The Monstrefact: The Lindworm

tales of just such a beast, the lendworm. In older accounts, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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.

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