The Monstrefact: The Lindworm

In this episode of STBYM’s The Monstrefact, Robert discusses the legend of the lindworm and the 19th century Swedish ethnologist who searched for it …

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
My Heart Radio. Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and
this is the Monster Fact, a short form series from
Stuff to Blow Your Mind, focusing in on mythical creatures, ideas,
and monsters. In time, dragons and worms wind their way

(00:25):
through human history, keeping largely to the shadows of myth
and legend, terrifying in their strength, mystery and symbolic resonance.
In the traditions of Sweden and Northern Scandinavia, we find
tales of just such a beast, the lendworm. In older accounts,

(00:45):
the lindworm takes on a hybrid form. It has the
body of a great serpent and a head like that
of a horse, complete with a mane running down part
of its neck. It occupies loathsome regions of the wilderness,
guards buried treasure, spits venom, and in some cases may
bite its own tail and roll like a hoop, or

(01:07):
ascend into the sky, shedding sparks and fire. Folklore's Carol
Rose also adds that in the later stages of its life,
the lindworm may mutate and take to the sea as
a sea serpent. Now the hoop snake account we can
neatly tuck away as part of the larger tradition of
the ora borus, the snake that bites or consumes its

(01:29):
own tail. For the most part, this does not occur
in the natural world, but it has proven to be
an intriguing image in human cultures. For ages. Likewise, we
can file away the lindworm's brilliant aerial maneuvers as part
of a broader tradition of unidentified aerial phenomenon transformed into
legend and the treasure well. It's pointed out by Thomas

(01:51):
mam in twenties a footnote to Scandinavian herpetology. The Bronze
Age salt tales from Asia and Africa traffic into Europe,
including accounts of large constrictor snakes and spitting cobras. There
also arrived reliefs from the Near East that if a
human being buried valuables in secret, their greed would transform

(02:14):
them after death, and they would come back from the
grave as a large snake to guard the buried treasure.
It stands to reason that the lendworm is simply the
convergence of all these elements. Along with Swedish knowledge of
native snake species such as the grass snake, and yet

(02:36):
the lendworm seemed resistant to keep to the shadows of
myth and legend, because among rural swedes there remained sightings
of the beast and even accounts of fighting and slaying
such monsters, and these continued throughout the Enlightenment and into
the nineteenth century. As Mom details in his article published

(02:57):
in the International Society for the History and Bibliography of Herpetology.
One man was encouraged by these accounts to drag the
lindworm out of the shadows and into the world of
scientific verification, ethnologist Gunar Olaf Hilton Karalius, who lived eighteen
eighteen through eighteen eighty nine. To be clear, it would

(03:21):
be more than half a century before the term cryptozoology
was introduced. Hilton Cavalius's curiosity certainly matched the spirit of
earlier inquiries, and he was quick to insist that he
himself was no zoologist, but he was fascinated by Swedish
accounts of the lindworm and was increasingly convinced that there

(03:41):
must be some underlying reality to it, not mere folklore
or oversized descriptions of otters and grass snakes, but an
actual large fierce serpent with something resembling a horse's mane.
He dismissed all the flying, hooping and treasure guarding, but
he believed and as yet undocumented organism awaited scientific discovery,

(04:04):
and so Hilton Cavalius drafted a memorandum to the Royal
Swedish Academy of Sciences and self printed his report, compiling
numerous accounts and his insistence that the existence of the
lindworm be explored. He offered a cash reward for proof
of the creature's existence, assuring the common folk that a
dead specimen could be pickled in schnaps within a waterproof vessel.

(04:28):
The Swedish scientific community largely found his efforts amusing, it best,
at times lampooning the notion of rural swedes rampaging through
the forest in search of monsters, ready to dunk them
in liquor and collect their reward. Alas the lindworm could
not be coaxed out of the safety of folklore, and
no proof was ever recovered of this large, fearsome serpent

(04:51):
with something like a horse's mane, Hilton Cavalias went to
his grave without ever seeing proof of the lindworm's existence,
and as has and pointed out this alone has some
scientific value, but his mom details He did get his
serpent in the end as his grave stone, and Scatolov

(05:11):
features the emblem of a serpent biting its own tail.
Special thanks to my son Sebastian. On this episode, I
was at a loss as to what to cover this week,
and he instantly piped up at the breakfast table and
suggested the Lindworm, which he learned about on the Netflix
animated series KILLEDA Tune into additional episodes of The Monster

(05:35):
Fact each week. As always, you can email us at
contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff
to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,

(05:56):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.