Lindworm

Somebody did try, once, to make the lindworm into a species — and because he did it in print, on paper, with his name and the date at the bottom, the attempt can be read instead of guessed at. On 29 October 1883, from his farm at Sunnanvik, Gunnar Olof Hyltén-Cavallius signed a memorandum addressed to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He printed it at his own expense the following year in Växjö, at the press of the local newspaper Smålandsposten: Om draken eller lindormen. Mémoire till Kongl. Vetenskaps-Akademien (Wexiö, 1884). The method is on page 5 and is stated as a method: strip away from the whole complex of ideas its mythical and foreign components, and what remains as the kernel of the legends is "folkets hågkomst af en stor forntida djur-art, tillhörande reptiliernas klass" — the people's memory of a great ancient animal species belonging to the class of reptiles. He then formulates the objection himself, in quotation marks: "Hvar existerar då detta blott af arkeologerna kända forntida djur? Är det en längesedan utdöd och försvunnen djur-art? — Den svenska zoologien vet ingenting derom och den moderna vetenskapen erkänner inga lösa hypotheser, utan kräfver bevisade fakta. Gif oss dessa fakta!" Where does this ancient animal, known only to archaeologists, exist? Swedish zoology knows nothing of it, and modern science demands proven facts. Give us these facts. His answer to that demand closes the pamphlet on page 8: since he was not a zoologist he did not consider himself entitled to judge the objective validity of the peasants' accounts, but he thought it a duty to lay them before the highest scientific authority in the country, proposed that the witnesses be re-examined by a zoologist, and asked that a suitable reward be offered for the killing and delivery of "frågans corpus delicti". If in this way the most feared and most famous reptile of the Nordic ancient world were restored to the Swedish fauna, he wrote, it would be a gain for natural history and cultural history at once. The reward followed on the last leaf, dated Torne, Sunnanvik, 20 May 1884: anyone delivering a dead specimen at Sunnanvik farm would receive from one hundred up to one thousand kronor, according to its size and condition, provided it arrived freshly killed or in a tight cooper's vessel topped up with spirits. A second, enlarged edition appeared in 1885 with forty-eight sworn statements attached. The specimen never came, and the reward was never claimed. The accounts themselves are not vague. On 5 May 1884, at Jäthsberg, a man signing M. Bergström swore before two witnesses, A. W. Rappe and Arthur Hofstedt, that he had beaten a snake to death with an oar after more than a hundred blows; that it was glossy black, about ten feet long as measured with his outstretched arms, thick as a man's thigh, with a mane of finger-length scales on its neck ending like black horsehair, white fangs the size of a little finger and a paler belly; that the carcass stank and that he dragged it to a rock at the water's edge, where he searched for it in vain afterwards. A closing postscript adds that the fright made him bedridden for three weeks until three holes opened on his right ankle. That is a real document about a real fright. It is not a specimen. Swedish reference literature settled the matter without ceremony a generation later. The 1912 Nordisk familjebok records the memoir, notes the detailed descriptions it contains, and calls the subject of them "detta fantasidjur" — this fantasy animal. And the strongest argument against the zoological reading is the collector's own earlier work: in 1863-1868 the same author had filed the same creature under the transmigration of souls, in a pair with the black hen into which a dead woman turned. Nobody has ever proposed the black hen as an undescribed species. The fossil belongs to a different story and deserves its own precision, because it is regularly told wrong. The colossal skull kept on a chain in Klagenfurt town hall is a woolly rhinoceros, Coelodonta antiquitatis, identified as Rhinoceros tichorhinus Cuvier by the Graz naturalist Franz Unger, who saw it around 1840 and published his note the same year in the Steiermärkische Zeitschrift (new series, vol. 6, part 1, pp. 75-81), reprinted unchanged in Carinthia in 1841. Unger also launched the claim that the sculptor of the monument had worked from it: the proportions and even the size, he wrote, agree strikingly with the stone skull, "and one recognises clearly that this fossil skull lay before the maker of the monument". Roman Puschnig tested that claim in the fullest study the object has ever had (Carinthia II, 125./45. Jg., 1935, pp. 65-85). He measured the fossil, obtained permission to measure the stone head on 5 November 1935, compared both against the dragon imagery available to a sixteenth-century carver — Gessner, Münster, Kircher, the city seals — found that the stone head resembles none of them and does resemble the rhinoceros in its upper contour and jaw line, and concluded that Unger and Othenio Abel were right. What Puschnig also did was correct the direction of the story. Abel had assumed that the discovery of a supposed dragon skull gave rise to the legend; after Puschnig's communications in 1924 he withdrew that, because the dragon on the city seal of 1287 documents the legend well before any recorded skull. Three further cautions come straight out of the same study, and each of them contradicts something that circulates freely today. The date of the find is not documented: the museum label of 1935 says the skull was found "probably around 1335 on the Goritschitzen", Fritz Pichler's list of Carinthian rhinoceros sites (1886) gives "Goritschitzen um 1353", Puschnig's own footnote writes 1334, and he states that the Goritschitzen tradition and the alternative — the gravel pit on the Zollfeld known as the Lindwurmgrube, a place name already in a deed of 24 September 1414 — are "about equally credible and both about equally unproven". The identification of the sculptor as Ulrich Vogelsang is likewise unproven, and Puschnig says he is himself partly to blame for it: he formed the guess in 1917 from the fact that Vogelsang was the provincial sculptor at the time, mentioned it to local historians and in museum lectures, and saw it printed by Paul Grueber in 1921. Only the Hercules has a document behind it — Michael Hönel, from an account of 1633. One last note on the picture attached to this file. It is a public-domain illustration by John Bauer, published in 1911 in the Swedish children's annual Guldslottet, Barnens julbok no. 13 for a story by Harald Östenson; it shows a young man with a sword fighting a snake. Its filing under "lindworms" is a category added by the person who uploaded it to Wikimedia Commons in June 2022, not a title given by Bauer.