The North English worm is a bit like a dragon, but without wings or (sometimes) legs. It's mostly a big serpent and usually lived in lakes and rivers. The area is full of dragon and worm stories from when their particular town was terrorized by a monster. While there are similarities between the stories, there's no agreement on where the monsters come from, what they want, what defeats them, or what they look like. The Sockburn Worm was defeated by a special sword, which is now presented to each new Bishop of Durham. When the bishop takes up his position, the Lord of Sockburn tells the story of the worm. The Worm of Linton also lived on the local hill, but was defeated by a knight shoving burning peat into its mouth. The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh is actually a princess turned into a Worm by her witch step-mother, and she's turned back into a woman when a knight kisses her instead of fighting her.
This episode is mostly in conversation with the Lambton Worm, a folktale that locals in County Durham still find important. It was popularized by a song by C. M. Leumane in 1867. The song is written in (kind of amazing) dialect. Part of the chorus goes "An' aa'll tell ye aall an aaful story," or "And I'll tell you all an awful story." It says that the villagers "Lost lots o' sheep an' lots o' sleep." It says of the worm, "He'd greet big teeth, a greet big gob, An greet big goggly eyes." It's rad. In 1911, Bram Stoker wrote a novel called "The Liar of the White Worm" about the Lambton Worm.
In the folktale, a boy named John Lambton goes fishing in the River Wear. In some versions, he goes on a Sunday and is warned by an old wise person that missing church is going to cause him trouble. While fishing, he catches a gross, wriggling eel-like thing. It has nine holes on the side of its head, and ranges from the size of a thumb to three feet long. It's not a fish, so he tosses it away into a well (later called the "Worm Well"). Many years pass and the boy goes off to the crusades and comes back to find the town and countryside ravaged by a gigantic worm that poisoned the well and eats people and cows and ruins crops. It's so big that it has wrapped itself around Worm Hill seven times and really settled in.
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| Worm Hill |
Lord Lambton, John's father, has pacified it by offering it the milk from nine good cows every day. That's 20 gallons, or enough to fill the big, stone trough they set up for the worm. A bunch of brave villagers and a few visiting knights set out to defeat it, but none of them are successful. If a part of the worm is cut off, it just picks up the fallen piece and puts it back, reattaching it. When the worm gets really irritated, it pulls up a tree in one of its coils and waves it around like a club.
It's pretty obvious that the thing John threw into the well grew up to be a huge monster, so he sets off to defeat it and make up for what he did. The old wise person reappears and tells John that he needs to cover his armor in spikes and fight the worm in the river. Then, after he's killed the worm, he has to kill the first living thing he sees or his family will be cursed for nine generations to not die in their beds. You can see where this is going, but the neat thing about this story is that John does too! He explains the whole thing to his father, and then makes a plan that when he kills the worm, he'll blow his hunting horn three times and his father will release John's favorite hound, which will run out to him, sacrificing a dog, but ensuring that John doesn't ironically kill his father.
John goes out to kill the worm. When the worm tries to crush him, it spears himself on John's armor. When pieces are cut off of it, they are washed away in the river before they can reattach. After a long battle, John is victorious and (in another unexpected show of competence) blows his horn three times.
However, John's father is so excited that the worm is dead and his son survived that, instead of releasing the hound, he runs out to hug his son. Instead of "Well, now I have to kill you," John hugs his dad back, says, "Aww, Geeze," then has the dog released and kills it according to plan, even though he knows that it won't work. His family is cursed. Since the legend is local and the family is real, you can see how the next generations of Lambtons died, and they were all drownings or death in battle, so everyone in the area can point to that as evidence that the curse and the story are real.
I like how this story subverts my expectations. I like how John's using his head. I like how John realizes that having his descendants "not die in their beds" isn't that bad a curse, and he'd rather do that than kill his father. But mostly, I like how the town had come to an uneasy truce with the worm where they fed it milk and it didn't bother them. It seems like that could have lasted for a while.
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