Lambton Lindworm

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John Lambton kills the dragon. Illustration from English fairy and other folk tales by Edwin Sidney Hartland (1890).

The Lambton Worm ( Engl. Lambton Worm ) is a folk legend from North East England . It is about a lindworm that struck the village of Lambton in what was then County Durham . The legend is one of the best known and most detailed British dragon sagas and is covered in numerous fairy tale books, an opera , a film and a folk song . The strong religious elements of this tale are striking in comparison to other British dragon sagas.

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The legend tells of the young John Lambton, son of Lord Lambton. Contrary to the Sabbath , he fishes on a Sunday on Wear . Not having any luck, he begins to swear loudly, whereupon he catches a strange, worm-like and nauseating creature. Confused about his catch, John is unsure what to do with the creature. Although an old man advises him to keep the worm, the boy cannot bring himself to do so because of the ugliness of his catch and instead throws it into the village well.

While the young Lambton forgets the event over the years, the worm in the well grows into a lindworm until one day it leaves the well and finds shelter on an island in the Wear (in other versions on a hill on the bank), where it can be found during the day resides However, at night the creature leaves the island to steal the cows' milk, eat sheep, and hunt women and girls. Thereupon the young Lord von Lambton remembers his deed and tries to atone for it on a crusade in the Holy Land . However, the dragon continues to grow and rages on the lands. After all, he even threatens Lambton Castle , where the old Lord of Lambton and the castle residents only know how to help each other by offering the Lindworm the milk of nine cows every night in order to appease him. Numerous knights and dragon slayers try to slay the monster, but none of them have any success, as the severed body parts always come together again.

The Lambton Lindworm raged in the Washington area for seven years until the young Lord Lambton returned from the crusade and found his home devastated and abandoned. He goes to the castle, where he asks his father for forgiveness. The latter forgives him, but warns him to end the calamity he has conjured up and sends him to a witch for this purpose. She instructs him to put on spiked armor and face the lindworm like this, and promises him that he will be victorious. At the same time, she admonishes him to kill the first being he meets after his fight with the monster as a victim, otherwise he would be cursed and none of the lords of Lambton would die a peaceful death for nine generations. The young Lambton swears this and agrees with the castle residents that on his signal , when he returns , his hunting dog will be sent out the gate.

Then he goes to the island in Wear in the spiked armor and faces the lindworm. The latter tries to crush him with his body, whereby the spikes of the armor dig into his flesh. The young Lambton can cut the weakened monster in two parts with his sword and kill it in such a way that the river carries the body parts away without them being able to join together. Then he wades back ashore and blows his horn as a signal. However, his father forgets the deal with joy and rushes to meet him first. Since the young Lambton does not have the heart to kill his father, he kills the dog, but is overtaken by the curse, just like the next eight Lambton gentlemen. The last affected descendant of the dragon slayer is usually named Henry Lambton, Esq., Member of the British Parliament , who died in 1761.

Emergence

The age of the legend cannot be determined with certainty. Before its distribution in printed versions from the beginning of the 19th century, the story was passed down orally . Therefore, it cannot be proven how long the legend was passed on before the first printed versions. Contrary to the frequently made assertion that the story has been passed on essentially unchanged over the centuries, Jacqueline Simpson assumes that the story has been enriched and expanded over a longer period of time with ever new additions. The core of the legend, the dragon fight, may still come from the Middle Ages or the Tudor era, while she considers the curse to be a much more recent addition. Leander Petzoldt , on the other hand, rather cautiously dates the lindworm of Lambton to the 18th and 19th. Century.

The historical core of the story is also unclear. Moses Aaron Richardson expresses an older thesis, according to which in the story of the cruel dragon the event of an enemy invasion was symbolically processed. Before him, C. Sharpe and W. Hutchinson advanced this theory - the latter with undisguised skepticism. The period in which the legend takes place is also uncertain. The mention of the Crusades and some more modern elements of the saga suggest the 13th or 14th century. The historic John Lambton, Knight of the Order of St. John, lived in the 15th century. Since the oral tradition is often inaccurate, Moses Aaron Richardson speaks of an earlier date of events. At the same time, Richardson claims that the Lords of Lambton actually died a violent death for nine generations, whereas John Timbs disagrees.

