Lagarfljót is a long, narrow glacial lake, also called Lögurinn, that runs through the Fljótsdalur valley in east Iceland past the town of Egilsstaðir. Fed by meltwater, it is gray with silt, its bed lies below sea level, and visibility in the water is close to nil. For more than six hundred years people have said it holds a serpent, the Lagarfljótsormur or Lagarfljót Worm.
The tradition
The earliest record usually cited is an entry for the year 1345 in the Skálholt annal, one of the medieval Icelandic chronicles. It does not mention a worm. It describes a marvel in Lagarfljót: shapes like islands or humps rising from the water a long distance apart, with no head or tail to be seen. By the late sixteenth century the creature had a reputation abroad. A map of Iceland published by Abraham Ortelius around 1590, based on work attributed to Bishop Guðbrandur Þorláksson, carries a note at Lagarfljót describing a great serpent that menaces the people nearby and shows itself before notable events. A seventeenth-century bishop of Skálholt wrote of a river serpent blamed for floods and tremors, noting that people disagreed over whether it had one hump or several.
The folk tale behind the name was collected in the 1840s and published by the folklorist Jón Árnason in 1862. A girl is given a gold ring and told to keep it in a box with a small heath-worm so that the gold will grow. The worm grows instead, bursts the box, and is thrown with the gold into the lake, where it keeps growing and poisons people and animals. Two Finnish sorcerers are called in; unable to kill it, they bind its head and tail to the lake bed. Its humps breaking the surface were taken as a sign of hard seasons to come.
Sightings have continued into modern times. The head of Iceland’s forestry service reported one in 1963. In 1983 contractors laying a telephone cable across the lake reported a big moving object on their readings close to the east bank, and the cable was afterward found damaged at several points. In 1998 a teacher and pupils at the Hallormsstaður school reported a sighting.
The 2012 video
In February 2012 Hjörtur E. Kjerúlf, a farmer in the valley, filmed about thirty seconds of footage from his house showing a long, dark shape that appeared to swim in a snaking motion among ice floes in the fast current near the head of the lake. The national broadcaster RÚV aired it, and within days it had millions of views online.
Miisa McKeown, a skeptical investigator living in Finland, compared the position of the shape’s ‘head’ with fixed reference points across a series of frames and found it was not going anywhere. The rushing water and drifting ice made a stationary, flexible object appear to swim. Writing for Live Science, Benjamin Radford added that a large snake is about the least likely animal to be found in an icy glacial river. The most widely accepted explanation is a length of fishing net or similar material frozen stiff and caught on the bottom. Kjerúlf insisted the video was not a hoax, and nothing in the analysis suggested that it was.
The truth committee
In 1997 the local municipality had offered 500,000 krónur for conclusive proof of the Worm, and no one had claimed it. After the video, the Fljótsdalshérað council revived the competition and appointed a thirteen-member volunteer committee to rule on the evidence, including councillors, a biologist, an ethnologist, a pastor, a former member of parliament and the head of an amateur monster-hunting society. In May 2014 it asked for more time, citing the flood of similar clips online. On August 25, 2014 it announced that seven of its members believed the Worm could be seen in Kjerúlf’s video, that it could not agree on any of the photographs submitted, and that it saw no reason to doubt that some creature lived in the lake. In September 2015 the council confirmed that Kjerúlf would receive the 500,000-krónur prize.
Where it stands
Critics saw the committee’s verdict as a bid for monster tourism, and the Worm remains a fixture of the area, lending its name to the Ormsteiti summer festival. The tradition is genuine and very old; the serpent itself, and the video that briefly made it famous, belong to legend.