lindworm drawn by Swedish illustrator
John Bauer, 1911. The Swedish lindworm lacks wings and limbs.
Etymology In early depictions, as with dragons in other cultures (compare ), the distinction between Germanic dragons and regular snakes is blurred, with both being referred to as: "worm" (; → ; ), "snake" (; , ; ), "adder" (; , ; ), and more, in writing; all being old Germanic synonyms for serpent and thereof. "Worm", in Old Germanic, specifically meant "long legless animal" in general, thus extending to serpents as well as
invertebrates, with the latter later becoming the primary sense in modern English, etc. The descendant term
worm remains used in modern English to refer to dragons, such as those similar to snakes or without wings, while the Old English form
wyrm has been borrowed back into
modern English to mean "dragon". The word also appear
archaically in the original broader sense, for example in the names for the
common legless lizard:
blindworm,
hazelworm,
slowworm, including the form
deaf adder etc (compare , , "common legless lizard", from , , "adder"). The
Nordic descendants of – , , , , – beyond being the common word for snake in Faroese, Norwegian and Swedish, in Danish and Icelandic instead being more ambiguous with
invertebrate worms, remain a poetic or archaic word for dragon and similar mythological serpentine creatures. A similar theme can be seen in German, with surviving compositions such as and etc. word (
oblique singular of
draca, "dragon") in
Beowulf The word "
dragon", contemporaneously also appear: , ;
Old West Norse: ,
Old East Norse: ;
Old Swedish:
draki;
Old Danish:
draghæ; , , , ; ; ; , meaning "dragon, sea serpent or sea monster" etc, stemming from , meaning "big serpent or dragon", itself from (
drákōn) of the same meaning. The Old West and East Norse forms differ quite remarkably, as the Western form,
dreki, features an initial e-vowel, largely unique among the Germanic forms, which otherwise feature an a-vowel, indicating an early adoption which then had time to shift, potentially from the Old English form
dræce. Old Swedish, and Old Danish, both East Norse languages, instead exhibit forms on /a/:
draki/draghæ, indicating a
Central European root. When the term entered the East Norse language is unknown. The form "dragon", in modern English, stems from , while the Germanic Old English form survives as
drake. A poem, by 11th-century Icelandic skáld
Þjóðólfr Arnórsson, manages to use all four above mentioned terms in a single poem about
Sigurd the dragon slayer, based on a fight between a blacksmith and a leather worker, which Arnórsson supposedly composed spontaneously upon request: Related are also the French
guivre/vouivre (from
Old French for "snake") and English
wyvern (, from ), ultimately deriving from ("viper"). Other words include
Knucker, a dialect word for a sort of water dragon in Sussex, England.
Written corpus Early corpus In the 10th century
Old English epic poem
Beowulf, probably composed a century or two earlier,
"the dragon" is referred to as both a and a . Within
Beowulf, there is a story of
Sigemund the Wælsing featuring a treasure-hoarding dragon slain by the aforementioned hero (paralleling Beowulf himself), and which scholars suggests comes from an older tradition of
dragonslayers within
Germanic pagan mythology. In the eddic poem
Völuspá, dating back to the 10th century, the dragon
Nidhogg (), is foretold to show himself at the dawn of the new world, revealing himself to be a "flying dragon" (), and a "shimmering adder" (), flying over the land, carrying the dead between his "feathers". , a Viking Age depiction of Fáfnir slain by Sigurd. In the Middle High German epic poem
Nibelungenlied, written around 1200, the unnamed dragon ("Fáfnir") is referred to as a ("lin-drake", ie,
lindworm), which associate professor of German,
George Henry Needler (1866–1962), translated as "worm-like dragon". The Old Norse Eddic poem
Fáfnismál, written around 1270, tells an alternate version of the same root story as Nibelungenlied, were the dragon,
Fáfnir, is described as flightless and snake-like, and is referred to as an . however, in contrast, the term , "flyging serpent", is also recorded. The Icelandic written corpus still describe dragons as very serpentine-like, however. Their tail, for example, is often called a
sporðr, a word for "fish tail, serpent tail and thereof" (a tail for swimming). The 13th century saga,
Bjarnar saga Hítdœlakappa, writes the following: The later, 14th century saga,
Ketils saga hœngs, specifically refers to
sporðr as the tail of a serpent, and also describes the dragon as having a "coil" () like a serpent, but "wings like a dragon": The evolution of wingless and legless worms and
lindworms to flying, four-legged romanesque dragons in Germanic folklore and literature is most likely due to influence from continental Europe that was facilitated by Christianisation and the increased availability of translated
romances. It has thus been proposed that the description in
Völuspá of
Níðhöggr with feathers and flying after
Ragnarök is a late addition and potentially a result of the integration of pagan and Christian imagery. Old Icelandic was later literarily borrowed into Old Swedish as
flughdraki and
floghdraki, which then became a term for a Swedish type of wingless, limbless, flying dragon –
Flogdrake – said to soar across the skies as a fiery or golden stripe that stretches across the sky (compare the Swedish
lindworm, which lacks both limbs and wings, also the analog European
firedrakes). Old Swedish
floghdraki was also, as a partial calque, borrowed into Finnish, as , "
louhi-serpent", which later folk-etymologically morphed into ("salmon serpent"), Finnish for dragon.
Technical terminology To address the difficulties with categorising Germanic dragons, the term
drakorm (Swedish for "dragon serpent") has been proposed, referring to beings described as either a
dragon or
worm. Irish historian A. Walsh used the term "worm-dragon" already in 1922 to describe the
runic dragon like ornament found side by side with the Celtic interlaced patterns on the
Cross of Cong from 1123. as depicted on
Olaus Magnus's
Carta marina (1539) – greyscale original There are also dragon-like monsters in Germanic folklore which continue the use of worm or other synonyms in the ambiguous sense of either dragon or snake, such as
lindworm (, ) and
sea serpent (, ), the latter popularized by Swede
Olaus Magnus through his
Carta marina (1539) and
A Description of the Northern Peoples (1555), in the latter describing a sea serpent found in
Bergen, Norway. Olaus gives the following description of a Norwegian sea serpent: == List of Germanic dragons in legend ==