The Lagarfljót worm, an Icelandic lake monster! [World mythology post 676]

(Image source: Halldor Baldursson)

Local folklore has it that Lagarfljót, a lake in Iceland, is supposedly home to a giant lake monster. It resembles a colossal slug-like worm or snake, and has been known to attack people and animals. Sightings of this creature (or just vaguely of ‘something’ that supposedly inhabits the lake) date as far back as 1345, and there are still locals who claim to believe in the creature or even to have encountered it. Among the people who live near Lagarfljót, the creature is often called ‘Ormur’, simply ‘the worm’. Sometimes, it would even crawl onto the shore and spit poison onto the land.

Unlike most lake monsters, this one actually has a very specific origin story! According to an old Icelandic folktale, there once was a little girl who lived on a farm. She received a gold ring from her mother and, determined to get the most possible gold out of it, she tested out a local old wives’ tale. Supposedly, if you put some gold underneath a slug, both will magically grow in size. The slug in question is a lingworm, but it is unclear to me whether this is an old (translated) Icelandic term for a generic slug, or a specific, possibly mythical type of slug.

(Image source: ‘Lagarfljótsormurinn’ by Spring Bee on Artstation)

In any case, the girl found one and kept both the ring and the slug safe in a linen chest, seeing no harm in testing out an old piece of folklore. When she eventually came back to check on the chest, she found it close to bursting, so much had the gold and the slug expanded. Severely frightened by the creature, the girl threw the chest in a nearby lake, not realizing that both the ring and the animal would keep on growing. And grow it did, until the tiny slug became a giant dragon.

A lot of time has passed since, and the monster kept causing trouble for the locals. Two Finns, both shamans wielding magical power, eventually showed up and claimed they were going to kill the creature and take the gold, but they quickly returned and claimed the beast couldn’t be slain. In the end, they did manage to bind the creature to the bottom with two ropes, one around its tail and the other around the head, so now it can no longer reach out of the lake and attack people.
Sometimes, however, an arch of the monster’s snake-like body rises out of the water, and this is considered to be a bad omen.

The same story is told about different bodies of water, such as Skorradalsvatn, and the resulting lake monsters are often conflated with each other.

Sources:
Árnason, J., 1862, Íslenzkar Þjóðsögur og Æfintýri, Vol. I, Leipzig, 666 pp., p. 638-639.
Sigurðsson, A., 2016, Museum of Hidden Beings: A Guide to Icelandic Creatures of Myth and Legend, Wool of Bat series, Eye of Newt Press, 80 pp., p. 50-51.
Lees, C. A. & Overing, G. R., 2017, Women and Water: Icelandic Tales and Anglo-Saxon Moorings, GeoHumanities, 00 p. 1-15, DOI 10.1080/2373566X.2017.1403859