blood-red carbuncle rising on a gold-red stalk, pale opal spreading bulb on bulb, the coils lifting ring on ring over the rank glitter beneath. It is written as a figure of speech the reader will already know. Where the reader knew it from is not recorded.

The monster half is only half. In the ballads and romances the lindworm is more often a well-disposed creature than a hostile one, and the ones who appear there are usually enchanted princes who come back into human shape through love, which is an odd thing to be able to say about a dragon. Meeting one in the Swedish countryside was counted the luckiest event a person could hope for and one of the rarest. The trick was to get a hand around it, whereupon it abandoned its skin in your grip, and a single lick of that skin opened your eyes to the healing powers hidden in herbs, in stones, in earths and in animals. Two celebrated cunning-men of eighteenth-century Västergötland, the wise man of Enekulla and Sven of Bragnum, were held by everyone to owe their cures to the white snake.

Which brings it to the bedroom. In the Danish tale collected by Svend Grundtvig in 1854, a childless queen is told to set a platter upside down in the northwest corner of her garden at sunset and lift it at sunrise. Under it lie two roses, one red and one white. Eat the red and bear a boy, eat the white and bear a girl, and on no account eat both. She chose the white deliberately, reasoning that a daughter would never be sent to a war, and then ate the red as well because the first had tasted so good. What she bore was a lindorm. It crawled under the bed in her chamber and stayed there. There is no human twin in this version, no exile to the forest, and nothing about a brother’s wedding: the worm simply announces at intervals that it wants a wife, and threatens to bring the castle down if it does not get one. Two princesses were fetched from far kingdoms and neither of them saw their bridegroom until they were standing beside him in the hall. Neither survived the night.

The third bride was a shepherd’s daughter, and she met an old woman picking berries in the woods in a red skirt and a blue jacket. Nine nightshirts over the one she was already wearing. A bucket of lye water, a bucket of sweet milk, an armful of switches, all carried into the bedroom while the king’s men laughed at her for a superstitious peasant. Beautiful maiden, take off your nightshirt. King Lindorm, take off your skin. Nine times each, which leaves her still dressed and him with nothing left, lying on the floor bleeding and barely able to move. She dipped the switches in the lye and beat him until there was hardly a twig left among the sticks, then bathed him in the sweet milk, wrapped him in the nine shirts and held him on her arm until she fell asleep. The arithmetic is the whole story. She has to have one layer more than he has. And it does not end when she wakes beside a handsome prince, because the tale runs on through forged letters and a queen driven into the forest and two enchanted kings in the shape of a swan and a crane, freed by her milk, and a deliberately over-salted dinner arranged to settle which of three men has the better claim on her.

Its powers are mass, venom and patience. A lindworm can crush and swallow a full-grown animal, foul the water and the air around it, and lie in one place through more than one human lifetime getting steadily longer. Its limits follow from the same body. It does not fly, it does not leave, and it is tied to the ground and to whatever it is lying on, which makes it findable, and once found it can be killed by a boy with a burning log, a farmer with an axe, or a duke with a bull and a length of chain. The cursed kind cannot be killed out of its shape at all. It can only be undressed, one skin at a time, by somebody who came prepared and does not run.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a lindworm?

A lindworm is a serpent-dragon of Germanic and Scandinavian tradition, best understood as a dragon that lives at ground level rather than in the air. The word appears across the Germanic languages, from Middle High German lintrache to Old Norse linnormr and Swedish lindorm, and covers both the monstrous worm a hero kills and the enchanted prince trapped in serpent form.

Does a lindworm have legs or wings?

The sources disagree, and the disagreement runs along cultural lines. Swedish country tradition described the lindorm as entirely limbless, a snake ten to twenty feet long and as thick as a man’s leg, sometimes with a horse-like mane along the neck. German and Austrian depictions give it a dragon’s head, a pair of clawed forelimbs and often wings, and heraldic handbooks contradict each other outright, the English ones defining a lindworm as a wingless dragon and the German ones as a four-footed one.

What does the name lindworm mean?

The second element is straightforward: ormr means serpent or worm. The first element is most likely a Germanic adjective meaning pliant or supple, related to English lithe, so that lindworm means roughly “the supple worm”. Because lind is also the Swedish word for lime tree, folk belief concluded that lindworms lived beneath lime trees, an idea Swedish reference works identify as a false etymology rather than a genuine tradition.

Is Fafnir a lindworm?

Fafnir is routinely called a lindworm in modern writing, but no Old Norse source about him uses the word. The poems and prose describe him only as ormr, a worm or serpent. The Old Norse text that does use linnormr tells a different story, in which the dragon is Regin, brother of the smith Mimir, turned into a serpent by sorcery and killed by the young Sigurd with a burning tree trunk.

What is the story of King Lindorm?

In the Danish tale collected by Svend Grundtvig in 1854, a queen is told to eat one of two roses she will find under an upturned platter in her garden, eats both, and gives birth to a lindorm. The worm demands a bride and kills the first two, until a shepherd’s daughter, advised by an old woman, wears nine nightshirts and makes him shed a skin for each one she removes, leaving him with no skin and her still clothed. She beats him with lye-soaked switches, bathes him in sweet milk and holds him until morning, when he wakes as a prince. Folklorists classify the tale as ATU 433B.

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