The story of the lindworm of Lambton is a so-called family saga, which gives the family of Lambton, the later Earls of Durham , a mythological background. At the same time, the story also deviates from the pattern of classic family legends: While these mostly tell the founding of the respective gender based on legendary events and mythically exaggerate the ancestor, these elements cannot be found in the Lambton Worm . The young Lambton is described neither as particularly virtuous nor as the founder of the sex. In view of John Lambton's responsibility for the disaster, the killing of the dragon does not appear to be a great act of heroism, but rather brings with it a curse. In addition, the lineage of the Lambton family was a respected family even before the story of the saga, whose position could not be established by killing a dragon.

In the context of the legend, a handwritten pedigree is usually mentioned, which is owned by the Middleton family in Offerton. Here is the peculiar entry: "Johan Lambeton that slewe ye Worme was Knight of Rhoodes and Lord of Lambton and Wod Apilton efter the detail of fower brothers sans esshewe masle." (Eng. "John Lambton, who slew the dragon, was Knight of Rhodes and Lord of Lambton and Wood Appleton after the death of four brothers without male descendants.") This historical John Lambton is referred to as the Knight of Rhodes , so as Johanniter ; he lived in the middle of the 15th century. Another knight of the Order of St. John who lived a good 100 years before John was Dieudonné de Gozon . It is also said of him that he defeated a dragon. Whether the legend of Dieudonné de Gozon is the starting point for the Lambton legend must remain speculation based on current sources.

John A. Boyle takes a different perspective. He compares John Lambton and other historical figures, who are told of a victory over a dragon or a snake, with mythical dragon slayers : On the one hand, the Babylonian Enûma elîsch tells how Marduk defeated the snake or dragon-shaped water goddess Tiamat and created the world from her body . In the Indian Rigveda, on the other hand, there is the story of Indra , he kills the Vṛtra (also "Ahi") and thereby frees the element of water that the serpent dragon previously held captive. With regard to the legend of Lambton, Boyle concludes: "in bisecting the Worm Sir John is re-enacting the rôles both of Marduk and of Indra; he is at once a demiurge and a rain-god."

Locations

Penshaw Hill is considered worm hill in some versions of the story. Today the Penshaw Monument stands here .
Worm Hill near Fatfield is named after the Lambton Worm .

The Lambton Worm is geographically very precisely located. The village of Lambton is still preserved today, and over the years many locations have been assigned specific landscape objects. Some of these places are still preserved today, but some no longer exist or only exist in a different form.

Worm hill

The hill or island on which the lindworm of Lambton sought refuge was seen by the local population either in Penshaw Hill south of Wear or, more often, in nearby Worm Hill near Fatfield , a man-made hill 153 m high to the north of the river.

Worm wells

Between Wear and Worm Hill is the well in which the dragon allegedly grew. The stone fountain used to have a roof and an iron ladle bucket and at the beginning of the 19th century had a reputation for being a wishing well . At that time, the area's midsummer night celebrations took place there .

Castle

The legendary Lambton Hall Castle should not be confused with what is now Lambton Castle in County Durham . The latter was only built around 1800, while the old castle no longer stood in 1787. It was originally located on the right side of the Wear, opposite the new property. At Lambton Castle there is a statue of John Lambton as a dragon slayer who kills the dragon in spiked armor. A piece of “dragon skin” is said to have been kept here in the past, as well as the stone trough from which the dragon drank the cow's milk.

chapel

Lambton Church, drawing from 1800.

The village chapel in which John Lambton swore his oath according to legend no longer exists. At the beginning of the 19th century it was only preserved as a ruin . It is said to have contained a statue of a man who freed himself from shackles. This statue was associated by the population with the dragon slayer from the legend, although there was no reference to this on the statue itself or in the church.

Reception and adaptation

The story of the Lambton Lindworm was one of the most popular legends in the Durham area. Robert Surtees (1779–1834), historian of the region, gave it again in 1809 in a letter to his friend Sir Walter Scott . A few years later he incorporated them into the second part of his multi-volume history of Durham County . In the further course of the 19th century, the saga became extremely popular across the region. Different oral traditions were compared and combined, and the story was included in numerous collections of fairy tales and sagas. Since then the story has been adapted many times.

In 1867, CM Leumane created a folk song based on the story called The Lambton Worm , which tells the story in the Mackem dialect of north-east England and was widely used in Great Britain. This song is the best known today about the dragon, but there are poems that deal with the subject from earlier times.
Robert Sherlaw Johnson as composer and Anne Ridler as librettist published the opera The Lambton Worm in 1978 . Horror writer Bram Stoker used some elements of the legend in his 1911 book The Lair of the White Worm , which was later filmed as The Bite of the Snake Woman. In Thomas Pynchon's novel Mason & Dixon , the retelling of the legend by the main character Jeremiah Dixon takes up an entire chapter. The story was also adapted in comics . Jeff Smith describes a similar fight with a dragon in Rose , the prologue to the Bone series. In Bryan Talbot's graphic novel Alice in Sunderland , the saga of the lindworm is also reproduced, along with other stories from the north-east of England.

References

literature

Retelling (partly commented)

German edition

Scientific contributions

  • John Andrew Boyle: Historical Dragon Slayers . In: JR Porter / WMS Russell (eds.): Animals in Folklore. DS Brewer Ltd., Ipswich 1978, pp. 23-32.
  • Jacqueline Simpson: Fifty British Dragon Tales: An Analysis . In: Folklore , Vol. 89, No. 1 (1978), pp. 79-93
  • Jacqueline Simpson: British Dragons . BT Batsford Ltd., London 1980
  • Leander Petzoldt : Lindwurm von Lambton. In: Small lexicon of demons and elementals . CH Beck , 2003, ISBN 3-406-49451-X , pp. 123-124.

Web links

Wikisource: The Lambton Worm  - Sources and full texts (English)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jacqueline Simpson: British Dragons , London 1980, pp. 33, 73 u. 111f.
  2. ^ Jacqueline Simpson: British Dragons , London 1980, pp. 116f.
  3. ↑ Jacqueline Simpson, British Dragons , London 1980, pp. 111f.
  4. ↑ Leander Petzoldt , Lindwurm von Lambton. In: Small Lexicon of Demons and Elementals , Munich 2003, p. 124
  5. ^ William Hutchinson: The history and antiquities of the county palatine of Durham, Volume 2 (1787), p. 493
  6. ^ A b c d e Moses Aaron Richardson: The Local Historian's Table Book: Of Remarkable Occurences, Historical Facts, Traditions, Legendary and Descriptive Ballads, & c., & C., Connected with the Counties of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Northumberland and Durham . Volume 8, MA Richardson, 1846. pp. 121-140.
  7. ↑ a b John Timbs: Ancestral Stories and Traditions of Great Families: Illustrative of English History. Read Books, 2008, ISBN 1-4097-1485-3 , pp. 166-170.
  8. ^ Robert Surtees: The History and Antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham, Vol. 2, London 1820, p. 171, more detailed in a draft letter from Surtees to Sir Walter Scott from 1809, printed in Taylor / Raine (eds.): A. memoir of Robert Surtees, 1852, p. 349
  9. ^ Jacqueline Simpson: British Dragons , London 1980, p. 58
  10. ^ Jacqueline Simpson: British Dragons , London 1980, p. 58
  11. ↑ Rigveda 1.32 de sa 
  12. ↑ JABoyle, Historical Dragon Slayers, in: Porter / Russell (eds.), Animals in Folklore, Ipswich 1978, p. 32
  13. ^ Jacqueline Simpson: Fifty British Dragon Tales: An Analysis . In: Folklore , Vol. 89, No. 1 (1978), pp. 79-93.
  14. ↑ Lambton Hall, Bournmoor. The Gatehouse. Retrieved October 25, 2009.